me for your clothes, I suppose, darling? Don't listen
to people who say that skirts are to be wider. I've discovered a new
woman--a Genius--and she absolutely swathes you.... Her name's my
secret; but we'll go to her together."

Susy rose from her engulphing armchair. "Do you mind if I go up to my
room? I'm rather tired--coming straight through."

"Of course, dear. I think there are some people coming to dinner... Mrs.
Match will tell you. She has such a memory.... Fulmer, where on earth
are those cartoons of the music-room?"

Their voices pursued Susy upstairs, as, in Mrs. Match's perpendicular
wake, she mounted to the white-panelled room with its gay linen hangings
and the low bed heaped with more cushions.

"If we'd come here," she thought, "everything might have been
different." And she shuddered at the sumptuous memories of the Palazzo
Vanderlyn, and the great painted bedroom where she had met her doom.

Mrs. Match, hoping she would find everything, and mentioning that dinner
was not till nine, shut her softly in among her terrors.

"Find everything?" Susy echoed the phrase. Oh, yes, she would always
find everything: every time the door shut on her now, and the sound of
voices ceased, her memories would be there waiting for her, every one
of them, waiting quietly, patiently, obstinately, like poor people in a
doctor's office, the people who are always last to be attended to,
but whom nothing will discourage or drive away, people to whom time is
nothing, fatigue nothing, hunger nothing, other engagements nothing: who
just wait.... Thank heaven, after all, that she had not found the
house empty, if, whenever she returned to her room, she was to meet her
memories there!

It was just a week since Nick had left her. During that week, crammed
with people, questions, packing, explaining, evading, she had believed
that in solitude lay her salvation. Now she understood that there was
nothing she was so unprepared for, so unfitted for. When, in all her
life, had she ever been alone? And how was she to bear it now, with all
these ravening memories besetting her!

Dinner not till nine? What on earth was she to do till nine o'clock? She
knelt before her boxes, and feverishly began to unpack.

Gradually, imperceptibly, the subtle influences of her old life were
stealing into her. As she pulled out her tossed and crumpled dresses she
remembered Violet's emphatic warning: "Don't believe the people who tell
you that skirt