range societies--were becoming less
and less attainable. Lansing had never had more than a pittance; he had
spent rather too much of it in his first plunge into life, and the best
he could look forward to was a middle-age of poorly-paid hack-work,
mitigated by brief and frugal holidays. He knew that he was more
intelligent than the average, but he had long since concluded that
his talents were not marketable. Of the thin volume of sonnets which a
friendly publisher had launched for him, just seventy copies had been
sold; and though his essay on "Chinese Influences in Greek Art" had
created a passing stir, it had resulted in controversial correspondence
and dinner invitations rather than in more substantial benefits.
There seemed, in short, no prospect of his ever earning money, and his
restricted future made him attach an increasing value to the kind of
friendship that Susy Branch had given him. Apart from the pleasure of
looking at her and listening to her--of enjoying in her what others less
discriminatingly but as liberally appreciated--he had the sense, between
himself and her, of a kind of free-masonry of precocious tolerance and
irony. They had both, in early youth, taken the measure of the world
they happened to live in: they knew just what it was worth to them
and for what reasons, and the community of these reasons lent to their
intimacy its last exquisite touch. And now, because of some jealous whim
of a dissatisfied fool of a woman, as to whom he felt himself no more to
blame than any young man who has paid for good dinners by good manners,
he was to be deprived of the one complete companionship he had ever
known....

His thoughts travelled on. He recalled the long dull spring in New York
after his break with Susy, the weary grind on his last articles,
his listless speculations as to the cheapest and least boring way of
disposing of the summer; and then the amazing luck of going, reluctantly
and at the last minute, to spend a Sunday with the poor Nat Fulmers, in
the wilds of New Hampshire, and of finding Susy there--Susy, whom he had
never even suspected of knowing anybody in the Fulmers' set!

She had behaved perfectly--and so had he--but they were obviously much
too glad to see each other. And then it was unsettling to be with her in
such a house as the Fulmers', away from the large setting of luxury
they were both used to, in the cramped cottage where their host had
his studio in the verandah, their hoste