y to understand that, to keep
on with the kind of life they were leading, one had to put up with
things... accept favours....

"Borrow money, you mean?"

"Well--yes; and all the rest." No--decidedly she could not reveal
to Strefford the episode of Ellie's letters. "Nick suddenly felt, I
suppose, that he couldn't stand it," she continued; "and instead of
asking me to try--to try to live differently, go off somewhere with him
and live, like work-people, in two rooms, without a servant, as I was
ready to do; well, instead he wrote me that it had all been a mistake
from the beginning, that we couldn't keep it up, and had better
recognize the fact; and he went off on the Hickses' yacht. The last
evening that you were in Venice--the day he didn't come back to
dinner--he had gone off to Genoa to meet them. I suppose he intends to
marry Coral."

Strefford received this in silence. "Well--it was your bargain, wasn't
it?" he said at length.

"Yes; but--"

"Exactly: I always told you so. You weren't ready to have him go
yet--that's all."

She flushed to the forehead. "Oh, Streff--is it really all?"

"A question of time? If you doubt it, I'd like to see you try, for a
while, in those two rooms without a servant; and then let me hear from
you. Why, my dear, it's only a question of time in a palace, with
a steam yacht lying off the door-step, and a flock of motors in the
garage; look around you and see. And did you ever imagine that you and
Nick, of all people, were going to escape the common doom, and survive
like Mr. and Mrs. Tithonus, while all about you the eternal passions
were crumbling to pieces, and your native Divorce-states piling up their
revenues?"

She sat with bent head, the weight of the long years to come pressing
like a leaden load on her shoulders.

"But I'm so young... life's so long. What does last, then?"

"Ah, you're too young to believe me, if I were to tell you; though
you're intelligent enough to understand."

"What does, then?"

"Why, the hold of the things we all think we could do without.
Habits--they outstand the Pyramids. Comforts, luxuries, the atmosphere
of ease... above all, the power to get away from dulness and monotony,
from constraints and uglinesses. You chose that power, instinctively,
before you were even grown up; and so did Nick. And the only difference
between you is that he's had the sense to see sooner than you that those
are the things that last, the prime necessities."