of his half-talents and her
half-principles, of the something in them both that was not stout enough
to resist nor yet pliant enough to yield. She stared at the fact on the
journey back to Versailles, and all that sleepless night in her room;
and the next morning, when the housemaid came in with her breakfast
tray, she felt the factitious energy that comes from having decided,
however half-heartedly, on a definite course.

She had said to herself: "If there's no letter from Nick this time next
week I'll write to Streff--" and the week had passed, and there was no
letter.

It was now three weeks since he had left her, and she had had no
word but his note from Genoa. She had concluded that, foreseeing the
probability of her leaving Venice, he would write to her in care of
their Paris bank. But though she had immediately notified the bank of
her change of address no communication from Nick had reached her; and
she smiled with a touch of bitterness at the difficulty he was doubtless
finding in the composition of the promised letter. Her own scrap-basket,
for the first days, had been heaped with the fragments of the letters
she had begun; and she told herself that, since they both found it so
hard to write, it was probably because they had nothing left to say to
each other.

Meanwhile the days at Mrs. Melrose's drifted by as they had been wont
to drift when, under the roofs of the rich, Susy Branch had marked
time between one episode and the next of her precarious existence.
Her experience of such sojourns was varied enough to make her acutely
conscious of their effect on her temporary hosts; and in the present
case she knew that Violet was hardly aware of her presence. But if no
more than tolerated she was at least not felt to be an inconvenience;
when your hostess forgot about you it proved that at least you were not
in her way.

Violet, as usual, was perpetually on the wing, for her profound
indolence expressed itself in a disordered activity. Nat Fulmer had
returned to Paris; but Susy guessed that his benefactress was still
constantly in his company, and that when Mrs. Melrose was whirled away
in her noiseless motor it was generally toward the scene of some new
encounter between Fulmer and the arts. On these occasions she sometimes
offered to carry Susy to Paris, and they devoted several long and
hectic mornings to the dress-makers, where Susy felt herself gradually
succumbing to the familiar spell of heaped-up fin