o take immediate
steps for a divorce. She was staying at a modest hotel in the Faubourg
St. Germain, and had once more refused his suggestion that they should
lunch at the Nouveau Luxe, or at some fashionable restaurant of the
Boulevards. As before, she insisted on going to an out-of-the-way place
near the Luxembourg, where the prices were moderate enough for her own
purse.

"I can't understand," Strefford objected, as they turned from her hotel
door toward this obscure retreat, "why you insist on giving me bad food,
and depriving me of the satisfaction of being seen with you. Why must we
be so dreadfully clandestine? Don't people know by this time that we're
to be married?"

Susy winced a little: she wondered if the word would always sound so
unnatural on his lips.

"No," she said, with a laugh, "they simply think, for the present, that
you're giving me pearls and chinchilla cloaks."

He wrinkled his brows good-humouredly. "Well, so I would, with joy--at
this particular minute. Don't you think perhaps you'd better take
advantage of it? I don't wish to insist--but I foresee that I'm much too
rich not to become stingy."

She gave a slight shrug. "At present there's nothing I loathe more than
pearls and chinchilla, or anything else in the world that's expensive
and enviable...."

Suddenly she broke off, colouring with the consciousness that she had
said exactly the kind of thing that all the women who were trying for
him (except the very cleverest) would be sure to say; and that he
would certainly suspect her of attempting the conventional comedy of
disinterestedness, than which nothing was less likely to deceive or to
flatter him.

His twinkling eyes played curiously over her face, and she went on,
meeting them with a smile: "But don't imagine, all the same, that if I
should... decide... it would be altogether for your beaux yeux...."

He laughed, she thought, rather drily. "No," he said, "I don't suppose
that's ever likely to happen to me again."

"Oh, Streff--" she faltered with compunction. It was odd-once upon a
time she had known exactly what to say to the man of the moment, whoever
he was, and whatever kind of talk he required; she had even, in the
difficult days before her marriage, reeled off glibly enough the sort
of lime-light sentimentality that plunged poor Fred Gillow into such
speechless beatitude. But since then she had spoken the language of real
love, looked with its eyes, embraced with its h