both of them had long ago guessed the immediate pleasure, but she at
least had never imagined the deeper harmony.

It was at one of their earliest meetings--at one of the heterogeneous
dinners that the Fred Gillows tried to think "literary"--that the young
man who chanced to sit next to her, and of whom it was vaguely rumoured
that he had "written," had presented himself to her imagination as the
sort of luxury to which Susy Branch, heiress, might conceivably have
treated herself as a crowning folly. Susy Branch, pauper, was fond of
picturing how this fancied double would employ her millions: it was one
of her chief grievances against her rich friends that they disposed of
theirs so unimaginatively.

"I'd rather have a husband like that than a steam-yacht!" she had
thought at the end of her talk with the young man who had written, and
as to whom it had at once been clear to her that nothing his pen had
produced, or might hereafter set down, would put him in a position to
offer his wife anything more costly than a row-boat.

"His wife! As if he could ever have one! For he's not the kind to marry
for a yacht either." In spite of her past, Susy had preserved enough
inner independence to detect the latent signs of it in others, and also
to ascribe it impulsively to those of the opposite sex who happened to
interest her. She had a natural contempt for people who gloried in what
they need only have endured. She herself meant eventually to marry,
because one couldn't forever hang on to rich people; but she was going
to wait till she found some one who combined the maximum of wealth with
at least a minimum of companionableness.

She had at once perceived young Lansing's case to be exactly the
opposite: he was as poor as he could be, and as companionable as it was
possible to imagine. She therefore decided to see as much of him as her
hurried and entangled life permitted; and this, thanks to a series of
adroit adjustments, turned out to be a good deal. They met frequently
all the rest of that winter; so frequently that Mrs. Fred Gillow one
day abruptly and sharply gave Susy to understand that she was "making
herself ridiculous."

"Ah--" said Susy with a long breath, looking her friend and patroness
straight in the painted eyes.

"Yes," cried Ursula Gillow in a sob, "before you interfered Nick liked
me awfully... and, of course, I don't want to reproach you... but when I
think...."

Susy made no answer. How could she, whe