BUT there were necessary accommodations, there always had been;Nick in old times, had been the first to own it .... How theyhad laughed at the Perpendicular People, the people who went byon the other side (since you couldn't be a good Samaritanwithout stooping over and poking into heaps of you didn't knowwhat)! And now Nick had suddenly become perpendicular ....
Susy, that evening, at the head of the dinner table, saw--in thebreaks between her scudding thoughts--the nauseatingly familiarfaces of the people she called her friends: Strefford, FredGillow, a giggling fool of a young Breckenridge, of their NewYork group, who had arrived that day, and Prince NeroneAltineri, Ursula's Prince, who, in Ursula's absence at atiresome cure, had, quite simply and naturally, preferred tojoin her husband at Venice. Susy looked from one to the otherof them, as if with newly-opened eyes, and wondered what lifewould be like with no faces but such as theirs to furnishit ....
Ah, Nick had become perpendicular! .... After all, most peoplewent through life making a given set of gestures, like dance-steps learned in advance. If your dancing manual told you at agiven time to be perpendicular, you had to be, automatically--and that was Nick!
"But what on earth, Susy," Gillow's puzzled voice suddenly cameto her as from immeasurable distances, "Are you going to do inthis beastly stifling hole for the rest of the summer?""Ask Nick, my dear fellow," Strefford answered for her; and:
"By the way, where is Nick--if one may ask?" young Breckenridgeinterposed, glancing up to take belated note of his host'sabsence.
"Dining out," said Susy glibly. "People turned up: blightingbores that I wouldn't have dared to inflict on you." How easilythe old familiar fibbing came to her !
"The kind to whom you say, 'Now mind you look me up'; and thenspend the rest of your life dodging-like our good Hickses,"Strefford amplified.
The Hickses--but, of course, Nick was with the Hickses! It wentthrough Susy like a knife, and the dinner she had so lightlyfibbed became a hateful truth. She said to herself feverishly:
"I'll call him up there after dinner--and then he will feelsilly"--but only to remember that the Hickses, in theirmediaeval setting, had of course sternly denied themselves atelephone.
The fact of Nick's temporary inaccessibility--since she was nowconvinced that he was really at the Hickses'--turned herdistress to a mocking irritation. Ah, that was where he carriedhis principles, his standards, or whatever he called the new setof rules he had suddenly begun to apply to the old game! It wasstupid of her not to have guessed it at once.
"Oh, the Hickses--Nick adores them, you know. He's going tomarry Coral next," she laughed out, flashing the joke around thetable with all her practiced flippancy.
"Lord!" grasped Gillow, inarticulate: while the Princedisplayed the unsurprised smile which Susy accused him ofpracticing every morning with his Mueller exercises.
Suddenly Susy felt Strefford's eyes upon her.
"What's the matter with me? Too much rouge?" she asked, passingher arm in his as they left the table.
"No: too little. Look at yourself," he answered in a low tone.
"Oh, in these cadaverous old looking-glasses-everybody looksfished up from the canal!"She jerked away from him to spin down the long floor of thesala, hands on hips, whistling a rag-time tune. The Prince andyoung Breckenridge caught her up, and she spun back with thelatter, while Gillow-it was believed to be his soleaccomplishment-snapped his fingers in simulation of bones, andshuffled after the couple on stamping feet.
Susy sank down on a sofa near the window, fanning herself with afloating scarf, and the men foraged for cigarettes, and rang forthe gondoliers, who came in with trays of cooling drinks.
"Well, what next--this ain't all, is it?" Gillow presentlyqueried, from the divan where he lolled half-asleep withdripping brow. Fred Gillow, like Nature, abhorred a void, andit was inconceivable to him that every hour of man's rationalexistence should not furnish a motive for getting up and goingsomewhere else. Young Breckenridge, who took the same view, andthe Prince, who earnestly desired to, reminded the company thatsomebody they knew was giving a dance that night at the Lido.
Strefford vetoed the Lido, on the ground that he'd just comeback from there, and proposed that they should go out on footfor a change.
"Why not? What fun!" Susy was up in an instant. "Let's paysomebody a surprise visit--I don't know who! Streffy, Prince,can't you think of somebody who'd be particularly annoyed by ourarrival?""Oh, the list's too long. Let's start, and choose our victim onthe way," Strefford suggested.
Susy ran to her room for a light cloak, and without changing herhigh-heeled satin slippers went out with the four men. Therewas no moon--thank heaven there was no moon!--but the stars hungover them as close as fruit, and secret fragrances dropped onthem from garden-walls. Susy's heart tightened with memories ofComo.
They wandered on, laughing and dawdling, and yielding to thedrifting whims of aimless people. Presently someone proposedtaking a nearer look at the facade of San Giorgio Maggiore, andthey hailed a gondola and were rowed out through the bobbinglanterns and twanging guitar-strings. When they landed again,Gillow, always acutely bored by scenery, and particularlyresentful of midnight aesthetics, suggested a night club near athand, which was said to be jolly. The Prince warmly supportedthis proposal; but on Susy's curt refusal they started theirrambling again, circuitously threading the vague dark lanes andmaking for the Piazza and Florian's ices. Suddenly, at a calle-corner, unfamiliar and yet somehow known to her, Susy paused tostare about her with a laugh.
"But the Hickses--surely that's their palace? And the windowsall lit up! They must be giving a party! Oh, do let's go upand surprise them!" The idea struck her as one of the drollestthat she had ever originated, and she wondered that hercompanions should respond so languidly.
"I can't see anything very thrilling in surprising the Hickses,"Gillow protested, defrauded of possible excitements; andStrefford added: "It would surprise me more than them if Iwent."But Susy insisted feverishly: "You don't know. It may beawfully exciting! I have an idea that Coral's announcing herengagement--her engagement to Nick! Come, give me a hand,Streff--and you the other, Fred-" she began to hum the firstbars of Donna Anna's entrance in Don Giovanni. "Pity I haven'tg............