The Glimpses of the Moon by Edith Wharton (best ereader for pdf .TXT) 📕

reasons, worldly or pecuniary, for its concealment. After a

moment, therefore, she told him why she had come; it was a

nuisance, of course, but he would understand. Ursula Gillow was

jealous, and they would have to give up seeing each other.

The young man’s burst of laughter was music to her; for, after

all, she had been rather afraid that being devoted to Ursula

might be as much in his day’s work as doing the encyclopaedia.

“But I give you my word it’s a raving-mad mistake! And I don’t

believe she ever meant me, to begin with—” he protested; but

Susy, her common-sense returning with her reassurance, promptly

cut short his denial.

“You can trust Ursula to make herself clear on such occasions.

And it doesn’t make any difference what you think. All that

matters is what she believes.”

“Oh, come! I’ve got a word to say about that too, haven’t I?”

Susy looked slowly and consideringly about the room. There was

nothing in it, absolutely nothing, to show that he had ever

possessed a spare dollar—or accepted a present.

“Not as far as I’m concerned,” she finally pronounced.

“How do you mean? If I’m as free as air—?”

“I’m not.”

He grew thoughtful. “Oh, then, of course—. It only seems a

little odd,” he added drily, “that in that case, the protest

should have come from Mrs. Gillow.”

“Instead of coming from my millionaire bridegroom, Oh, I haven’t

any; in that respect I’m as free as you.”

“Well, then—? Haven’t we only got to stay free?”

Susy drew her brows together anxiously. It was going to be

rather more difficult than she had supposed.

“I said I was as free in that respect. I’m not going to

marry—and I don’t suppose you are?”

“God, no!” he ejaculated fervently.

“But that doesn’t always imply complete freedom ….”

He stood just above her, leaning his elbow against the hideous

black marble arch that framed his fireless grate. As she

glanced up she saw his face harden, and the colour flew to hers.

“Was that what you came to tell me?” he asked.

“Oh, you don’t understand—and I don’t see why you don’t, since

we’ve knocked about so long among exactly the same kind of

people.” She stood up impulsively and laid her hand on his arm.

“I do wish you’d help me—!”

He remained motionless, letting the hand lie untouched.

“Help you to tell me that poor Ursula was a pretext, but that

there IS someone who—for one reason or another—really has a

right to object to your seeing me too often?”

Susy laughed impatiently. “You talk like the hero of a novel—

the kind my governess used to read. In the first place I should

never recognize that kind of right, as you call it—never!”

“Then what kind do you?” he asked with a clearing brow.

“Why—the kind I suppose you recognize on the part of your

publisher.” This evoked a hollow laugh from him. “A business

claim, call it,” she pursued. “Ursula does a lot for me: I

live on her for half the year. This dress I’ve got on now is

one she gave me. Her motor is going to take me to a dinner

to-night. I’m going to spend next summer with her at

Newport …. If I don’t, I’ve got to go to California with the

Bockheimers-so good-bye.”

Suddenly in tears, she was out of the door and down his steep

three flights before he could stop her—though, in thinking it

over, she didn’t even remember if he had tried to. She only

recalled having stood a long time on the corner of Fifth Avenue,

in the harsh winter radiance, waiting till a break in the

torrent of motors laden with fashionable women should let her

cross, and saying to herself: “After all, I might have promised

Ursula … and kept on seeing him ….”

Instead of which, when Lansing wrote the next day entreating a

word with her, she had sent back a friendly but firm refusal;

and had managed soon afterward to get taken to Canada for a

fortnight’s ski-ing, and then to Florida for six weeks in a

house-boat ….

As she reached this point in her retrospect the remembrance of

Florida called up a vision of moonlit waters, magnolia fragrance

and balmy airs; merging with the circumambient sweetness, it

laid a drowsy spell upon her lids. Yes, there had been a bad

moment: but it was over; and she was here, safe and blissful,

and with Nick; and this was his knee her head rested on, and

they had a year ahead of them … a whole year …. “Not

counting the pearls,” she murmured, shutting her eyes ….

II.

LANSING threw the end of Strefford’s expensive cigar into the

lake, and bent over his wife. Poor child! She had fallen

asleep …. He leaned back and stared up again at the

silver-flooded sky. How queer—how inexpressibly queer—it was

to think that that light was shed by his honeymoon! A year

ago, if anyone had predicted his risking such an adventure, he

would have replied by asking to be locked up at the first

symptoms ….

There was still no doubt in his mind that the adventure was a

mad one. It was all very well for Susy to remind him twenty

times a day that they had pulled it off—and so why should he

worry? Even in the light of her far-seeing cleverness, and of

his own present bliss, he knew the future would not bear the

examination of sober thought. And as he sat there in the summer

moonlight, with her head on his knee, he tried to recapitulate

the successive steps that had landed them on Streffy’s

lake-front.

On Lansing’s side, no doubt, it dated back to his leaving

Harvard with the large resolve not to miss anything. There

stood the evergreen Tree of Life, the Four Rivers flowing from

its foot; and on every one of the four currents he meant to

launch his little skiff. On two of them he had not gone very

far, on the third he had nearly stuck in the mud; but the fourth

had carried him to the very heart of wonder. It was the stream

of his lively imagination, of his inexhaustible interest in

every form of beauty and strangeness and folly. On this stream,

sitting in the stout little craft of his poverty, his

insignificance and his independence, he had made some notable

voyages …. And so, when Susy Branch, whom he had sought out

through a New York season as the prettiest and most amusing girl

in sight, had surprised him with the contradictory revelation of

her modern sense of expediency and her old-fashioned standard of

good faith, he had felt an irresistible desire to put off on one

more cruise into the unknown.

It was of the essence of the adventure that, after her one brief

visit to his lodgings, he should have kept his promise and not

tried to see her again. Even if her straightforwardness had not

roused his emulation, his understanding of her difficulties

would have moved his pity. He knew on how frail a thread the

popularity of the penniless hangs, and how miserably a girl like

Susy was the sport of other people’s moods and whims. It was a

part of his difficulty and of hers that to get what they liked

they so often had to do what they disliked. But the keeping of

his promise was a greater bore than he had expected. Susy

Branch had become a delightful habit in a life where most of the

fixed things were dull, and her disappearance had made it

suddenly clear to him that his resources were growing more and

more limited. Much that had once amused him hugely now amused

him less, or not at all: a good part of his world of wonder had

shrunk to a village peep-show. And the things which had kept

their stimulating power—distant journeys, the enjoyment of art,

the contact with new scenes and strange societies—were becoming

less and less attainable. Lansing had never had more than a

pittance; he had spent rather too much of it in his first plunge

into life, and the best he could look forward to was a middle-age of poorly-paid hack-work, mitigated by brief and frugal

holidays. He knew that he was more intelligent than the

average, but he had long since concluded that his talents were

not marketable. Of the thin volume of sonnets which a friendly

publisher had launched for him, just seventy copies had been

sold; and though his essay on “Chinese Influences in Greek Art”

had created a passing stir, it had resulted in controversial

correspondence and dinner invitations rather than in more

substantial benefits. There seemed, in short, no prospect of

his ever earning money, and his restricted future made him

attach an increasing value to the kind of friendship that Susy

Branch had given him. Apart from the pleasure of looking at her

and listening to her—of enjoying in her what others less

discriminatingly but as liberally appreciated—he had the sense,

between himself and her, of a kind of free-masonry of precocious

tolerance and irony. They had both, in early youth, taken the

measure of the world they happened to live in: they knew just

what it was worth to them and for what reasons, and the

community of these reasons lent to their intimacy its last

exquisite touch. And now, because of some jealous whim of a

dissatisfied fool of a woman, as to whom he felt himself no more

to blame than any young man who has paid for good dinners by

good manners, he was to be deprived of the one complete

companionship he had ever known ….

His thoughts travelled on. He recalled the long dull spring in

New York after his break with Susy, the weary grind on his last

articles, his listless speculations as to the cheapest and least

boring way of disposing of the summer; and then the amazing luck

of going, reluctantly and at the last minute, to spend a Sunday

with the poor Nat Fulmers, in the wilds of New Hampshire, and of

finding Susy there—Susy, whom he had never even suspected of

knowing anybody in the Fulmers’ set!

She had behaved perfectly—and so had he—but they were

obviously much too glad to see each other. And then it was

unsettling to be with her in such a house as the Fulmers’, away

from the large setting of luxury they were both used to, in the

cramped cottage where their host had his studio in the verandah,

their hostess practiced her violin in the dining-room, and five

ubiquitous children sprawled and shouted and blew trumpets and

put tadpoles in the water-jugs, and the mid-day dinner was two

hours late-and proportionately bad—because the Italian cook

was posing for Fulmer.

Lansing’s first thought had been that meeting Susy in such

circumstances would be the quickest way to cure them both of

their regrets. The case of the Fulmers was an awful object-lesson in what happened to young people who lost their heads;

poor Nat, whose pictures nobody bought, had gone to seed so

terribly-and Grace, at twenty-nine, would never again be

anything but the woman of whom people say, “I can remember her

when she was lovely.”

But the devil of it was that Nat had never been such good

company, or Grace so free from care and so full of music; and

that, in spite of their disorder and dishevelment, and the bad

food and general crazy discomfort, there was more amusement to

be got out of their society than out of the most opulently

staged house-party through