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That evening after the children had gone to bed Susy sat up late
in the cheerless sitting-room. She was not thinking of
Strefford but of Nick. He was coming to Paris--perhaps he had
already arrived. The idea that he might be in the same place
with her at that very moment, and without her knowing it, was so
strange and painful that she felt a violent revolt of all her
strong and joy-loving youth. Why should she go on suffering so
unbearably, so abjectly, so miserably? If only she could see
him, hear his voice, even hear him say again such cruel and
humiliating words as he had spoken on that dreadful day in
Venice when that would be better than this blankness, this utter
and final exclusion from his life! He had been cruel to her,
unimaginably cruel: hard, arrogant, unjust; and had been so,
perhaps, deliberately, because he already wanted to be free.
But she was ready to face even that possibility, to humble
herself still farther than he had humbled her--she was ready to
do anything, if only she might see him once again.
She leaned her aching head on her hands and pondered. Do
anything? But what could she do? Nothing that should hurt him,
interfere with his liberty, be false to the spirit of their
pact: on that she was more than ever resolved. She had made a
bargain, and she meant to stick to it, not for any abstract
reason, but simply because she happened to love him in that way.
Yes--but to see him again, only once!
Suddenly she remembered what Strefford had said about Nelson
Vanderlyn and his wife. "Why should two people who've just done
each other the best turn they could behave like sworn enemies
ever after?" If in offering Nick his freedom she had indeed
done him such a service as that, perhaps he no longer hated her,
would no longer be unwilling to see her .... At any rate, why
should she not write to him on that assumption, write in a
spirit of simple friendliness, suggesting that they should meet
and "settle things"? The business-like word "settle" (how she
hated it) would prove to him that she had no secret designs upon
his liberty; and besides he was too unprejudiced, too modern,
too free from what Strefford called humbug, not to understand
and accept such a suggestion. After all, perhaps Strefford was
right; it was something to have rid human relations of
hypocrisy, even if, in the process, so many exquisite things
seemed somehow to have been torn away with it ....
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