“You mean: Nat and Grace may after all be having the best of it?”
“How can I say, when I’ve told you I see all the sides? Of course,” Susy added hastily, “I couldn’t live as they do for a week. But it’s wonderful how little it’s dimmed them.”
“Certainly Nat was never more coruscating. And she keeps it up even better.” He reflected. “We do them good, I daresay.”
“Yes—or they us. I wonder which?”
After that, he seemed to remember that they sat a long time silent, and that his next utterance was a boyish outburst against the tyranny of the existing order of things, abruptly followed by the passionate query why, since he and she couldn’t alter it, and since they both had the habit of looking at facts as they were, they wouldn’t be utter fools not to take their chance of being happy in the only way that was open to them, To this challenge he did not recall Susy’s making any definite answer; but after another interval, in which all the world seemed framed in a sudden kiss, he heard her murmur to herself in a brooding tone: “I don’t suppose it’s ever been tried before; but we might—.” And then and there she had laid before him the very experiment they had since hazarded.
She would have none of surreptitious bliss, she began by declaring; and she set forth her reasons with her usual lucid impartiality. In the first place, she should have to marry some day, and when she made the bargain she meant it to be an honest one; and secondly, in the matter of love, she would never give herself to anyone she did not really care for, and if such happiness ever came to her she did not want it shorn of half its brightness by the need of fibbing and plotting and dodging.
“I’ve seen too much of that kind of thing. Half the women I know who’ve had lovers have had them for the fun of sneaking and lying about it; but the other half have been miserable. And I should be miserable.”
It was at this point that she unfolded her plan. Why shouldn’t they marry; belong to each other openly and honourably, if for ever so short a time, and with the definite understanding that whenever either of them got the chance to do better he or she should be immediately released? The law of their country facilitated such exchanges, and society was beginning to view them as indulgently as the law. As Susy talked, she warmed to her theme and began to develop its endless possibilities.
“We should really, in a way, help more than we should hamper each other,” she ardently explained. “We both know the ropes so well; what one of us didn’t see the other might—in the way of opportunities, I mean. And then we should be a novelty as married people. We’re both rather unusually popular—why not be frank!—and it’s such a blessing for dinner-givers to be able to count on a couple of whom neither one is a blank. Yes, I really believe we should be more than twice the success we are now; at least,” she added with a smile, “if there’s that amount of room for improvement. I don’t know how you feel; a man’s popularity is so much less precarious than a girl’s—but I know it would furbish me up tremendously to reappear as a married woman.” She glanced away from him down the long valley at their feet, and added in a lower tone: “And I should like, just for a little while, to feel I had something in life of my very own—something that nobody had lent me, like a fancy-dress or a motor or an opera cloak.”
The suggestion, at first, had seemed to Lansing as mad as it was enchanting: it had thoroughly frightened him. But Susy’s arguments were irrefutable, her ingenuities inexhaustible. Had he ever thought it all out? She asked. No. Well, she had; and would he kindly not interrupt? In the first place, there would be all the wedding-presents. Jewels, and a motor, and a silver dinner service, did she mean? Not a bit of it! She could see he’d never given the question proper thought. Cheques, my dear, nothing but cheques—she undertook to manage that on her side: she really thought she could count on about fifty, and she supposed he could rake up a few more? Well, all that would simply represent pocket-money! For they would have plenty of houses to live in: he’d see. People were always glad to lend their house to a newly-married couple. It was such fun to pop down and see them: it made one feel romantic and jolly. All they need do was to accept the houses in turn: go on honey-mooning for a year! What was he afraid of? Didn’t he think they’d be happy enough to want to keep it up? And why not at least try—get engaged, and then see what would happen? Even if she was all wrong, and her plan failed, wouldn’t it have been rather nice, just for a month or two, to fancy they were going to be happy? “I’ve often fancied it all by myself,” she concluded; “but fancying it with you would somehow be so awfully different....”