“Dining out,” said Susy glibly. “People turned up: blighting bores that I wouldn’t have dared to inflict on you.” How easily the old familiar fibbing came to her!
“The kind to whom you say, ‘Now mind you look me up’; and then spend the rest of your life dodging-like our good Hickses,” Strefford amplified.
The Hickses—but, of course, Nick was with the Hickses! It went through Susy like a knife, and the dinner she had so lightly fibbed became a hateful truth. She said to herself feverishly: “I’ll call him up there after dinner—and then he will feel silly”—but only to remember that the Hickses, in their mediaeval setting, had of course sternly denied themselves a telephone.
The fact of Nick’s temporary inaccessibility—since she was now convinced that he was really at the Hickses’—turned her distress to a mocking irritation. Ah, that was where he carried his principles, his standards, or whatever he called the new set of rules he had suddenly begun to apply to the old game! It was stupid of her not to have guessed it at once.
“Oh, the Hickses—Nick adores them, you know. He’s going to marry Coral next,” she laughed out, flashing the joke around the table with all her practiced flippancy.
“Lord!” grasped Gillow, inarticulate: while the Prince displayed the unsurprised smile which Susy accused him of practicing 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, passing her 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 looks fished up from the canal!”