Page:Glimpses of the Moon (Wharton 1922).djvu/124

114 "But what on earth, Susy," Gillow's puzzled voice suddenly came to her as from immeasurable distances, "are you going to do in this 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 Breckenridge interposed, glancing up to take belated note of his host's absence.

"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 mediæval 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