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Such precautions were the more needful Lansing could not but note because of the different standards of the society in which the Hickses now moved.
"Remember you're here to write, dearest; it's your duty not to let any one interfere with that. Why shouldn't we tell them we're just leaving!" "Because it's no use: we're sure to be always meeting them. And besides, I'll be hanged if I'm going to shirk the Hickses. I spent five whole months on the Ibis, and if they bored me occasionally, India didn't."
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.
She had promised Strefford to seek legal advice about her divorce, and he had kissed her; and the promise had been easier to make than she had expected, the kiss less difficult to receive. She had gone to the dinner a-quiver with the mortification of learning that her husband was still with the Hickses.
He considered himself absurdly over-paid, but that was the Hickses' affair; and he saw nothing humiliating in being in the employ of people he liked and respected. But from the moment of the ill-fated encounter with the wandering Princes, his position had changed as much as that of his employers. He was no longer, to Mr. and Mrs.
They were just off to Corsica and Sardinia, and from there to Sicily: he could rejoin the railway at Naples, and be back at Venice in ten days. Ten days of respite the temptation was irresistible. And he really liked the kind uncomplicated Hickses.
And thus it happened that when October gales necessitated laying up the Ibis, the Hickses, finding again in Rome the august travellers from whom they had parted the previous month in Athens, also found their visiting-list enlarged by all that the capital contained of fashion.
"I'm getting really fond of the Hickses; I believe I should be nice to them even if they were staying at Danieli's," Susy said to Strefford. "And even if you owned the yacht?" he answered; and for once his banter struck her as beside the point.
Even if it had been less pleasant to have a big yacht at their door during the long golden days and the nights of silver fire, the Hickses' admiration for Nick would have made Susy suffer them gladly. She even began to be aware of a growing liking for them, a liking inspired by the very characteristics that would once have provoked her disapproval.
Hitherto in his relations with the Hickses he had carefully avoided the least allusion that might make him feel the heavy hand of their beneficence. But the idle procrastinating weeks had weakened him and he had yielded to the need of putting into words his vague intentions. To do so would perhaps help to make them more definite.
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