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Fulmer!" and, while Susy Lansing stood in the middle of the room with widening eyes, a man emerged from the more deeply cushioned and scented twilight of some inner apartment, and she saw with surprise Nat Fulmer, the good Nat Fulmer of the New Hampshire bungalow and the ubiquitous progeny, standing before her in lordly ease, his hands in his pockets, a cigarette between his lips, his feet solidly planted in the insidious depths of one of Violet Melrose's white leopard skins.
He seemed to prefer not to dwell farther on the legal obligations involved. "You haven't yet told me," he suggested, "how you happen to be living here." "Here with the Fulmer children?" She roused herself, trying to catch his easier note. "Oh, I've simply been governessing them for a few weeks, while Nat and Grace are in Sicily." She did not say: "It's because I've parted with Strefford."
If you're coming home soon I could let you have a lot of the children's little old things." "You're always so dear, Grace. But we haven't any special plans as yet not even for a baby. And I wish you'd tell me all of yours instead." Mrs. Fulmer asked nothing better: Susy perceived that, so far, the greater part of her European experience had consisted in talking about what it was to be.
And I suppose it makes a thing sound new to hear it said in a new voice." Susy looked at her meditatively. "And how should you feel if Nat liked too much to hear Mrs. Melrose say it? Too much, I mean, to care any longer what you felt or thought?" Her friend's worn face flushed quickly, and then paled: Susy almost repented the question. But Mrs. Fulmer met it with a tranquil dignity.
From their cramped and uncomfortable household Grace and Nat Fulmer had managed to keep out mean envies, vulgar admirations, shabby discontents; above all the din and confusion the great images of beauty had brooded, like those ancestral figures that stood apart on their shelf in the poorest Roman households.
Nat Fulmer had returned to Paris; but Susy guessed that his benefactress was still constantly in his company, and that when Mrs. Melrose was whirled away in her noiseless motor it was generally toward the scene of some new encounter between Fulmer and the arts.
She was curious to know how the happy-go-lucky companion of Fulmer's evil days was bearing the weight of his prosperity, and she vaguely felt that it would be refreshing to see some one who had never been afraid of poverty. The airless pension sitting-room, where she waited while a reluctant maid-servant screamed about the house for Mrs. Fulmer, did not have the hoped-for effect.
It was not, she owned to herself, that the society of the Fulmer children had roused in her any abstract passion for the human young. She knew had known since Nick's first kiss how she would love any child of his and hers; and she had cherished poor little Clarissa Vanderlyn with a shrinking and wistful solicitude.
"You are always finding friends, Richard," said he; "no matter what your misfortunes, they are ever double discounted. As for me; I am like Fulmer in Mr. Cumberland's 'West Indian': 'I have beat through every quarter of the compass; I have bellowed for freedom; I have offered to serve my country; I have' I am engaging to betray it. No, Scotland is no longer my country, and so I cannot betray her.
"Do you mind if I go up to my room? I'm rather tired coming straight through." "Of course, dear. I think there are some people coming to dinner... Mrs. Match will tell you. She has such a memory.... Fulmer, where on earth are those cartoons of the music-room?" Their voices pursued Susy upstairs, as, in Mrs.
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