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Updated: June 15, 2025
She paused a moment to steady her voice. "Couldn't you? I suppose you'd forgotten my bargain with Nick. He hadn't-and he's asked me to fulfil it." Strefford stared. "What that nonsense about your setting each other free if either of you had the chance to make a good match?" She signed "Yes." "And he's actually asked you ?" "Well: practically. He's gone off with the Hickses.
He had not yet reached the point of facing a definite separation; but whenever his thoughts travelled back over their past life he recoiled from any attempt to return to it. As long as this state of mind continued there seemed nothing to add to the letter he had already written, except indeed the statement that he was cruising with the Hickses. And he saw no pressing reason for communicating that.
As he looked back over the four months since he had so unexpectedly joined the Ibis at Genoa, he saw that the change, at first insidious and unperceived, dated from the ill-fated day when the Hickses had run across a Reigning Prince on his travels. Hitherto they had been proof against such perils: both Mr. and Mrs.
Ellie did not come; but the Mortimer Hickses did, and Nick Lansing was assailed by the scruples his wife had foreseen.
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.
"After all," he said to himself one evening, as his eyes wandered, with somewhat of a convalescent's simple joy, from one to another of their large confiding faces, "after all, they've got a religion...." The phrase struck him, in the moment of using it, as indicating a new element in his own state of mind, and as being, in fact, the key to his new feeling about the Hickses.
But the Hickses were both ridiculous and unsuccessful. They had consistently resisted the efforts of the experienced advisers who had first descried them on the horizon and tried to help them upward. They were always taking up the wrong people, giving the wrong kind of party, and spending millions on things that nobody who mattered cared about.
"Nick suddenly felt, I suppose, that he couldn't stand it," she continued; "and instead of asking me to try to try to live differently, go off somewhere with him and live, like work-people, in two rooms, without a servant, as I was ready to do; well, instead he wrote me that it had all been a mistake from the beginning, that we couldn't keep it up, and had better recognize the fact; and he went off on the Hickses' yacht.
The only thing he was sure of was that he was not going to remain in the Hickses' employ: when they left Rome for Central Asia he had no intention of accompanying them. The part of Mr. Buttles' successor was becoming daily more intolerable to him, for the very reasons that had probably made it most gratifying to Mr. Buttles. To be treated by Mr. and Mrs.
There was fascination in the thought that, among the rabble of vulgar uneducated royalties who overran Europe from Biarritz to the Engadine, gambling, tangoing, and sponging on no less vulgar plebeians, they, the unobtrusive and self-respecting Hickses, should have had the luck to meet this cultivated pair, who joined them in gentle ridicule of their own frivolous kinsfolk, and whose tastes were exactly those of the eccentric, unreliable and sometimes money-borrowing persons who had hitherto represented the higher life to the Hickses.
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