MOON SCRIPT

62.
STREFFY
Don’t tell me anything you don’t
want to, you know, my dear.
SUSY
No; I do want to; only it’s
difficult. You see-we had so very
little money.
Yes?
STREFFY
SUSY
And Nick-who was thinking of his
book, and of all sorts of big
things, fine things-didn’t realize,
left it all to me, to manage.
She stumbled over the word, remembering how Nick had always
winced at it.
But Strefford did not seem to notice her, and she hurried
on, unfolding in short awkward sentences the avowal of their
pecuniary difficulties, and of Nick’s inability to
understand that, to keep on with the kind of life they were
leading, one had to put up with things, accept favors.
STREFFY
Borrow money, you mean?
SUSY
Well-yes; and all the rest.
No-decidedly she could not reveal to Strefford the episode
of Ellie’s letters.
SUSY (cont’d)
Nick suddenly felt, I suppose, that
he couldn’t stand it, 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 last
evening that you were in Venice-the
day he didn’t come back to
dinner-he had gone off to Genoa to
meet them. I suppose he intends to
marry Coral.