I know I can count on you to rub out the numbers."

Susy sprang up and tossed Mrs. Vanderlyn's letter into the fire:
then she came slowly back to the chair. There, at her elbow,
lay the four fatal envelopes; and her next affair was to make up
her mind what to do with them.

To destroy them on the spot had seemed, at first thought,
inevitable: it might be saving Ellie as well as herself. But
such a step seemed to Susy to involve departure on the morrow,
and this in turn involved notifying Ellie, whose letter she had
vainly scanned for an address. Well--perhaps Clarissa's nurse
would know where one could write to her mother; it was unlikely
that even Ellie would go off without assuring some means of
communication with her child. At any rate, there was nothing to
be done that night: nothing but to work out the details of
their flight on the morrow, and rack her brains to find a
substitute for the hospitality they were rejecting. Susy did
not disguise from herself how much she had counted on the
Vanderlyn apartment for the summer: to be able to do so had
singularly simplified the future. She knew Ellie's largeness of
hand, and had been sure in advance that as long as they were her
guests their only expense would be an occasional present to the
servants. And what would the alternative be? She and Lansing,
in their endless talks, had so lived themselves into the vision
of indolent summer days on the lagoon, of flaming hours on the
beach of the Lido, and evenings of music and dreams on their
broad balcony above the Giudecca, that the idea of having to
renounce these joys, and deprive her Nick of them, filled Susy
with a wrath intensified by his having confided in her that when