"It's all right, I suppose?--Ellie said I might come," he
explained in a shrill cheerful voice; "and I'm to have my same
green room with the parrot-panels, because its furniture is
already so frightfully stained with my hair-wash."

Susy was beaming on him with the deep sense of satisfaction
which his presence always produced in his friends. There was no
one in the world, they all agreed, half as ugly and untidy and
delightful as Streffy; no one who combined such outspoken
selfishness with such imperturbable good humour; no one who knew
so well how to make you believe he was being charming to you
when it was you who were being charming to him.

In addition to these seductions, of which none estimated the
value more accurately than their possessor, Strefford had for
Susy another attraction of which he was probably unconscious.
It was that of being the one rooted and stable being among the
fluid and shifting figures that composed her world. Susy had
always lived among people so denationalized that those one took
for Russians generally turned out to be American, and those one
was inclined to ascribe to New York proved to have originated in
Rome or Bucharest. These cosmopolitan people, who, in countries
not their own, lived in houses as big as hotels, or in hotels
where the guests were as international as the waiters, had
inter-married, inter-loved and inter-divorced each other over
the whole face of Europe, and according to every code that
attempts to regulate human ties. Strefford, too, had his home
in this world, but only one of his homes. The other, the one he
spoke of, and probably thought of, least often, was a great dull