CHAPTER I

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THE WORKS OF KATHLEEN NORRIS

SATURDAY'S CHILD

VOLUME IV

"Friday's child is loving and giving;

But Saturday's child must work for her living."

To C. G. N.

How shall I give you this, who long have known

Your gift of all the best of life to me?

No living word of mine could ever be

Without the stirring echo of your own.

Under your hand, as mine, this book has grown,

And you, whose faith sets all my musing free,

You, whose true vision helps my eyes to see,

Know that these pages are not mine alone.

Not mine to give, not yours, the happy days,

The happy talks, the hoping and the fears

That made this story of a happy life.

But, in dear memory of your words of praise,

And grateful memory of four busy years,

Accept her portion of it, from your wife.

PART ONE

Poverty

SATURDAY'S CHILD

CHAPTER I

Not the place in which to look for the Great Adventure, the dingy,

narrow office on the mezzanine floor of Hunter, Baxter & Hunter's great

wholesale drug establishment, in San Francisco city, at the beginning

of the present century. Nothing could have seemed more monotonous, more

grimy, less interesting, to the outsider's eye at least, than life as

it presented itself to the twelve women who were employed in

bookkeeping there. Yet, being young, as they all were, each of these

girls was an adventuress, in a quiet way, and each one dreamed bright

dreams in the dreary place, and waited, as youth must wait, for

fortune, or fame, or position, love or power, to evolve itself somehow

from the dulness of her days, and give her the key that should

open--and shut--the doors of Hunter, Baxter & Hunter's offices to her

forever.

And, while they waited, working over the unvaried, stupid columns of

the company's books, they talked, confided, became friends, and

exchanged shy hints of ambition. The ill-ventilated, neglected room was

a little world, and rarely, in a larger world, do women come to know

each other as intimately as these women did.

Therefore, on a certain sober September morning, the fact that Miss

Thornton, familiarly known as "Thorny," was out of temper, speedily

became known to all the little force. Miss Thornton was not only the

oldest clerk there, but she was the highest paid, and the longest in

the company's employ; also she was by nature a leader, and generally

managed to impress her associates with her own mood, whatever it might

be. Various uneasy looks were sent to-day in her direction, and by

eleven o'clock even the giggling Kirk sisters, who were newcomers, were

imbued with a sense of something wrong.

Nobody quite liked to allude to the subject, or ask a direct question.

Not that any one of them was particularly considerate or reserved by

nature, but because Miss Thornton was known to be extremely unpleasant

when she had any grievance against one of the younger clerks. She could

maintain an ugly silence until goaded into speech, but, once launched,

few of her juniors escaped humiliation. Ordinarily, however, Miss

Thornton was an extremely agreeable woman, shrewd, kindly, sympathetic,

and very droll in her passing comments on men and events. She was in

her early thirties, handsome, and a not quite natural blonde, her mouth

sophisticated, her eyes set in circles of a leaden pallor. An

assertive, masterful little woman, born and reared in decent poverty,

still Thorny claimed descent from one of the first families of

Maryland, and talked a good deal of her birth. Her leading

characteristic was a determination never, even in the slightest

particular, to allow herself to be imposed upon, and she gloried in

stories of her own success in imposing upon other people.

Miss Thornton's desk stood at the inner end of the long room, nearest

the door that led out to the "deck," as the girls called the mezzanine

floor beyond, and so nearest the little private office of Mr. George

Brauer, the arrogant young German who was the superintendent of the

Front Office, and heartily detested by every girl therein.

When Miss Thornton wanted to be particularly annoying to her associates

she would remark casually that "she and Mr. Brauer" thought this or

that, or that "she suggested, and Mr. Brauer quite agreed" as to

something else. As a matter of fact, she disliked him as much as they

did, although she, and any and every girl there, would really have been

immensely pleased and flattered by his admiration, had he cared to

bestow it. But George Brauer's sea-blue eyes never rested for a second

upon any Front Office girl with anything but annoyed responsibility. He

kept his friendships severely remote from the walls of Hunter, Baxter &

Hunter, and was suspected of social ambitions, and of distinguished,

even noble connections in the Fatherland.

This morning Miss Thornton and Mr. Brauer had had a conference, as the

lady called it, immediately after his arrival at nine o'clock, and Miss

Murray, who sat next to Miss Thornton, suspected that it had had

something to do with her neighbor's ill-temper. But Miss Thornton,

delicately approached, had proved so ungracious and so uncommunicative,

that Miss Murray had retired into herself, and attacked her work with

unusual briskness.

Next to friendly, insignificant little Miss Murray was Miss Cottle, a

large, dark, morose girl, with untidy hair, and untidy clothes, and a

bad complexion. Miss Cottle was unapproachable and insolent in her

manner, from a sense of superiority. She was connected, she stated

frequently, with one of the wealthy families of the city, whose old

clothes, the girls suspected, she frequently wore. On Saturday, a

half-day, upon which all the girls wore their best clothes to the

office, if they had matinee or shopping plans for the afternoon, Miss

Cottle often appeared with her frowsy hair bunched under a tawdry

velvet hat, covered with once exquisite velvet roses, and her muscular

form clad in a gown that had cost its original owner more than this

humble relative could earn in a year. Miss Cottle's gloves were always

expensive, and always dirty, and her elaborate silk petticoats were of

soiled pale pinks and blues.

Miss Cottle's neighbor was Miss Sherman, a freckled, red-headed, pale

little girl, always shabby and pinched-looking, eager, silent, and

hard-working. Miss Sherman gave the impression--or would have given it

to anyone who cared to study her--of having been intimidated and

underfed from birth. She had a keen sense of humor, and, when Susan

Brown "got started," as Susan Brown occasionally did, Miss Sherman

would laugh so violently, and with such agonized attempts at

suppression, that she would almost strangle herself. Nobody guessed

that she adored the brilliant Susan, unless Miss Brown herself guessed

it. The girls only knew of Miss Sherman that she was the oldest of

eight brothers and sisters, and that she gave her mother all her money

every Saturday night.

Miss Elsie Kirk came next, in the line of girls that faced the room,

and Miss Violet Kirk was next to her sister. The Kirks were pretty,

light-headed girls, frivolous, common and noisy. They had a comfortable

home, and worked only because they rather liked the excitement of the

office, and liked an excuse to come downtown every day. Elsie, the

prettier and younger, was often "mean" to her sister, but Violet was

always good-natured, and used to smile as she told the girls how Elsie

captured her--Violet's--admirers. The Kirks' conversation was all of

"cases," "the crowd," "the times of their lives," and "new crushes";

they never pinned on their audacious hats to go home at night without

speculating as to possible romantic adventures on the car, on the

street, everywhere. They were not quite approved by the rest of the

Front Office staff; their color was not all natural, their clothes were

"fussy." Both wore enormous dry "rats," that showed through the thin

covering of outer hair, their stockings were quite transparent, and

bows of pink and lavender ribbon were visible under their thin

shirt-waists. It was known that Elsie had been "spoken to" by old Mr.

Baxter, on the subject of a long, loose curl, which had appeared one

morning, dangling over her powdered neck. The Kirks, it was felt, never

gave an impression of freshness, of soapiness, of starched apparel, and

Front Office had a high standard of personal cleanliness. Miss

Sherman's ears glowed coldly all morning long, from early ablutions,

and her fingertips were always icy, and Miss Thornton and Susan Brown

liked to allude casually to their "cold plunges" as a daily

occurrence--although neither one ever really took a cold bath, except,

perhaps, for a few days in mid-summer. But all of cleanliness is

neither embraced nor denied by the taking of cold baths, and the Front

Office girls, hours and obligations considered, had nothing on this

score of which to be ashamed. Manicuring went on in every quiet moment,

and many of the girls spent twenty minutes daily, or twice daily, in

the careful adjustment of large sheets of paper as cuffs, to protect

their sleeves. Two elastic bands held these cuffs in place, and only

long practice made their arrangement possible. This was before the day

of elbow sleeves, although Susan Brown always included elbow sleeves in

a description of a model garment for office wear, with which she

sometimes amused her associates.

"No wet skirts to freeze you to death," Susan would grumble, "no high

collar to scratch you! It's time that the office women of America were

recognized as a class with a class dress! Short sleeves, loose, baggy

trousers--"

A shriek would interrupt her.

"Yes, I SEE you wearing that in the street, Susan!"

"Well, I WOULD. Overshoes," the inventor would pursue, "fleece-lined

leggings, coming well up on your--may I allude to limbs, Miss Wrenn?"

"I don't care what you allude to!" Miss Wrenn, the office prude, a

little angry at being caught listening to this nonsense, would answer

snappily.

"Limbs, then," Susan would proceed graciously, "or, as Miss Sherman

says, legs---"

"Oh, Miss Brown! I DIDN'T! I never use that word!" the little woman

would protest.

"You don't! Why, you said last night that you were trying to get into

the chorus at the Tivoli! You said you had such handsome--"

"Oh, aren't you awful!" Miss Sherman would put her cold red fingers

over her ears, and the others, easily amused, would giggle at intervals

for the next half hour.

Susan Brown's desk was at the front end of the room, facing down the

double line. At her back was a round window, never opened, and never

washed, and so obscured by the great cement scrolls that decorated the

facade of the building that it gave only a dull blur of light,

ordinarily, and no air at all. Sometimes, on a bright summer's morning,

the invading sunlight did manage to work its way in through the

dust-coated ornamental masonry, and to fall, for a few moments, in a

bright slant, wheeling with motes, across the office floor. But usually

the girls depended for light upon the suspended green-hooded electric

lights, one over each desk.

Susan though that she had the most desirable seat in the room, and the

other girls carefully concealed from her the fact that they thought so,

too. Two years before, a newcomer, she had been given this same desk,

but it faced directly against the wall then, and was in the shadow of a

dirty, overcrowded letter press. Susan had turned it about,

straightened it, pushed the press down the room, against the

coat-closet, and now, like all the other girls, she faced the room,

could see more than any of them, indeed, and keep an eye on Mr. Brauer,

and on the main floor below, visible through the glass inner wall of

the office. Miss Brown was neither orderly nor industrious, but she had

an eye for proportion, and a fine imagination. She loved small, fussy

tasks, docketed and ruled the contents of her desk scrupulously, and

lettered trim labels for boxes and drawers, but she was a lazy young

creature when regular work was to be done, much given to idle and

discontented dreams.

At this time she was not quite twenty-one, and felt herself to be

distressingly advanced in years. Like all except a few very fortunate

girls of her age, Susan was brimming with perverted energy--she could

have done a thousand things well and joyously, could have used to the

utmost the exceptional powers of her body and soul, but, handicapped by

the ideals of her sex, and lacking the rare guidance that might have

saved her, she was drifting, busy with work she detested, or equally

unsatisfied in idleness, sometimes lazily diverted and soothed by the

passing hour, and sometimes stung to her very soul by longings and

ambitions.

"She is no older than I am--she works no harder than I do!" Susan would

reflect, studying the life of some writer or actress with bitter envy.

But how to get out of this groove, and into another, how to work and

fight and climb, she did not know, and nobody ever helped her to

discover.

There was no future for her, or for any girl here, that she knew. Miss

Thornton, after twelve years of work, was being paid forty-five

dollars, Miss Wrenn, after eight years, forty, and Susan only thirty

dollars a month. Brooding over these things, Susan would let her work

accumulate, and endure, in heavy silence, the kindly, curious

speculations and comments of her associates.

But perhaps a hot lunch or a friendly word would send her spirits

suddenly up again, Susan would forget her vague ambitions, and reflect

cheerfully that it was already four o'clock, that she was going with

Cousin Mary Lou and Billy Oliver to the Orpheum to-night, that her best

white shirtwaist ought by this time to have come back from the laundry.

Or somehow, if depression continued, she would shut her desk, in

mid-afternoon, and leave Front Office, cross the long deck--which was a

sort of sample room for rubber goods, and was lined with long cases of

them--descend a flight of stairs to the main floor, cross it and

remount the stairs on the other side of the building, and enter the

mail-order department. This was an immense room, where fifty men and a

few girls were busy at long desks, the air was filled with the hum of

typewriters and the murmur of low voices. Beyond it was a door that

gave upon more stairs, and at the top of them a small bare room known

as the lunch-room. Here was a great locker, still marked with the

labels that had shown where senna leaves and tansy and hepatica had

been kept in some earlier stage of Hunter, Baxter & Hunter's existence,

and now filled with the girls' lunch-boxes, and rubber overshoes, and

hair-brushes. There was a small gas-stove in this room, and a long

table with benches built about it. A door gave upon a high strip of

flat roof, and beyond a pebbled stretch of tar were the

dressings-rooms, where there were wash-stands, and soap, and limp

towels on rollers.

Here Susan would wash her hands and face, and comb her bright thick

hair, and straighten belt and collar. There were always girls here: a

late-comer eating her luncheon, two chatter-boxes sharing a bit of

powdered chamois-skin at a mirror, a girl who felt ill drinking

something hot at the stove. Here was always company, and gossip, Susan

might stop for a half-cup of scalding hot tea, or a chocolate from a

striped paper bag. Returning, refreshed and cheered, to the office, she

would lay a warm, damp hand over Miss Thornton's, and give her the news.

"Miss Polk and Miss French are just going it up there, Thorny, mad as

hops!" or "Miss O'Brien is going to be in Mr. Joe Hunter's office after

this."

"'S'at so?" Miss Thornton would interestedly return, wrinkling her nose

under the glasses she used while she was working. And perhaps after a

few moments she would slip away herself for a visit to the lunch-room.

Mr. Brauer, watching Front Office through his glass doors, attempted in

vain to discourage these excursions. The bolder spirits enjoyed defying

him, and the more timid never dared to leave their places in any case.

Miss Sherman, haunted by the horror of "losing her job," eyed the

independent Miss Brown and Miss Thornton with open awe and admiration,

without ever attempting to emulate them.

Next to Susan sat severe, handsome, reserved little Miss Wrenn, who

coldly repelled any attempts at friendship, and bitterly hated the

office. Except for an occasional satiric comment, or a half-amused

correction of someone's grammar, Miss Wrenn rarely spoke.

Miss Cashell was her neighbor, a mysterious, pretty girl, with wicked

eyes and a hard face, and a manner so artless, effusive and virtuous as

to awaken the basest suspicions among her associates. Miss Cashell

dressed very charmingly, and never expressed an opinion that would not

well have become a cloistered nun, but the girls read her colorless

face, sensuous mouth, and sly dark eyes aright, and nobody in Front

Office "went" with Miss Cashell. Next her was Mrs. Valencia, a harmless

little fool of a woman, who held her position merely because her

husband had been long in the employ of the Hunter family, and who made

more mistakes than all the rest of the staff put together. Susan

disliked Mrs. Valencia because of the jokes she told, jokes that the

girl did not in all honesty always understand, and because the little

widow was suspected of "reporting" various girls now and then to Mr.

Hunter.

Finishing the two rows of desks, down opposite Miss Thornton again were

Miss Kelly and Miss Garvey, fresh-faced, intelligent Irish girls,

simple, merry, and devoted to each other. These two took small part in

what did not immediately concern them, but went off to Confession

together every Saturday, spent their Sundays together, and laughed and

whispered together over their ledgers. Everything about them was

artless and pure. Susan, motherless herself, never tired of their talk

of home, their mothers, their married sisters, their cousins in

convents, their Church picnics and concerts and fairs, and

"joshes"--"joshes" were as the breath of life to this innocent pair.

"Joshes on Ma," "joshes on Joe and Dan," "joshes on Cecilia and

Loretta" filled their conversations.

"And Ma yells up, 'What are you two layin' awake about?'" Miss Garvey

would recount, with tears of enjoyment in her eyes. "But we never said

nothing, did we, Gert? Well, about twelve o'clock we heard Leo come in,

and he come upstairs, and he let out a yell--'My God!' he says--"

But at the recollection of Leo's discovery of the sheeted form, or the

pail of water, or whatever had awaited him at the top of the stairs,

Miss Garvey's voice would fail entirely, and Miss Kelly would also lay

her head down on her desk, and sob with mirth. It was infectious,

everyone else laughed, too.

To-day Susan, perceiving something amiss with Miss Thornton, sauntered

the length of the office, and leaned over the older woman's desk. Miss

Thornton was scribbling a little list of edibles, her errand boy

waiting beside her. Tea and canned tomatoes were bought by the girls

every day, to help out the dry lunches they brought from home, and

almost every day the collection of dimes and nickels permitted a

"wreath-cake" also, a spongy, glazed confection filled with chopped

nuts and raisins. The tomatoes, bubbling hot and highly seasoned, were

quite as much in demand as was the tea, and sometimes two or three

girls made their entire lunch up by enlarging this list with cheese,

sausages and fruit.

"Mad about something," asked Susan, when the list for to-day was

finished.

Miss Thornton, under "2 wreath" wrote hastily, "Boiling! Tell you

later," and turned it about for Susan to read, before she erased it.

"Shall I get that?" she asked, for the benefit of the attentive office.

"Yes, I would," answered her fellow-conspirator, as she turned away.

The hour droned by. Boys came with bills, and went away again. Sudden

sharp pangs began to assert themselves in Susan's stomach. An odor of

burning rubber drifted up from below, as it always drifted up at about

this time. Susan announced that she was starving.

"It's not more than half-past eleven," said Miss Cottle, screwing her

body about, so that she could look down through the glass walls of the

office to the clock, on the main floor below. "Why, my heavens! It's

twelve o'clock!" she announced amazedly, throwing down her pen, and

stretching in her chair.

And, in instant confirmation of the fact, a whistle sounded shrilly

outside, followed by a dozen more whistles, high and low, constant and

intermittent, sharp on the silent noon air. The girls all jumped up,

except Miss Wrenn, who liked to assume that the noon hour meant nothing

to her, and who often finished a bill or two after the hour struck.

But among the others, ledgers were slammed shut, desk drawers jerked

open, lights snapped out. Miss Thornton had disappeared ten minutes

before in the direction of the lunch-room; now all the others followed,

yawning, cramped, talkative.

They settled noisily about the table, and opened their lunches. A

joyous confusion of talk rose above the clinking of spoons and plates,

as the heavy cups of steaming tea were passed and the sugar-bowl went

the rounds; there was no milk, and no girl at Hunter, Baxter & Hunter's

thought lemon in tea anything but a wretched affectation. Girls who had

been too pale before gained a sudden burning color, they had been

sitting still and were hungry, now they ate too fast. Without exception

the Front Office girls suffered from agonies of indigestion, and most

of them grew used to a dull headache that came on every afternoon. They

kept flat bottles of soda-mint tablets in their desks, and exchanged

them hourly. No youthful constitution was proof against the speed with

which they disposed of these fresh soft sandwiches at noon-time, and

gulped down their tea.

In ten minutes some of them were ready to hurry off into sunny Front

Street, there to saunter past warehouses, and warehouses, and

warehouses, with lounging men eyeing them from open doorways.

The Kirks disappeared quickly to-day, and some of the others went out,

too. When Miss Thornton, Miss Sherman, Miss Cottle and Miss Brown were

left, Miss Thornton said suddenly:

"Say, listen, Susan. Listen here--"

Susan, who had been wiping the table carefully, artistically, with a

damp rag, was arrested by the tone.

"I think this is the rottenest thing I ever heard, Susan," Miss

Thornton began, sitting down at the table. The others all sat down,

too, and put their elbows on the table. Susan, flushing uncomfortably,

eyed Miss Thornton steadily.

"Brauer called me in this morning," said Miss Thornton, in a low voice,

marking the table with the handle of a fork, in parallel lines, "and he

asked me if I thought--no, that ain't the way he began. Here's what he

said first: he says, 'Miss Thornton,' he says, 'did you know that Miss

Wrenn is leaving us?'"

"What!" said all the others together, and Susan added, joyfully, "Gee,

that means forty for me, and the crediting."

"Well, now listen," Miss Thornton resumed. "I says, 'Mr. Brauer, Miss

Wrenn didn't put herself out to inform me of her plans, but never mind.

Although,' I says, 'I taught that girl everything she ever knew of

office work, and the day she was here three weeks Mr. Philip Hunter

himself came to me and said, "Miss Thornton, can you make anything of

her?" So that if it hadn't been for me--'"

"But, Thorny, what's she leaving for?" broke in Susan, with the excited

interest that the smallest change invariably brought.

"Her uncle in Milwaukee is going to pay her expenses while she takes a

library course, I believe," Miss Thornton said, indifferently. "Anyway,

then Brauer asked--now, listen, Susan--he asked if I thought Violet

Kirk could do the crediting--"

"Violet Kirk!" echoed Susan, in incredulous disappointment. This blow

to long-cherished hopes gave her a sensation of actual sickness.

"Violet Kirk!" the others broke out, indignant and astonished. "Why,

she can't do it! Is he crazy? Why, Joe Hunter himself told Susan to

work up on that! Why, Susan's done all the substituting on that! What

does she know about it, anyway? Well, wouldn't that honestly jar you!"

Susan alone did not speak. She had in turn begun to mark the table, in

fine, precise lines, with a hairpin. She had grown rather pale.

"It's a rotten shame, Susan," said Rose Murray, sympathetically. Miss

Sherman eyed Susan with scared and sorrowful eyes. "Don't you

care--don't you care, Susan!" said the soothing voices.

"I don't care," said Susan presently, in a hard, level voice. She

raised her somber eyes. "I don't care because I simply won't stand it,

that's all," said she. "I'll go straight to Mr. Baxter. Yes, I WILL,

Thorny. Brauer'll see if he can run everything this way! Is she going

to get forty?"

"What do you care if she does?" Miss Thornton said, hardily.

"All right," Susan answered. "Very well. But I'll get forty next month

or I'll leave this place! And I'm not one bit afraid to go straight to

old 'J. G.' and tell him so, too! I'll--"

"Listen, Susan, now listen," urged Miss Thornton. "Don't you get mad,

Susan. She can't do it. It'll be just one mistake after another. Brauer

will have to give it to you, inside of two months. She'll find," said

Miss Thornton, with a grim tightening of the lips, "that precious few

mistakes get by ME! I'll make that girl's life a burden, you trust me!

And meantime you work up on that line, Sue, and be ready for it!"

Susan did not answer. She was staring at the table again, cleaning the

cracks in its worn old surface with her hairpin.

"Thorny," she said huskily, "you know me. Do you think that this is

fair?"

"Aw--aw, now, Susan, don't!" Miss Thornton jumped up, and put her arm

about Susan's shoulders, and Susan, completely unnerved by the sympathy

in the other's tone, dropped her head upon her arm, and began to cry.

A distressed murmur of concern and pity rose all about her, everyone

patted her shoulder, and bitter denunciations of Mr. Brauer and Miss

Kirk broke forth. Even Hunter, Baxter & Hunter were not spared, being

freely characterized as "the rottenest people in the city to work for!"

"It would serve them right," said more than one indignant voice, "if

the whole crowd of us walked out on them!"

Presently Susan indicated, by a few gulps, and by straightening

suddenly, that the worst of the storm was over, and could even laugh

shakily when Miss Thornton gave her a small, fringed lunch napkin upon

which to wipe her eyes.

"I'm a fool to cry this way," said Susan, sniffing.

"Fool!" Miss Cottle echoed tenderly, "It's enough to make a cow cry!"

"Not calling Susan a cow, or anything like that," said Miss Thornton

humorously, as she softly smoothed Susan's hair. At which Susan began

to laugh violently, and the others became almost hysterical in their

delight at seeing her equilibrium restored.

"But you know what I do with my money, Thorny," began Susan, her eyes

filling again.

"She gives every cent to her aunt," said Miss Thornton sternly, as if

she accused the firm, Mr. Brauer and Miss Kirk by the statement.

"And I've--worked--so hard!" Susan's lips were beginning to tremble

again. But with an effort she controlled herself, fumbled for a

handkerchief, and faced the group, disfigured as to complexion, tumbled

as to hair, but calm.

"Well, there's no help for it, I suppose!" said she hardily, in a tone

somewhat hoarsened by tears. "You're all darlings, and I'm a fool. But

I certainly intend to get even with Mr. Brauer!"

"DON'T give up your job," Miss Sherman pleaded.

"I will the minute I get another," said Susan, morosely, adding

anxiously, "Do I look a perfect fright, Thorny? Do my eyes show?"

"Not much--" Miss Cottle wavered.

"Wash them with cold water, and powder your nose," advised Miss

Thornton briskly.

"And my hair--!" Susan put her hand to the disordered mass, and laughed

helplessly.

"It's all right!" Thorny patted it affectionately. "Isn't it gorgeous,

girls? Don't you care, Susan, you're worth ten of the Kirks!"

"Here they come now!" Miss Murray whispered, at the head of the stairs.

"Beat it, Susan, don't let 'em see you!"

Susan duly fled to the wash-room, where, concealed a moment later by a

towel, and the hanging veil of her hair, she could meet the Kirks'

glances innocently enough. Later, fresh and tidy, she took her place at

her desk, rather refreshed by her outburst, and curiously peaceful in

spirit. The joys of martyrdom were Susan's, she was particularly busy

and cheerful. Fate had dealt her cruel blows before this one, she

inherited from some persecuted Irish ancestor a grim pleasure in

accepting them.

Afternoons, from one o'clock until half-past five, seemed endless in

Front Office. Mornings, beside being exactly one hour shorter by the

clock, could be still more abbreviated by the few moments gained by the

disposal of hats and wraps, the dusting of desks, sharpening of

pencils, and filling of ink-wells. The girls used a great many blocks

of yellow paper called scratch-pads, and scratch-pads must be gotten

down almost daily from the closet, dusted and distributed, there were

paper cuffs to adjust, and there was sometimes a ten or fifteen-minute

delay before the bills for the day began to come up. But the afternoons

knew no such delays, the girls were tired, the air in the office stale.

Every girl, consciously or not, sighed as she took her seat at one

o'clock.

The work in Front Office was entirely with bills. These bills were of

the sales made in the house itself the day before, and those sent by

mail from the traveling salesmen, and were accompanied by duplicate

bills, on thin yellow sheets. It was Mrs. Valencia's work, the easiest

in the office, to compare originals and duplicates, and supply to the

latter any item that was missing. Hundreds of the bills were made out

for only one or two items, many were but one page in length, and there

were several scores of longer ones every day, raging from two to twenty

pages.

The original bills went downstairs again immediately, and Miss

Thornton, taking the duplicates one by one from Mrs. Valencia, marked

the cost price of every article in the margin beyond the selling price.

Thorny, after twelve years' experience, could jot down costs,

percentages and discounts at an incredible speed. Drugs, patent

medicines, surgical goods and toilet articles she could price as fast

as she could read them, and, even while her right hand scribbled

busily, her left hand turned the pages of her cost catalog

automatically, when her trained eye discovered, half-way down the page,

some item of which she was not quite sure. Susan never tired of

admiring the swiftness with which hand, eye and brain worked together.

Thorny would stop in her mad flight, ponder an item with absent eyes

fixed on space, suddenly recall the price, affix the discounts, and be

ready for the next item. Susan had the natural admiration of an

imaginative mind for power, and the fact that Miss Thornton was by far

the cleverest woman in the office was one reason why Susan loved her

best.

Miss Thornton whisked her finished duplicates, in a growing pile, to

the left-hand side of Miss Munay's desk. Her neighbor also did

"costing," but in a simpler form. Miss Murray merely marked, sometimes

at cost, sometimes at an advance, those articles that were "B. O." or

"bought out," not carried in Hunter, Baxter & Hunter's regular stock.

Candy, postal-cards, cameras, sporting-goods, stamps, cigars,

stationery, fruit-sirups, all the things in fact, that the firm's

customers, all over the state, carried in their little country stores,

were "B. O." Miss Murray had invoices for them all, and checked them

off as fast as she could find their places on the duplicates.

Then Miss Cottle and Susan Brown got the duplicates and "extended"

them. So many cases of cold cream at so much per case, so many ounces

of this or that at so much the pound, so many pounds at so much per

ounce, and forty and ten and ten off. Two-thirds of a dozen, one

hundredweight, one eighth of a gross, twelve per cent, off, and

twenty-three per cent. on for freight charges; the "extenders" had to

keep their wits about them.

After that the duplicates went to Miss Sherman, who set down the

difference between cost and selling price. So that eventually every

article was marked five times, its original selling price, extended by

the salesman, its cost price, separately extended, and the difference

between the two.

From Miss Sherman the bills went to the Misses Kirk, who gave every

item a red number that marked it in its proper department, drugs or

rubber goods or soaps and creams and colognes. The entire stock was

divided into ten of these departments, and there were ten great ledgers

in which to make entries for each one.

And for every one of a hundred salesmen a separate great sheet was kept

for the record of sales, all marked with the rubber stamp "B. O.," or

the number of a department in red ink. This was called "crediting," and

was done by Miss Wrenn. Finally, Miss Garvey and Miss Kelly took the

now limp bills, and extracted from them bewildering figures called "the

percentages," into the mysteries of which Susan never dared to

penetrate.

This whole involved and intricate system had originated, years before,

in the brain of one of the younger members of the firm, whose theory

was that it would enable everyone concerned to tell "at a glance" just

where the firm stood, just where profits and losses lay. Theoretically,

the idea was sound, and, in the hands of a few practiced accountants,

it might have been practically sound as well. But the uninterested,

untrained girls in Front Office never brought their work anywhere near

a conclusion. Several duplicates on Miss Thornton's desk were eternally

waiting for special prices, several more, delayed by the non-appearance

of invoices, kept Miss Murray always in arrears, and Susan Brown had a

little habit of tucking away in a desk drawer any duplicate whose

extension promised to be unusually tedious or difficult. Girls were

continually going into innocent gales of mirth because long-lost bills

were discovered, shut in some old ledger, or rushing awe-struck to Miss

Thornton with accounts of others that had been carried away in

waste-baskets and burned.

"Sh-sh! Don't make such a fuss," Miss Thornton would say warningly,

with a glance toward Mr. Brauer's office. "Perhaps he'll never ask for

them!"

And perhaps he never did. If he did, the office presented him a blank

and innocent face. "Miss Brown, did you see this bill Mr. Brauer speaks

of?" "Beg pardon? Oh, no, Miss Thornton." "Miss Cashell, did you?"

"Just-one-moment-Miss-Thornton-until-I-foot-up-this-column. Thank you!

No. No, I haven't seen it, Miss Thornton. Did you trace it to my desk,

Mr. Brauer?"

Baffled, Mr. Brauer would retire to his office. Ten silent, busy

minutes would elapse before Miss Cottle would say, in a low tone, "Bet

it was that bill that you were going to take home and work on, Miss

Murray!"

"Oh, sure!" Miss Murray would agree, with a startled smile. "Sure.

Mamma stuck it behind the clock--I remember now. I'll bring it down

to-morrow."

"Don't you forget it, now," Miss Thornton would perhaps command, with a

sudden touch of authority, "old Baxter'd jump out of his skin if he

knew we ever took 'em home!"

"Well, YOU do!" Miss Murray would retort, reddening resentfully.

"Ah, well," Susan Brown would answer pompously, for Miss Thornton, "you

forget that I'm almost a member of the firm! Me and the Baxters can do

pretty much what we like! I'll fire Brauer to-morrow if he--"

"You shut up, Susan!" Miss Thornton, her rising resentment pricked like

a bubble, would laugh amiably, and the subject of the bill would be

dismissed with a general chuckle.

On this particular afternoon Miss Thornton delayed Susan Brown, with a

significant glance, when the whistle blew at half-past five, and the

girls crowded about the little closet for their wraps.

"S'listen, Susan," said she, with a look full of import. Susan leaned

over Miss Thornton's flat-topped desk so that their heads were close

together. "Listen," said Miss Thornton, in a low tone, "I met George

Banks on the deck this afternoon, see? And I happened to tell him that

Miss Wrenn was going." Miss Thornton glanced cautiously about her, her

voice sank to a low murmur. "Well. And then he says, 'Yes, I knew

that,' he says, 'but do you know who's going to take her place?' 'Miss

Kirk is,' I says, 'and I think it's a dirty shame!'"

"Good for you!" said Susan, grateful for this loyalty.

"Well, I did, Susan. And it is, too! But listen. 'That may be,' he

says, 'but what do you know about young Coleman coming down to work in

Front Office!'"

"Peter Coleman!" Susan gasped. This was the most astonishing, the most

exciting news that could possibly have been circulated. Peter Coleman,

nephew and heir of old "J. G." himself, handsome, college-bred, popular

from the most exclusive dowager in society to the humblest errand boy

in his uncle's employ, actually coming down to Front Office daily, to

share the joys and sorrows of the Brauer dynasty--it was unbelievable,

it was glorious! Every girl in the place knew all about Peter Coleman,

his golf record, his blooded terriers, his appearances in the social

columns of the Sunday newspapers! Thorny remembered, although she did

not boast of it, the days when, a little lad of twelve or fourteen, he

had come to his uncle's office with a tutor, or even with an old, and

very proud, nurse, for the occasional visits which always terminated

with the delighted acceptance by Peter of a gold piece from Uncle

Josiah. But Susan only knew him as a man, twenty-five now, a wonderful

and fascinating person to watch, even, in happy moments, to dream about.

"You know I met him, Thorny," she said now, eager and smiling.

"'S'at so?" Miss Thornton said, politely uninterested.

"Yes, old Baxter introduced me, on a car. But, Thorny, he can't be

coming right down here into this rotten place!" protested Susan.

"He'll have a desk in Brauer's office," Miss Thornton explained. "He is

to learn this branch, and be manager some day. George says that Brauer

is going to buy into the firm."

"Well, for Heaven's sake!" Susan's thoughts flew. "But, Thorny," she

presently submitted, "isn't Peter Coleman in college?"

Miss Thornton looked mysterious, looked regretful.

"I understand old J. G.'s real upset about that," she said discreetly,

"but just what the trouble was, I'm not at liberty to mention. You know

what young men are."

"Sure," said Susan, thoughtfully.

"I don't mean that there was any scandal," Miss Thornton amended

hastily, "but he's more of an athlete than a student, I guess--"

"Sure," Susan agreed again. "And a lot he knows about office work,

NOT," she mused. "I'll bet he gets a good salary?"

"Three hundred and fifty," supplied Miss Thornton.

"Oh, well, that's not so much, considering. He must get that much

allowance, too. What a snap! Thorny, what do you bet the girls all go

crazy about him!"

"All except one. I wouldn't thank you for him."

"All except TWO!" Susan went smiling back to her desk, a little more

excited than she cared to show. She snapped off her light, and swept

pens and blotters into a drawer, pulling open another drawer to get her

purse and gloves. By this time the office was deserted, and Susan could

take her time at the little mirror nailed inside the closet door.

A little cramped, a little chilly, she presently went out into the

gusty September twilight of Front Street. In an hour the wind would die

away. Now it was sweeping great swirls of dust and chaff into the eyes

of home-going men and women. Susan, like all San Franciscans, was used

to it. She bent her head, sank her hands in her coat-pockets, and

walked fast.

Sometimes she could walk home, but not to-night, in the teeth of this

wind. She got a seat on the "dummy" of a cable-car. A man stood on the

step, holding on to the perpendicular rod just before her, but under

his arm she could see the darkened shops they passed, girls and men

streaming out of doors marked "Employees Only," men who ran for the car

and caught it, men who ran for the car and missed it. Her bright eyes

did not miss an inch of the crowded streets.

Susan smiled dreamily. She was arranging the details of her own

wedding, a simple but charming wedding in Old Saint Mary's. The groom

was of course Mr. Peter Coleman.

CHAPTER II

The McAllister Street cable-car, packed to its last inch, throbbed upon

its way so jerkily that Susan, who was wedged in close to the glass

shield at the front of the car, had sometimes to cling to the seat with

knees and finger-tips to keep from sliding against her neighbor, a

young man deep in a trade-journal, and sometimes to brace herself to

withstand his helpless sliding against her. They both laughed presently

at the absurdity of it.

"My, don't they jerk!" said the friendly Susan, and the young man

agreed fervently, in a bashful mumble, "It's fierce, all right," and

returned to his book. Susan, when she got down at her corner, gave him

a little nod and smile, and he lifted his hat, and smiled brightly in

return.

There was a little bakery on this corner, with two gaslights flaring in

its window. Several flat pies and small cakes were displayed there, and

a limp curtain, on a string, shut off the shop, where a dozen people

were waiting now. A bell in the door rang violently, whenever anyone

came out or in. Susan knew the bakery well, knew when the rolls were

hot, and just the price and variety of the cookies and the pies.

She knew, indeed, every inch of the block, a dreary block at best,

perhaps especially dreary in this gloomy pitiless summer twilight. It

was lined with shabby, bay-windowed, three-story wooden houses, all

exactly alike. Each had a flight of wooden steps running up to the

second floor, a basement entrance under the steps, and a small cemented

yard, where papers and chaff and orange peels gathered, and grass

languished and died. The dining-room of each house was in the basement,

and slatternly maids, all along the block, could be seen setting

tables, by flaring gas-light, inside. Even the Nottingham lace curtains

at the second-story windows seemed akin, although they varied from the

stiff, immaculate, well-darned lengths that adorned the rooms where the

Clemenceaus--grandmother, daughter and granddaughter, and direct

descendants of the Comte de Moran--were genteelly starving to death, to

the soft, filthy, torn strips that finished off the parlor of the

noisy, cheerful, irrepressible Daleys' once-pretentious home. Poverty

walked visibly upon this block, the cold, forbidding poverty of pride

and courage gone wrong, the idle, decorous, helpless poverty of fallen

gentility. Poverty spoke through the unobtrusive little signs over

every bell, "Rooms," and through the larger signs that said "Costello.

Modes and Children's Dressmaker." Still another sign in a second-story

bay said "Alice. Milliner," and a few hats, dimly discernible from the

street, bore out the claim.

Upon the house where Susan Brown lived with her aunt, and her aunt's

three daughters, there was no sign, although Mrs. Lancaster, and Mary

Lou, Virginia and Georgianna had supported themselves for many years by

the cheerless process known as taking boarders. Sometimes, when the

Lancasters were in especially trying financial straits, the possibility

of a little sign was discussed. But so far, the humiliating extreme had

been somehow avoided.

"No, I feel that Papa wouldn't like it," Mrs. Lancaster persisted.

"Oh, Papa! He'd have died first!" the daughters would agree, in eager

sympathy. And the question of the sign would be dismissed again.

"Papa" had been a power in his day, a splendid, audacious, autocratic

person, successful as a pioneer, a miner, a speculator, proud of a

beautiful and pampered Southern wife and a nurseryful of handsome

children. These were the days of horses and carriages, when the Eddy

Street mansion was built, when a score of servants waited upon Ma and

the children. But terrible times came finally upon this grandeur, the

stock madness seized "Papa," he was a rich man one day, a millionaire

the next,--he would be a multi-millionaire next week! Ma never ceased

to be grateful that Papa, on the very day that his fortune crashed to

ruin, came home too sick and feverish to fully comprehend the calamity,

and was lying in his quiet grave before his widow and her children did.

Mrs. Lancaster, in her fresh expensive black, with her five black-clad

children beside her, thus had the world to face, at thirty-four.

George, the first-born, destined to die in his twentieth summer, was

eighteen then, Mary Lou sixteen, helpless and feminine, and Alfred, at

thirteen, already showed indications of being entirely spoiled. Then

came conscientious, gentle little Virginia, ten years old, and finally

Georgianna, who was eight.

Out of the general wreckage, the Fulton Street house was saved, and to

the Fulton Street house the spoiled, terrified little family moved.

Mary Lou sometimes told Susan with mournful pride of the weeping and

wailing of those days, of dear George's first job, that, with the check

that Ma's uncle in Albany sent every month, supported the family. Then

the uncle died, and George died, and Ma, shaken from her silent and

dignified retirement, rose to the occasion in a manner that Mary Lou

always regarded as miraculous, and filled the house with boarders. And

enjoyed the new venture thoroughly, too, although Mary Lou never

suspected that. Perhaps Ma, herself, did not realize how much she liked

to bustle and toil, how gratifying the stir and confusion in the house

were, after the silent want and loneliness. Ma always spoke of women in

business as unfortunate and hardened; she never spoke of her livelihood

as anything but a temporary arrangement, never made out a bill in her

life. Upon her first boarders, indeed, she took great pride in

lavishing more than the luxuries for which their board money could

possibly pay. Ma reminded them that she had no rent to pay, and that

the girls would soon be married, and Alfie working.

But Papa had been dead for twenty years now, and still the girls were

unmarried, and Alfred, if he was working, was doing it in so fitful and

so casual a manner as to be much more of a burden than a help to his

mother. Alfred lost one position after another because he drank, and

Ma, upon whose father's table wine had been quite a matter of course,

could not understand why a little too much drinking should be taken so

seriously by Alfie's employers, and why they could not give the boy

another--and another, and another--chance. Ma never alluded, herself,

to this little weakness of Alfie's. He was still her darling, the one

son she had left, the last of the Lancasters.

But, as the years went on, she grew to be less of the shrinking

Southern lady, more the boarding-house keeper. If she wrote no bills,

she kept them pretty straight in her head, and only her endless courage

and industry kept the crazy enterprise afloat, and the three idle girls

comfortable and decently dressed. Theoretically, they "helped Ma."

Really, one well-trained servant could have done far more than Mary

Lou, Virginia and Georgie did between them. This was, of course,

primarily her own fault. Ma belonged to the brisk and bustling type

that shoves aside a pair of eager little hands, with "Here, I can do

that better myself!" She was indeed proud of the fact that Mary Lou, at

thirty-six, could not rent a room or receipt a bill if her life were at

stake. "While I'm here, I'll do this, dear," said Ma, cheerfully. "When

I'm gone you'll have quite enough to do!"

Susan entered a small, square entrance-hall, papered in arabesques of

green against a dark brown, where a bead of gas flickered dispiritedly

in a red glass shade over the newel post. Some fly-specked calling

cards languished in the brass tray of an enormous old walnut hat-rack,

where several boarders had already hung wraps and hats.

The upper part of the front door was set with two panels of beveled

glass, decorated with a scroll design in frosted glass. When Susan

Brown had been a very small girl she would sometimes stand inside this

door and study the passing show of Fulton Street for hours at a time.

Somebody would come running up the street steps, and pull the bell!

Susan could hear it tinkle far downstairs in the kitchen, and would

bashfully retire to the niche by the hat-rack. Minnie or Lizzie, or

perhaps a Japanese schoolboy,--whoever the servant of the hour might

be, would come slowly up the inside stairs, and cautiously open the

street door an inch or two.

A colloquy would ensue. No, Mrs. Lancaster wasn't in, no, none of the

family wasn't in. He could leave it. She didn't know, they hadn't said.

He could leave it. No, she didn't know.

The collector would discontentedly depart, and instantly Mary Lou or

Georgie, or perhaps both, would hang over the railing in the upper hall.

"Lizzie, who was it?" they would call down softly, impatient and

excited, as Lizzie dragged her way upstairs.

"Who was it, Mary Lou?"

"Why, how do I know?"

"Here, GIVE it to me, Lizzie!"

A silence. Then, "Oh, pshaw!" and the sound of a closing door. Then

Lizzie would drag downstairs again, and Susan would return to her

silent contemplation of the street.

She had seen nothing particularly odd or unattractive about the house

in those little-girl days, and it seemed a perfectly normal

establishment to her now. It was home, and it was good to get home

after the long day. She ran up the flight of stairs that the gas-bead

dimly lighted, and up another, where a second gas-jet, this one without

a shade, burned unsteadily and opened the door, at the back of the

third-floor hall, that gave upon the bedroom that she shared with Mary

Lou and Georgianna. The boarding-house was crowded, at this particular

time, and Georgie, who flitted about as a rule to whatever room chanced

to be empty, was now quartered here and slept on a narrow couch, set at

an angle from the bay-window, and covered with a worn strip of chenille.

It was a shabby room, and necessarily crowded, but it was bright, and

its one window gave an attractive view of little tree-shaded backyards

below, where small tragedies and comedies were continually being

enacted by dogs and babies and cats and the crude little maids of the

neighborhood. Susan enjoyed these thoroughly, and she and Georgie also

liked to watch the girl in the house just behind theirs, who almost

always forgot to draw the shades when she lighted her gas. Whatever

this unconscious neighbor did they found very amusing.

"Oh, look, Georgie, she's changing her slippers. Don't miss this--She

must be going out to-night!" Susan would quiver with excitement until

her cousin joined her at the window.

"Well, I wish you could have seen her trying her new hat on to-day!"

Georgie would contribute. And both girls would kneel at the window as

long as the bedroom in the next house was lighted. "Gone down to meet

that man in the light overcoat," Susan would surmise, when the light

went out, and if she and Georgie, hurrying to the bakery, happened to

encounter their neighbor, they had much difficulty in suppressing their

mirth.

To-night the room that the cousins shared was empty, and Susan threw

her hat and coat over the foot of the large, lumpy wooden bed that

seemed to take up at least one-half of the floor-space. She sat down on

the side of the bed, feeling the tension of the day relax, and a

certain lassitude creep over her. An old magazine lay nearby on a

chair, she reached for it, and began idly to re-read it.

Beside the bed and Georgie's cot, there was a walnut bureau in the

room, two chairs and one rocking chair, and a washstand. One the latter

was a china basin, half-full of cold, soapy water, a damp towel was

spread upon the pitcher that stood beside it on the floor. The wet pink

soap, lying in a blue saucer, scented the room. On the bureau were

combs and brushes, powders and cold creams, little brass and china

trays filled with pins and buttons, and an old hand-mirror, in a

loosened, blackened silver mounting. There was a glazed paper candy-box

with hairpins in it, and a little liqueur glass, with "Hotel

Netherlands" written upon it in gold, held wooden collar buttons and

odd cuff-links. A great many hatpins, some plain, some tarnished and

ornate, all bent, were stuck into a little black china boot. A basket

of china and gold wire was full of combings, some dotted veils were

folded into squares, and pinned into the wooden frame of the mirror,

and the mirror itself was thickly rimmed with cards and photographs and

small souvenirs of all sorts, that had been stuck in between the glass

and the frame. There were dance cards with dangling tiny pencils on

tasseled cords, and score cards plastered with tiny stars. There were

calling cards, and newspaper clippings, and tintypes taken of young

people at the beach or the Chutes. A round pilot-biscuit, with a dozen

names written on it in pencil, was tied with a midshipman's hat-ribbon,

there were wooden plates and champagne corks, and toy candy-boxes in

the shapes of guitars and fire-crackers. Miss Georgie Lancaster, at

twenty-eight, was still very girlish and gay, and she shared with her

mother and sisters the curious instinctive acquisitiveness of the woman

who, powerless financially and incapable of replacing, can only save.

Moments went by, a quarter-hour, a half-hour, and still Susan sat

hunched up stupidly over her book. It was not an interesting magazine,

she had read it before, and her thoughts ran in an uneasy undercurrent

while she read. "I ought to be doing my hair--it must be half-past six

o'clock--I must stop this--"

It was almost half-past six when the door opened suddenly, and a large

woman came in.

"Well, hello, little girlie!" said the newcomer, panting from the climb

upstairs, and turning a cold, fresh-colored cheek for Susan's kiss. She

took off a long coat, displaying beneath, a black walking-skirt, an

elaborate high collar, and a view of shabby corset and shabby

corset-cover between. "Ma wanted butter," she explained, with a

pleasant, rueful smile, "and I just slipped into anything to go for it!"

"You're an angel, Mary Lou," Susan said affectionately.

"Oh, angel!" Miss Lancaster laughed wearily, but she liked the

compliment for all that. "I'm not much of an angel," she said with a

sigh, throwing her hat and coat down beside Susan's, and assuming a

somewhat spotted serge skirt, and a limp silk waist a trifle too small

for her generous proportions. Susan watched her in silence, while she

vigorously jerked the little waist this way and that, pinning its torn

edges down firmly, adjusting her skirt over it, and covering the

safety-pin that united them with a cracked patent-leather belt.

"There!" said Mary Lou, "that doesn't look very well, but I guess it'll

do. I have to serve to-night, and I will not wear my best skirt into

the kitchen. Ready to go down?"

Susan flung her book down, yawned.

"I ought to do my hair--" she began.

"Oh, you look all right," her cousin assured her, "I wouldn't bother."

She took a small paper bag full of candy from her shopping bag and

tucked it out of sight in a bureau drawer. "Here's a little sweet bite

for you and me, Sue," said she, with childish, sweet slyness, "when

Jinny and Ma go to the lecture to-night, we'll have OUR little party,

too. Just a little secret between you and me."

They went downstairs with their arms about each other, to the big front

dining-room in the basement. The lower hall was dark and draughty, and

smelled of boiling vegetables. There was a telephone on a little table,

close by the dining-room door, and a slender, pretty young woman was

seated before it. She put her hand over the transmitter, as they came

downstairs, and said in a smiling whisper, "Hello, darling!" to Susan.

"Shut the door," she added, very low, "when you go into the

dining-room."

Susan nodded, and Georgianna Lancaster returned at once to her

telephoned conversation.

"Yes, you did!" said she, satirically, "I believe that! ... Oh, of

course you did! ... And I suppose you wrote me a note, too, only I

didn't get it. Now, listen, why don't you say that you forgot all about

it, I wouldn't care ... Honestly, I wouldn't ... honestly, I wouldn't

... Yes, I've heard that before ... No, he didn't either, Rose was

furious. ... No, I wasn't furious at all, but at the same time I didn't

think it was a very gentlemanly way to act, on your part ..."

Susan and Mary Lou went into the dining-room, and the closing door shut

off the rest of the conversation. The household was quite used to

Georgie's quarrels with her male friends.

A large, handsome woman, who did not look her sixty years, was moving

about the long table, which, spread with a limp and slightly spotted

cloth, was partially laid for dinner. Knives, spoons, forks and rolled

napkins were laid in a little heap at each place, the length of the

table was broken by salt shakers of pink and blue glass, plates of soda

crackers, and saucers of green pickles.

"Hello, Auntie!" Susan said, laying an arm about the portly figure, and

giving the lady a kiss. Mrs. Lancaster's anxious eye went to her oldest

daughter.

"Who's Georgie talking to?" she asked, in a low tone.

"I don't know, Ma," Mary Lou said, sympathetically, pushing a chair

against the table with her knee, "Fred Persons, most likely."

"No. 'Tisn't Fred. She just spoke about Fred," said the mother

uneasily. "This is the man that didn't meet them Sunday. Sometimes,"

she complained, "it don't seem like Georgie has any dignity at all!"

She had moved to the china closet at one end of the room, and now stood

staring at it. "What did I come here for?" she asked, helplessly.

"Glasses," prompted Susan, taking some down herself.

"Glasses," Mrs. Lancaster echoed, in relief. "Get the butter, Mary Lou?"

"In the kitchen, Ma." Miss Lancaster went into the kitchen herself, and

Susan went on with the table-setting. Before she had finished, a

boarder or two, against the unwritten law of the house, had come

downstairs. Mrs. Cortelyou, a thin little wisp of a widow, was in the

rocker in the bay-window, Major Kinney, fifty, gray, dried-up, was on

the horsehair sofa, watching the kitchen door over his paper. Georgia,

having finished her telephoning, had come in to drop idly into her own

chair, and play with her knives and forks. Miss Lydia Lord, a plain,

brisk woman, her upper lip darkened with hair, her figure flat and

square, like a boy's, had come down for her sister's tray, and was

talking to Susan in the resolutely cheerful tone that Susan always

found annoying, when she was tired.

"The Keiths are off for Europe again, Susan,--dear me! isn't it lovely

for the people who can do those things!" said Miss Lord, who was

governess in a very wealthy household, and liked to talk of the city's

prominent families. "Some day you and I will have to find a million

dollars and run away for a year in Italy! I wonder, Sue," the mild

banter ceased, "if you could get Mary's dinner? I hate to go into the

kitchen, they're all so busy--"

Susan took the tray, and went through the swinging door, and into the

kitchen. Two or three forms were flitting about in the steam and smoke

and flickering gas-light, water was running, gravy hissing on the

stove; Alice, the one poor servant the establishment boasted, was

attempting to lift a pile of hot plates with an insufficient cloth.

Susan filled her tray silently.

"Anything I can do, Mary Lou?"

"Just get out of the WAY, lovey--that's about all--I salted that once,

Ma. If you don't want that table, Sue--and shut the door, dear! The

smoke--"

Susan was glad to get out of the kitchen, and in a moment Mrs.

Lancaster and Mary Lou came into the dining-room, too, and Alice rang

the dinner bell. Instantly the boarders streamed downstairs, found

their places with a general murmuring of mild little pleasantries. Mrs.

Lancaster helped the soup rapidly from a large tureen, her worried eyes

moved over the table-furnishings without pause.

The soup was well cooled before the place next to Susan was filled by a

tall and muscular young man, with very blue eyes, and a large and

exceptionally charming mouth. The youth had teeth of a dazzling

whiteness, a smile that was a bewildering Irish compound of laughter

and tears, and sooty blue-black hair that fitted his head like a thick

cap. He was a noisy lad, this William Oliver, opinionated, excitable, a

type that in its bigness and broadness seemed almost coarse, sometimes,

but he had all a big man's tenderness and sweetness, and everyone liked

him. Susan and he quarreled with and criticized each other, William

imitating her little affectations of speech and manner, Susan reviling

his transparent and absurd ambitions, but they had been good friends

for years. Young Oliver's mother had been Mrs. Lancaster's housekeeper

for the most prosperous period in the history of the house, and if

Susan naturally felt that the son of a working housekeeper was

seriously handicapped in a social sense, she nevertheless had many

affectionate memories of his mother, as the kindly dignified "Nellie"

who used to amuse them so delightfully on rainy days. Nellie had been

long dead, now, and her son had grown up into a vigorous, enthusiastic

young person, burning his big hands with experiments in physics and

chemistry, reading the Scientific American late into the night, until

his broad shoulders were threatened with a permanent stoop, and his

eager eyes blinked wearily at breakfast, anxious to disprove certain

accepted theories, and as eager to introduce others, unaffected,

irreverent, and irresistibly buoyant. William could not hear an opera

praised without dragging Susan off to gallery seats, which the lady

frankly characterized as "smelly," to see if his opinion agreed with

that of the critics. If it did not, Susan must listen to long

dissertations upon the degeneracy of modern music. His current passion

was the German language, which he was studying in odd moments so that

he might translate certain scientific treatises in a manner more to the

scientific mind.

"Hello, Susan, darling!" he said now, as he slipped into his chair.

"Hello, heart's delight!" Susan answered composedly.

"Well, here--here--here!" said an aged gentleman who was known for no

good reason as "Major," "what's all this? You young folks going to give

us a wedding?"

"Not unless I'm chloroformed first, Major," Susan said, briskly, and

everybody laughed absently at the well-known pleasantry. They were all

accustomed to the absurdity of the Major's question, and far more

absorbed just now in watching the roast, which had just come on.

Another pot-roast. Everybody sighed.

"This isn't just what I meant to give you good people to-night," said

Mrs. Lancaster cheerfully, as she stood up to carve, "but butchers can

be tyrants, as we all know. Mary Lou, put vegetables on that for Mrs.

Cortelyou."

Mary Lou briskly served potatoes and creamed carrots and summer squash;

Susan went down a pyramid of saucers as she emptied a large bowl of

rather watery tomato-sauce.

"Well, they tell us meat isn't good for us anyway!" piped Mrs. Kinney,

who was rheumatic, and always had scrambled eggs for dinner.

"--ELEGANT chicken, capon, probably, and on Sundays, turkey all winter

long!" a voice went on in the pause.

"My father ate meat three times a day, all his life," said Mrs. Parker,

a dark, heavy woman, with an angelic-looking daughter of nineteen

beside her, "and papa lived to be--let me see--"

"Ah, here's Jinny!" Mrs. Lancaster stopped carving to receive the kiss

of a tall, sweet-faced, eye-glassed young woman who came in, and took

the chair next hers. "Your soup's cold, dear," said she tenderly.

Miss Virginia Lancaster looked a little chilly; her eyes, always weak,

were watery now from the sharp evening air, and her long nose red at

the tip. She wore neat, plain clothes, and a small hat, and laid black

lisle gloves and a small black book beside her plate as she sat down.

"Good evening, everybody!" said she, pleasantly. "Late comers mustn't

complain, Ma, dear. I met Mrs. Curry, poor thing, coming out of the

League rooms, and time flew, as time has a way of doing! She was

telling me about Harry," Miss Virginia sighed, peppering her soup

slowly. "He knew he was going," she resumed, "and he left all his

little things--"

"Gracious! A child of seven?" Mrs. Parker said.

"Oh, yes! She said there was no doubt of it."

The conversation turned upon death, and the last acts of the dying.

Loretta Parker related the death of a young saint. Miss Lord, pouring a

little lime water into most of her food, chewed religiously, her eyes

moving from one speaker's face to another.

"I saw my pearl to-day," said William Oliver to Susan, under cover of

the general conversation.

"Eleanor Harkness? Where?"

"On Market Street,--the little darling! Walking with Anna Carroll.

Going to the boat."

"Oh, and how's Anna?"

"Fine, I guess. I only spoke to them for a minute. I wish you could

have seen her dear little laugh--"

"Oh, Billy, you fatuous idiot! It'll be someone else to-morrow."

"It will NOT," said William, without conviction "No, my little treasure

has all my heart--"

"Honestly," said Susan, in fine scorn, "it's cat-sickening to hear you

go on that way! Especially with that snapshot of Anna Carroll still in

your watch!"

"That snapshot doesn't happen to be still in my watch, if it's any

business of yours!" the gentleman said, sweetly.

"Why, it is TOO! Let's see it, then!"

"No, I won't let you see it, but it's not there, just the same."

"Oh, Billy, what an awful lie!"

"Susan!" said Mrs. Lancaster, partly in reproof, partly to call her

niece's attention to apple-pie and tapioca pudding.

"Pudding, please, auntie." Susan subsided, not to break forth again

until the events of the day suddenly rushed into her mind. She hastily

reviewed them for William's benefit.

"Well, what do you care?" he consoled her for the disappointment,

"here's your chance to bone up on the segregating, or crediting, or

whatever you call it."

"Yes, and then have someone else get it!"

"No one else could get it, if you understood it best!" he said

impatiently.

"That shows just about how much you know about the office!" Susan

retorted, vexed at his lack of sympathy. And she returned to her

pudding, with the real cream of the day's news yet untold.

A few moments later Billy was excused, for a struggle with German in

the night school, and departed with a joyous, "Auf wiedersehen,

Fraulein Brown!" to Susan. Such boarders as desired were now drinking

their choice between two dark, cool fluids that might have been tea, or

might have been coffee, or might have been neither.

"I am going a little ahead of you and Georgie, Ma," said Virginia,

rising, "for I want to see Mamie Evans about tickets for Saturday."

"Say, listen, Jin, I'm not going to-night," said Miss Georgie, hastily,

and with a little effort.

"Why, you said you were, Georgie!" the older sister said reproachfully.

"I thought you'd bring Ma."

"Well, I'm not, so you thought wrong!" Georgie responded airily.

"Somebody coming to see you, dear?" asked her mother.

"I don't know--maybe." Miss Georgie got up, brushing the crumbs from

her lap.

"Who is it, dear?" her mother pursued, too casually.

"I tell you it may not be anyone, Ma!" the girl answered, suddenly

irritated. A second later they heard her running upstairs.

"I really ought to be early--I promised Miss Evans--" Virginia murmured.

"Yes, I know, lovey," said her mother. "So you run right along. I'll

just do a few little things here, and come right after you." Virginia

was Mrs. Lancaster's favorite child, now she kissed her warmly. "Don't

get all tired out, my darling!" said she, and when the girl was gone

she added, "Never gives ONE thought to herself!"

"She's an angel!" said Loretta Parker fervently.

"But I kind of hate to have you go down to League Hall alone, Ma," said

Mary Lou, who was piling dishes and straightening the room, with

Susan's help.

"Yes, let us put you on the car," Susan suggested.

"I declare I hate to have you," the older woman hesitated.

"Well, I'll change," Mary Lou sighed wearily. "I'll get right into my

things, a breath of air will do us both good, won't it, Sue?"

Presently they all walked to the McAllister Street car. Susan, always

glad to be out at night, found something at which to stop in every shop

window; she fairly danced along at her cousin's side, on the way back.

"I think Fillmore Street's as gay as Kearney, don't you, Mary Lou?

Don't you just hate to go in. Don't you wish something exciting would

happen?"

"What a girl you are for wanting excitement, Sue. I want to get back

and see that Georgie hasn't shut everyone out of the parlor!" worried

Mary Lou.

They went through the basement door to the dining room, where one or

two old ladies were playing solitaire, on the red table-cloth, under

the gas-light. Susan drew up a chair, and plunged into a new library

book. Mary Lou, returning from a trip upstairs, said noiselessly, "Gone

walking!" and Susan looked properly disgusted at Georgie's lack of

propriety. Mary Lou began a listless game of patience, with a shabby

deck of cards taken from the sideboard drawer, presently she grew

interested, and Susan put aside her book, and began to watch the cards,

too. The old ladies chatted at intervals over their cards. One game

followed another, Mary Lou prefacing each with a firm, "Now, no more

after this one, Sue," and a mention of the time.

It was like many of their evenings, like three hundred evenings a year.

The room grew warm, the gas-lights crept higher and higher, flared

noisily, and were lowered. Mary Lou unfastened her collar, Susan

rumpled her hair. The conversation, always returning to the red king

and the black four-spot, ranged idly here and there. Susan observed

that she must write some letters, and meant to take a hot bath and go

early to bed. But she sat on and on; the cards, by the smallest

percentage of amusement, still held them.

At ten o'clock Mrs. Lancaster and Virginia came in, bright-eyed and

chilly, eager to talk of the lecture. Mrs. Lancaster loosened her coat,

laid aside the miserable little strip of fur she always wore about her

throat, and hung her bonnet, with its dangling widow's veil, over the

back of her deep chair. She drew Susan down to sit on her knee. "All

the baby auntie's got," she said. Georgie presently came downstairs,

her caller, "that fresh kid I met at Sallie's," had gone, and she was

good-natured again. Mary Lou produced the forgotten bag of candy; they

all munched it and talked. The old ladies had gone upstairs long ago.

All conversations led Mrs. Lancaster into the past, the girls could

almost have reconstructed those long-ago, prosperous years, from

hearing her tell of them.

"--Papa fairly glared at the man," she was saying presently, won to an

old memory by the chance meeting of an old friend to-night, "I can see

his face this day! I said, 'Why, papa, I'd JUST as soon have these

rooms!' But, no. Papa had paid for the best, and he was going to have

the best--"

"That was Papa!" laughed his daughters.

"That was Papa!" his widow smiled and sighed. "Well. The first thing I

knew, there was the proprietor,--you may imagine! Papa says, 'Will you

kindly tell me why I have to bring my wife, a delicate, refined

Southern woman--'"

"And he said beautiful, too, Ma!"

Mrs. Lancaster laughed mildly.

"Poor papa! He was so proud of my looks! 'Will you tell me,' he says,

'why I have to put my wife into rooms like these?' 'Sir,' the landlord

says, 'I have only one better suite--'"

"Bridal suite, he said, Ma!"

"Yes, he did. The regular bridal suite. I wasn't a bride then, that was

after poor George was born, but I had a very high color, and I always

dressed very elegantly. And I had a good figure, your father's two

hands could meet around my waist. Anyway, then Papa--dear me, how it

all comes back!--Papa says, fairly shouting, 'Well, why can't I have

that suite?' 'Oh, sir,' the landlord says, 'a Mr. George Lancaster has

engaged that for his wife, and they say that he's a man who WILL get

what he pays for--'" Another mild laugh interrupted the narrative.

"Didn't you nearly DIE, Ma?"

"Well, my dear! If you could have seen the man's face when Papa--and

how well he did this sort of thing, deary me!--whips out a card--"

They all laughed merrily. Then Mrs. Lancaster sighed.

"Poor Papa, I don't know what he would have done if he could have seen

us to-day," she said. "It's just as well we couldn't see ahead, after

all!"

"Gee, but I'd like to see what's coming," Susan said thoughtfully.

"Bed is coming next!" Mary Lou said, putting her arm about the girl.

Upstairs they all filed sleepily, lowering the hall gases as they went.

Susan yawningly kissed her aunt and Virginia good-night, on the second

floor, where they had a dark and rather colorless room together. She

and the other girls went on up to the third-story room, where they

spent nearly another hour in dilatory undressing. Susan hesitated again

over the thought of a hot bath, decided against it, decided against

even the usual brushing of her hair to-night, and sprang into bed to

lie flat on her tired back, watching Mary Lou make up Georgie's bed

with dislocating yawns, and Georgie, wincing as she put her hair into

tight "kids." Susan slept in a small space bounded by the foot of the

bed, the head of the bed, the wall, and her cousin's large person, and,

as Mary Lou generally made the bed in the morning by flapping the

covers back without removing them, they were apt to feel and smell

unaired, and to be rumpled and loose at the foot. Susan could not turn

over in the night without arousing Mary Lou, who would mutter a

terrified "What is it--what is it?" for the next ten minutes. Years

before, Susan, a timid, country-bred child, had awakened many a time in

the night, frightened by the strange city noises, or the fire-bells,

and had lain, with her mouth dry, and her little heart thundering,

through lessening agonies of fright. But she never liked to awake Mary

Lou. Now she was used to the city, and used to the lumpy, ill-made bed

as well; indeed Susan often complained that she fell asleep too fast,

that she wanted to lie awake and think.

But to-night she lay awake for a long time. Susan was at twenty-one no

more than a sweet and sunny child, after all. She had accepted a rather

cheerless destiny with all the extraordinary philosophy and patience of

a child, thankful for small pleasures, enduring small discomforts

gaily. No situation was too hopeless for Susan's laughter, and no

prospect too dark for her bright dreams. Now, to-night for the first

time, the tiny spark of a definite ambition was added to this natural

endowment. She would study the work of the office systematically, she

would be promoted, she would be head girl some day, some day very soon,

and obliged, as head girl, to come in and out of Mr. Peter Coleman's

office constantly. And by the dignity and gravity of her manner, and

her personal neatness, and her entire indifference to his

charms--always neat little cuffs and collars basted in her tailor-made

suit--always in her place on the stroke of half-past eight--

Susan began to get sleepy. She turned over cautiously, and bunched her

pillow comfortably under one cheek. Hazy thoughts wheeled through her

tired brain. Thorny--the man on the dummy--the black king--

CHAPTER III

Among Mrs. Lancaster's reminiscences Susan had heard none more often

than the one in which the first appearance of Billy Oliver and his

mother in the boarding-house was described. Mrs. Oliver had been newly

widowed then, and had the round-faced, square-shouldered little Billy

to support, in a city that was strange and unfriendly. She had gone to

Mrs. Lancaster's intending merely to spend a day or two, until the

right work and the right home for herself and Billy should be found.

"It happened to be a bad time for me," Mrs. Lancaster would say,

recalling the event. "My cook had gone, the house was full, and I had a

quinsy sore throat. But I managed to find her a room, and Alfie and

George carried in a couch for the little boy. She borrowed a broom, I

remember, and cleaned out the I room herself. I explained how things

were with me, and that I ought to have been on my back THEN! She was

the cleanest soul I ever saw, she washed out the very bureau drawers,

and she took the little half-curtain down, it was quite black,--we used

to keep that window open a good deal. Well, and we got to talking, and

she told me about her husband's death, he was a surveyor, and a pretty

clever man, I guess. Poor thing, she burst right out crying--"

"And you kept feeling sicker and sicker, Ma."

"I began to feel worse and worse, yes. And at about four o'clock I sent

Ceely,--you remember Ceely, Mary Lou!--for the doctor. She was getting

dinner--everything was upset!"

"Was that the day I broke the pitchers, Ma?"

"No. That was another day. Well, when the doctor came, he said BED. I

was too wretched then to say boo to a goose, and I simply tumbled in.

And I wasn't out of bed for five weeks!"

"Ma!"

"Not for five weeks. Well. But that first night, somebody knocked at my

door, and who should it be but my little widow! with her nice little

black gown on, and a white apron. She'd brought me some gruel, and she

began to hang up my things and straighten the room. I asked about

dinner, and she said she had helped Ceely and that it was all right.

The relief! And from that moment she took hold, got a new cook, cleaned

house, managed everything! And how she adored that boy! I don't think

that, in the seven years that she was with me, Nellie ever spent an

evening away from him. Poor Nellie! And a witty, sweet woman she was,

too, far above that sort of work. She was taking the public library

examinations when she died. Nellie would have gone a long way. She was

a real little lady. Billy must be more like his father, I imagine."

"Oh, now, Ma!" There was always someone to defend Billy. "Look how good

and steady Billy is!"

"Steady, yes, and a dear, dear boy, as we all know. But--but very

different from what I would wish a son of mine to be!" Mrs. Lancaster

would say regretfully.

Susan agreed with her aunt that it was a great pity that a person of

Billy's intelligence should voluntarily grub away in a dirty iron

foundry all the days of his youth, associating with the commonest types

of laboring men. A clerkship, an agency, a hundred refined employments

in offices would have seemed more suitable, or even a professional

vocation of some sort. But she had in all honesty to admit that

Alfred's disinclination to do anything at all, and Alfred's bad habits,

made Billy's industry and cleanness and temperance a little less

grateful to Mrs. Lancaster than they might otherwise have been.

Alfred tried a great many positions, and lost them all because he could

not work, and could not refrain from drinking. The women of his family

called Alfred nothing more unkind than "unfortunate," and endured the

drunkenness, the sullen aftermath, the depression while a new job was

being found, and Alfie's insufferable complacency when the new job was

found, with tireless patience and gentleness. Mary Lou carried Alfie's

breakfast upstairs to his bed, on Sunday mornings, Mrs. Lancaster often

gave him an early dinner, and hung over him adoringly while he ate it,

because he so hated to dine with the boarders. Susan loaned him money,

Virginia's prayers were all for him, and Georgie laughed at his jokes

and quoted him as if he had been the most model of brothers. How much

they realized of Alfie's deficiencies, how important the matter seemed

to them, even Susan could not guess Mrs. Lancaster majestically forbade

any discussion of Alfie. "Many a boy has his little weakness in early

youth," she said, "Alfie will come out all right!"

She had the same visionary optimism in regarding her daughters'

futures. The girls were all to marry, of course, and marry well, far

above their present station, indeed.

"Somehow I always think of Mary Lou's husband as a prominent officer,

or a diplomat," Mrs. Lancaster would say. "Not necessarily very rich,

but with a comfortable private income. Mary Lou makes friends very

easily, she likes to make a good appearance, she has a very gracious

manner, and with her fine figure, and her lovely neck, she would make a

very handsome mistress for a big home--yes, indeed you would, dear!

Where many a woman would want to run away and hide, Mary Lou would be

quite in her element--"

"Well, one thing," Mary Lou would say modestly, "I'm never afraid to

meet strangers, and, don't you know you've spoken of it, Ma? I never

have any trouble in talking to them. Do you remember that woman in the

grocery that night, Georgie, who said she thought I must have traveled

a great deal, I had such an easy way of speaking? And I'd love to dress

every night for dinner."

"Of course you would!" her mother always said approvingly. "Now,

Georgie," she would pursue, "is different again. Where Mary Lou only

wants the very NICEST people about her, Georgie cares a good deal more

for the money and having a good time!"

"The man I marry has got to make up his mind that I'm going to keep on

the go," Georgie would admit, with an independent toss of her head.

"But you wouldn't marry just for that, dear? Love must come, too."

"Oh, the love would come fast enough, if the money was there!" Georgie

would declare naughtily.

"I don't like to have you say that even in fun, dear! ... Now Jinny,"

and Mrs. Lancaster would shake her head, "sometimes I think Jinny would

be almost too hard upon any man," she would say, lovingly. "There are

mighty few in this world good enough for her. And I would certainly

warn any man," she usually added seriously, "that Jinny is far finer

and more particular than most women. But a good, good man, older than

she, who could give her a beautiful home--"

"I would love to begin, on my wedding-day, to do some beautiful, big,

charitable thing every day," Virginia herself would say eagerly. "I

would like to be known far and wide as a woman of immense charities.

I'd have only one handsome street suit or two, each season, beside

evening dresses, and people would get to know me by sight, and bring

their babies up to me in the street--" Her weak, kind eyes always

watered at the picture.

"But Mama is not ready yet to let you go!" her mother would say

jealously. "We'll hope that Mr. Right will be a long time arriving!"

Then it was Susan's turn.

"And I want some fine, good man to make my Sue happy, some day," her

aunt often said, affectionately. Susan writhed in spirit under the

implication that no fine, good man yet had desired the honor; she had a

girl's desire that her affairs--or the absence of affairs--of the heart

should not be discussed. Susan felt keenly the fact that she had never

had an offer of marriage; her one consolation, in this humiliation, was

that no one but herself could be quite sure of it. Boys had liked her,

confided in her, made her small Christmas presents,--just how other

girls led them from these stages to the moment of a positive

declaration, she often wondered. She knew that she was attractive to

most people; babies and old men and women, servants and her associates

in the office, strangers on ferryboats and sick people in hospitals

alike responded to her friendliness and gaiety. But none of these was

marriageable, of course, and the moment Susan met a person who was, a

subtle change crept over her whole personality, veiled the bright

charm, made the friendliness stiff, the gaiety forced. Susan, like all

other girls, was not herself with the young unmarried men of her

acquaintance; she was too eager to be exactly what they supposedly

wanted her to be. She felt vaguely the utter unnaturalness of this,

without ever being able to analyze it. Her attitude, the attitude of

all her sex, was too entirely false to make an honest analysis

possible. Susan, and her cousins, and the girls in the office, rather

than reveal their secret longings to be married, would have gone

cheerfully to the stake. Nevertheless, all their talk was of men and

marriage, and each girl innocently appraised every man she met, and was

mentally accepting or refusing an offer of marriage from him before she

had known him five minutes.

Susan viewed the single state of her three pretty cousins with secret

uneasiness. Georgie always said that she had refused "dozens of

fellows," meeting her mother's occasional mild challenge of some

specific statement with an unanswerable "of course you didn't know, for

I never told you, Ma." And Virginia liked to bemoan the fact that so

many nice men seemed inclined to fall in love with herself, a girl who

gave absolutely no thought to such things at all. Mrs. Lancaster

supported Virginia's suspicions by memories of young men who had

suddenly and mysteriously appeared, to ask her to accept them as

boarders, and young attorneys who had their places in church changed to

the pews that surrounded the Lancaster pew. But Susan dismissed these

romantic vapors, and in her heart held Mary Lou in genuine admiration,

because Mary Lou had undoubtedly and indisputably had a real lover,

years ago.

Mary Lou loved to talk of Ferd Eastman still; his youth, his manly

charms, his crossing an empty ball-room floor, on the memorable evening

of their meeting, especially to be introduced to her, and to tell her

that brown hair was his favorite color for hair. After that the

memories, if still fondly cherished, were less bright. Mary Lou had

been "perfectly wretched," she had "cried for nights and nights" at the

idea of leaving Ma; Ma had fainted frequently. "Ma made it really hard

for me," said Mary Lou. Ma was also held to blame for not reconciling

the young people after the first quarrel. Ma might have sent for Ferd.

Mary Lou, of course, could do nothing but weep.

Poor Mary Lou's weeping soon had good cause. Ferd rushed away, rushed

into another marriage, with an heiress and a beauty, as it happened,

and Mary Lou had only the dubious consolation of a severe illness.

After that, she became cheerful, mild, unnecessary Mary Lou, doing a

little bit of everything about the house, appreciated by nobody. Ferd

and his wife were the great people of their own little town, near

Virginia City, and after a while Mary Lou had several pictures of their

little boy to treasure,--Robbie with stiff curls falling over a lace

collar, and plaid kilts, in a swing, and Robbie in velvet

knickerbockers, on a velocipede.

The boarding-house had a younger affair than Mary Lou's just now in the

attachment felt for lovely Loretta Parker by a young Mission doctor,

Joseph O'Connor. Susan did not admire the gentleman very much, with his

well-trimmed little beard, and his throaty little voice, but she could

not but respect the dreamy and indifferent Loretta for his

unquestionable ardor. Loretta wanted to enter a convent, to her

mother's bitter anguish, and Susan once convulsed Georgie by the remark

that she thought Joe O'Connor would make a cute nun, himself.

"But think of sacrificing that lovely beard!" said Georgie.

"Oh, you and I could treasure it, Georgie! Love's token, don't you

know?"

Loretta's affair was of course extremely interesting to everyone at

Mrs. Lancaster's, as were the various "cases" that Georgie continually

talked of, and the changing stream of young men that came to see her

night after night. But also interesting were all the other lives that

were shut up here together, the varied forms which sickness and

money-trouble can take for the class that has not learned to be poor.

Little pretenses, timid enjoyments and mild extravagances were all

overshadowed by a poverty real enough to show them ever more shadowy

than they were. Susan grew up in an atmosphere where a lost pair of

overshoes, or a dentist's bill, or a counterfeit half-dollar, was a

real tragedy. She was well used to seeing reddened eyes, and hearing

resigned sighs at the breakfast table, without ever knowing what little

unforeseen calamity had caused them. Every door in the dark hallways

shut in its own little story of suffering and privation. Susan always

thought of second-floor alcoved bedrooms as filled with the pungent

fumes of Miss Beattie's asthma powder, and of back rooms as redolent of

hot kerosene and scorched woolen, from the pressing of old Mr. Keane's

suits, by Mrs. Keane. She could have identified with her eyes shut any

room in the house. A curious chilliness lurked in the halls, from

August to May, and an odor compounded of stale cigarette smoke, and

carbolic acid, and coal-gas, and dust.

Those women in the house who did not go to business every day generally

came down to the breakfast table very much as they rose from bed. Limp

faded wrappers and "Juliet" slippers were the only additions made to

sleeping wear. The one or two men of the house, with Susan and Jane

Beattie and Lydia Lord, had breakfasted and gone long before these

ladies drifted downstairs. Sometimes Mrs. Parker and Loretta made an

early trip to Church, but even then they wore only long cloaks over

very informal attire, and joined the others, in wrappers, upon their

return.

Loitering over coffee and toast, in the sunny dining-room, the morning

wasted away. The newspapers were idly discussed, various scraps of the

house gossip went the rounds. Many a time, before her entrance into the

business world, Susan had known this pleasant idleness to continue

until ten o'clock, until eleven o'clock, while the room, between the

stove inside and the winter sunshine outside, grew warmer and warmer,

and the bedrooms upstairs waited in every stage of appalling disorder

and confusion.

Nowadays Susan ran downstairs just before eight o'clock, to gulp down

her breakfast, with one eye on the clock. The clatter of a cable car

passing the corner meant that Susan had just time to pin on her hat,

seize her gloves and her lunch, and catch the next cable-car. She

flashed through the dreary little entrance yard, past other yards, past

the bakery, and took her seat on the dummy breathless with her hurry,

exhilarated by the morning freshness of the air, and filled with happy

expectation for the new day.

On the Monday morning that Mr. Peter Coleman made his appearance as a

member of the Front Office staff, Susan Brown was the first girl to

reach the office. This was usually the case, but to-day Susan,

realizing that the newcomer would probably be late, wished that she had

the shred of an excuse to be late herself, to have an entrance, as it

were. Her plain suit had been well brushed, and the coat was

embellished by a fresh, dainty collar and wide cuffs of white linen.

Susan had risen early to wash and press these, and they were very

becoming to her fresh, unaffected beauty. But they must, of course, be

hung in the closet, and Susan, taking her place at her desk, looked

quite as usual, except for the spray of heliotrope pinned against her

lavender shirtwaist.

The other girls were earlier than was customary, there was much

laughing and chatting as desks were dusted, and inkwells filled for the

day. Susan, watching soberly from her corner, saw that Miss Cottle was

wearing her best hat, that Miss Murray had on the silk gown she usually

saved for Saturdays, that Thorny's hair was unusually crimped and

puffed, and that the Kirks were wearing coquettish black silk aprons,

with pink and blue bows. Susan's face began to burn. Her hand

unobtrusively stole to her heliotrope, which fell, a moment later, a

crushed little fragrant lump, into her waste-basket. Presently she went

into the coat closet.

"Remind me to take these to the French Laundry at noon," said Susan,

pausing before Thorny's desk, on her way back to her own, with a tight

roll of linen in her hand. "I left 'em on my coat from yesterday.

They're filthy."

"Sure, but why don't you do 'em yourself, Susan, and save your two

bits?"

"Well, maybe I will. I usually do." Susan yawned.

"Still sleepy?"

"Dying for sleep. I went with my cousin to St. Mary's last night, to

hear that Mission priest. He's a wonder."

"Not for me! I've not been inside a church for years. I had my friend

last night. Say, Susan, has he come?"

"Has who come?"

"Oh, you go to, Susan! Young Coleman."

"Oh, sure!" Susan's eyes brightened intelligently. "That's so, he was

coming down to-day, wasn't he?"

"Girls," said Miss Thornton, attracting the attention of the entire

room, "what do you know about Susan Brown's trying to get away with it

that she's forgotten about Peter Coleman!"

"Oh, Lord, what a bluff!" somebody said, for the crowd.

"I don't see why it's a bluff," said Susan hardily, back at her own

desk, and turning her light on, full above her bright, innocent face.

"I intended to wear my grandfather's gray uniform and my aunt's widow's

veil to make an impression on him, and you see I didn't!"

"Oh, Susan, you're awful!" Miss Thornton said, through the general

shocked laughter. "You oughtn't say things like that," Miss Garvey

remonstrated. "It's awful bad luck. Mamma had a married cousin in

Detroit and she put on a widow's veil for fun--"

At ten o'clock a flutter went through the office. Young Mr. Coleman was

suddenly to be seen, standing beside Mr. Brauer at his high desk. He

was exceptionally big and broad, handsome and fresh looking, with a

look of careful grooming and dressing that set off his fine head and

his fine hands; he wore a very smart light suit, and carried well the

affectation of lavender tie and handkerchief and hose, and an opal

scarf-pin.

He seemed to be laughing a good deal over his new work, but finally sat

down to a pile of bills, and did not interrupt Mr. Brauer after that

oftener than ten times a minute. Susan met his eye, as she went along

the deck, but he did not remember her, or was too confused to recognize

her among the other girls, and they did not bow. She was very

circumspect and very dignified for a week or two, always busy when

Peter Coleman came into Front Office, and unusually neat in appearance.

Miss Murray sat next to him on the car one morning, and they chatted

for fifteen minutes; Miss Thornton began to quote him now and then;

Miss Kirk, as credit clerk, spent at least a morning a week in Mr.

Brauer's office, three feet away from Mr. Coleman, and her sister

tripped in there now and then on real or imagined errands.

But Susan bided her time. And one afternoon, late in October, returning

early to the office, she found Mr. Coleman loitering disconsolately

about the deck.

"Excuse me, Miss Brown," said he, clearing his throat. He had, of

course, noticed this busy, absorbed young woman.

Susan stopped, attentive, unsmiling.

"Brauer," complained the young man, "has gone off and locked my hat in

his office. I can't go to lunch."

"Why didn't you walk through Front Office?" said Susan, leading the way

so readily and so sedately, that the gentleman was instantly put in the

position of having addressed her on very slight provocation.

"This inner door is always unlocked," she explained, with maternal

gentleness.

Peter Coleman colored.

"I see--I am a bally ass!" he said, laughing.

"You ought to know," Susan conceded politely. And suddenly her dimples

were in view, her blue eyes danced as they met his, and she laughed too.

This was a rare opportunity, the office was empty, Susan knew she

looked well, for she had just brushed her hair and powdered her nose.

She cast about desperately in her mind for something--anything!--to

keep the conversation going. She had often thought of the words in

which she would remind him of their former meeting.

"Don't think I'm quite as informal as this, Mr. Coleman, you and I have

been properly introduced, you know! I'm not entirely flattered by

having you forget me so completely, Mr. Coleman!"

Before she could choose either form, he said it himself.

"Say, look here, look here--didn't my uncle introduce us once, on a

car, or something? Doesn't he know your mother?"

"My mother's dead," said Susan primly. But so irresistible was the well

of gaiety bubbling up in her heart that she made the statement mirthful.

"Oh, gosh, I do beg your pardon--" the man stammered. They both,

although Susan was already ashamed of herself, laughed violently again.

"Your uncle knows my aunt," she said presently, coldly and unsmilingly.

"That's it," he said, relieved. "Quite a French sentence, 'does the

uncle know the aunt'?" he grinned.

"Or 'Has the governess of the gardener some meat and a pen'?" gurgled

Susan. And again, and more merrily, they laughed together.

"Lord, didn't you hate French?" he asked confidentially.

"Oh, HATE it!" Susan had never had a French lesson.

There was a short pause--a longer pause. Suddenly both spoke.

"I beg your pardon--?"

"No, you. You were first."

"Oh, no, you. What were you going to say?"

"I wasn't going to say anything. I was just going to say--I was going

to ask how that pretty, motherly aunt of yours is,--Mrs. Baxter?"

"Aunt Clara. Isn't she a peach? She's fine." He wanted to keep talking,

too, it was obvious. "She brought me up, you know." He laughed

boyishly. "Not that I'd want you to hold that against her, or anything

like that!"

"Oh, she'll live that down!" said Susan.

That was all. But when Peter Colernan went on his way a moment later he

was still smiling, and Susan walked to her desk on air.

The office seemed a pleasant place to be that afternoon. Susan began

her work with energy and interest, the light falling on her bright

hair, her fingers flying. She hummed as she worked, and one or two

other girls hummed with her.

There was rather a musical atmosphere in Front Office; the girls

without exception kept in touch with the popular music of the day, and

liked to claim a certain knowledge of the old classics as well. Certain

girls always hummed certain airs, and no other girl ever usurped them.

Thus Thorny vocalized the "Spring Song," when she felt particularly

cheerful, and to Miss Violet Kirk were ceded all rights to Carmen's own

solos in "Carmen." Susan's privilege included "The Rosary" and the

little Hawaiian fare-well, "Aloha aoi." After the latter Thorny never

failed to say dreamily, "I love that song!" and Susan to mutter

surprisedly, "I didn't know I was humming it!"

All the girls hummed the Toreador's song, and the immediate favorites

of the hour, "Just Because She Made Those Goo-Goo Eyes," and "I Don't

Know Why I Love You but I Do," and "Hilee-Hilo" and "The Mosquito

Parade." Hot discussions as to the merits of various compositions

arose, and the technique of various singers.

"Yes, Collamarini's dramatic, and she has a good natural voice," Miss

Thornton would admit, "but she can't get AT it."

Or, "That's all very well," Miss Cottle would assert boldly, "but

Salassa sings better than either Plancon or de Reszke. I'm not saying

this myself, but a party that KNOWS told me so."

"Probably the person who told you so had never heard them," Miss

Thornton would say, bringing the angry color to Miss Cottle's face, and

the angry answer:

"Well, if I could tell you who it IS, you'd feel pretty small!"

Susan had small respect for the other girls' opinions, and almost as

little for her own. She knew how ignorant she was. But she took to

herself what credit accrued to general quoting, quoting from

newspapers, from her aunt's boarders, from chance conversations

overheard on the cars.

"Oh, Puccini will never do anything to TOUCH Bizet!" Susan asserted

firmly. Or, "Well, we'd be fighting Spain still if it wasn't for

McKinley!" Or, "My grandmother had three hundred slaves, and slavery

worked perfectly well, then!" If challenged, she got very angry. "You

simply are proving that you don't know anything about it!" was Susan's

last, and adequate, answer to questioners.

But as a rule she was not challenged. Some quality in Susan set her

apart from the other girls, and they saw it as she did. It was not that

she was richer, or prettier, or better born, or better educated, than

any or all of them. But there was some sparkling, bubbling quality

about her that was all her own. She read, and assimilated rather than

remembered what she read, adopted this little affectation in speech,

this little nicety of manner. She glowed with varied and absurd

ambitions, and took the office into her confidence about them. Wavering

and incomplete as her aunt's influence had been, one fact had early

been impressed upon her; she was primarily and absolutely a "lady."

Susan's forebears had really been rather ordinary folk, improvident and

carefree, enjoying prosperity when they had it with the uneducated,

unpractical serenity of the Old South, shiftless and lazy and unhappy

in less prosperous times.

But she thought of them as most distinguished and accomplished

gentlefolk, beautiful women environed by spacious estates, by exquisite

old linen and silver and jewels, and dashing cavaliers rising in gay

gallantry alike to the conquest of feminine hearts, or to their

country's defense. She bore herself proudly, as became their

descendants. She brought the gaze of her honest blue eyes frankly to

all the other eyes in the world, a lady was unembarrassed in the

presence of her equals, a lady was always gracious to her inferiors.

Her own father had been less elevated in rank than his wife, yet Susan

could think of him with genuine satisfaction. He was only a vague

memory to her now, this bold heart who had challenged a whole family's

opposition, a quarter of a century before, and carried off Miss Sue

Rose Ralston, whose age was not quite half his forty years, under her

father's very eyes.

When Susan was born, four years later, the young wife was still

regarded by her family as an outcast. But even the baby Susan, growing

happily old enough to toddle about in the Santa Barbara rose-garden

that sheltered the still infatuated pair, knew that Mother was

supremely indifferent to the feeling toward her in any heart but one.

Martin Brown was an Irishman, and a writer of random essays. His

position on a Los Angeles daily newspaper kept the little family in

touch with just the people they cared to see, and, when the husband and

father was found dead at his desk one day, with his wife's picture over

the heart that had suddenly and simply ceased to serve him, there were

friends all about to urge the beautiful widow to take up at least a

part of his work, in the old environment.

But Sue Rose was not quite thirty, and still girlish, and shrinking,

and helpless. Beside, there was Lou's house to go to, and five thousand

dollars life insurance, and three thousand more from the sale of the

little home, to meet the immediate need. So Susan and her mother came

up to Mrs. Lancaster, and had a very fine large room together, and

became merged in the older family. And the eight thousand dollars

lasted a long time, it was still paying little bills, and buying

birthday presents, and treating Alfie to a "safety bicycle," and Mary

Lou to dancing lessons when, on a wet afternoon in her thirteenth

summer, little Susan Brown came in from school to find that Mother was

very ill.

"Just an ugly, sharp pain, ducky, don't look so scared!" said Mother,

smiling gallantly, but writhing under the bed covers. "Dr. Forsythe has

been here, and it's nothing at all. Ah-h-h!" said Mother, whimsically,

"the poor little babies! They go through this, and we laugh at them,

and call it colic! Never-laugh-at-another-baby, Sue! I shan't. You'd

better call Auntie, dear. This--this won't do."

A day or two later there was talk of an operation. Susan was told very

little of it. Long afterward she remembered with certain resentment the

cavalier manner in which her claims were dismissed. Her mother went to

the hospital, and two days later, when she was well over the

wretchedness of the ether, Susan went with Mary Lou to see her, and

kissed the pale, brave little face, sunk in the great white pillows.

"Home in no time, Sue!" her mother said bravely.

But a few days later something happened, Susan was waked from sleep,

was rushed to the hospital again, was pressed by some unknown hand into

a kneeling position beside a livid and heavily breathing creature whom

she hardly recognized as her mother. It was all confusing and

terrifying; it was over very soon. Susan came blinking out of the dimly

lighted room with Mary Lou, who was sobbing, "Oh, Aunt Sue Rose! Aunt

Sue Rose!" Susan did not cry, but her eyes hurt her, and the back of

her head ached sharply.

She cried later, in the nights, after her cousins had seemed to be

unsympathetic, feeling that she needed her mother to take her part. But

on the whole the cousins were devoted and kind to Susan, and the child

was as happy as she could have been anywhere. But her restless ambition

forced her into many a discontented hour, as she grew, and when an

office position was offered her Susan was wild with eagerness to try

her own feet.

"I can't bear it!" mourned her aunt, "why can't you stay here happily

with us, lovey? My own girls are happy. I don't know what has gotten

into you girls lately, wanting to rush out like great, coarse men! Why

can't you stay at home, doing all the little dainty, pretty things that

only a woman can do, to make a home lovely?"

"Don't you suppose I'd much RATHER not work?" Susan demanded

impatiently. "I can't have you supporting me, Auntie. That's it."

"Well, if that's it, that's nonsense, dear. As long as Auntie lives all

she asks is to keep a comfortable home for her girls."

"Why, Sue, you'll be implying that we all ought to have taken horrid

office positions," Virginia said, in smiling warning.

Susan remained mutinously silent.

"Have you any fault to find with Auntie's provision for you, dear?"

asked Mrs. Lancaster, patiently.

"Oh, NO, auntie! That's not it AT ALL!" Susan protested, "it's just

simply that I--I can't--I need money, sometimes--" She stopped,

miserably.

"Come, now!" Mrs. Lancaster, all sweet tolerance of the vagary, folded

her hands to await enlightenment. "Come, now! Tell auntie what you need

money for. What is this special great need?"

"No one special thing, auntie--" Susan was anything but sure of her

ground. As a matter of fact she did not want to work at all, she merely

felt a frantic impulse to do something else than settle down for life

as Mary Lou and Virginia and Georgie had done. "But clothes cost

money," she pursued vaguely.

"What sort of a gown did you want, dear?" Mrs. Lancaster reached for

her shabby purse. Susan refused the gift of a gown with many kisses,

and no more was said for a while of her working.

This was in her seventeenth summer. For more than a year after that she

drifted idly, reading a great many romantic novels, and wishing herself

a young actress, a lone orphan, the adored daughter of an invalid

father or of a rich and adoring mother, the capable, worshiped oldest

sister in a jolly big family, a lovely cripple in a bright hospital

ward, anything, in short, except what she was.

Then came the offer of a position in Front Office, and Susan took it on

her own responsibility, and resigned herself to her aunt's anger. This

was a most unhappy time for all concerned.

But it was all over now. Auntie rebeled no more, she accepted the fact

as she had accepted other unwelcome facts in her life. And soon Susan's

little salary came to be depended upon by the family; it was not much,

but it did pay a gas or a laundry bill, it could be "borrowed" for the

slippers Georgie must have in a hurry, or the ticket that should carry

Alfie to Sacramento or Stockton for his new job. Virginia wondered if

Sue would lend her two dollars for the subscription to the "Weekly

Era," or asked, during the walk to church, if Susan had "plate-money"

for two? Mary Lou used Susan's purse as her own. "I owe you a dollar,

Sue," she would observe carelessly, "I took it yesterday for the

cleaner."

Or, on their evening walks, Mary Lou would glance in the candy-store

window. "My! Don't those caramels look delicious! This is my treat,

now, remind me to give it back to you." "Oh, Ma told me to get eggs,"

she would remember suddenly, a moment later. "I'll have to ask you to

pay for them, dearie, until we get home."

Susan never was repaid these little loans. She could not ask it. She

knew very well that none of the girls ever had a cent given her except

for some definite and unavoidable purchase. Her aunt never spent money.

They lived in a continual and agonizing shortage of coin.

Lately, however, Susan had determined that if her salary were raised

she would save the extra money, and not mention the fact of the raise

at home. She wanted a gray feather boa, such as Peter Coleman's girl

friends wore. It would cost twenty dollars, but what beauty and

distinction it lent to the simplest costume!

Since young Mr. Coleman's appearance in Front Office certain young

girls very prominent in San Francisco society found various reasons for

coming down, in mid-afternoon, to the establishment of Hunter, Baxter &

Hunter, for a chat with old Mr. Baxter, who appeared to be a great

favorite with all girls. Susan, looking down through the glass walls of

Front Office, would suddenly notice the invasion of flowered hats and

smart frocks, and of black and gray and white feather-boas, such as her

heart desired. She did not consciously envy these girls, but she felt

that, with their advantages, she would have been as attractive as any,

and a boa seemed the first step in the desired direction. She always

knew it when Mr. Baxter sent for Peter, and generally managed to see

him as he stood laughing and talking with his friends, and when he saw

them to their carriages. She would watch him wistfully when he came

upstairs, and be glad when he returned briskly to his work, as if the

interruption had meant very little to him after all.

One day, when a trio of exquisitely pretty girls came to carry him off

bodily, at an early five o'clock, Miss Thornton came up the office to

Susan's desk. Susan, who was quite openly watching the floor below,

turned with a smile, and sat down in her place.

"S'listen, Susan," said Miss Thornton, leaning on the desk, "are you

going to the big game?"

"I don't know," said Susan, suddenly wild to go.

"Well, I want to go," pursued Miss Thornton, "but Wally's in Los

Angeles." Wally was Miss Thornton's "friend."

"What would it cost us, Thorny?"

"Two-fifty."

"Gosh," said Susan thoughtfully. The big intercollegiate game was not

to be seen for nothing. Still, it was undoubtedly THE event of the

sporting year.

"Hat come?" asked Thorny.

"Ye-es." Susan was thinking. "Yes, and she's made it look lovely," she

admitted. She drew a sketch of a little face on her scratch pad. "Who's

that?" asked Miss Thornton, interestedly. "Oh, no one!" Susan said, and

scratched it out.

"Oh, come on, Susan, I'm dying to go!" said the tempter.

"We need a man for that, Thorny. There's an awful crowd."

"Not if we go early enough. They say it's going to be the closest YET.

Come on!"

"Thorny, honest, I oughtn't to spend the money," Susan persisted.

"S'listen, Susan." Miss Thornton spoke very low, after a cautious

glance about her. "Swear you won't breathe this!"

"Oh, honestly I won't!"

"Wait a minute. Is Elsie Kirk there?" asked Miss Thornton. Susan

glanced down the office.

"Nope. She's upstairs, and Violet's in Brauer's office. What is it?"

"Well, say, listen. Last night--" began Miss Thornton, impressively,

"Last night I and Min and Floss and Harold Clarke went into the Techau

for supper, after the Orpheum show. Well, after we got seated--we had a

table way at the back--I suddenly noticed Violet Kirk, sitting in one

of those private alcoves, you know--?"

"For Heaven's sake!" said Susan, in proper horror.

"Yes. And champagne, if you please, all as bold as life! And all

dressed up, Susan, I wish you could have seen her! Well. I couldn't see

who she was with--"

"A party?"

"A party--no! One man."

"Oh, Thorny--" Susan began to be doubtful, slowly shook her head.

"But I tell you I SAW her, Sue! And listen, that's not all. We sat

there and sat there, an hour I guess, and she was there all that time.

And when she got up to go, Sue, I saw the man. And who do you suppose

it was?"

"Do I know him?" A sick premonition seized Susan, she felt a stir of

agonizing jealousy at her heart. "Peter Coleman?" she guessed, with

burning cheeks. "Peter Coleman! That kid! No, it was Mr. Phil!"

"Mr. Phil HUNTER!" But, through all her horror, Susan felt the warm

blood creep back to her heart.

"Sure."

"But--but Thorny, he's married!"

Miss Thornton shrugged her shoulders, and pursed her lips, as one well

accustomed, if not reconciled, to the wickedness of the world.

"So now we know how she can afford a velvet tailor-made and ostrich

plumes," said she. Susan shrank in natural cleanness of heart, from the

ugliness of it.

"Ah, don't say such things, Thorny!" she said. Her brows contracted.

"His wife enjoying Europe!" she mused. "Can you beat it?"

"I think it's the limit," said Miss Thornton virtuously, "and I think

old J. B. would raise the roof. But anyway, it shows why she got the

crediting."

"Oh, Thorny, I can't BELIEVE it! Perhaps she doesn't realize how it

looks!"

"Violet Hunter!" Thorny said, with fine scorn. "Now you mark my words,

Susan, it won't last--things like this don't--"

"But--but don't they sometimes last, for years?" Susan asked, a little

timidly, yet wishing to show some worldly wisdom, too.

"Not like her, there's nothing TO her," said the sapient Miss Thornton.

"No. You'll be doing that work in a few months, and getting forty. So

come along to the big game, Sue."

"Well--" Susan half-promised. But the big game was temporarily lost

sight of in this horrid news of Violet Kirk. Susan watched Miss Kirk

during the remainder of the afternoon, and burst out with the whole

story, to Mary Lou, when they went out to match a piece of tape that

night.

"Dear me, Ma would hate to have you coming in contact with things like

that, Sue!" worried Mary Lou. "I wonder if Ma would miss us if we took

the car out to the end of the line? It's such a glorious night!

Let's,--if you have carfare. No, Sue, it's easy enough to rob a girl of

her good name. There were some people who came to the house once, a man

and his wife. Well, I suppose I was ordinarily polite to the man, as I

am to all men, and once or twice he brought me candy--but it never

entered my head--"

It was deliciously bracing to go rushing on, on the car, past the

Children's Hospital, past miles of sandhills, out to the very shore of

the ocean, where the air was salt, and filled with the dull roaring of

surf. Mary Lou, sharing with her mother a distaste for peanuts, crowds,

tin-type men, and noisy pleasure-seekers, ignored Susan's hints that

they walk down to the beach, and they went back on the same car.

When they entered the close, odorous dining-room, an hour later,

Georgie, lazily engaged with Fan-tan, had a piece of news.

"Susan, you sly thing! He's adorable!" said Georgie.

"Who?" said Susan, taking a card from her cousin's hand. Dazedly she

read it. "Mr. Peter Coleman."

"Did he call?" she asked, her heart giving a great bound.

"Did he call? With a perfect heart-breaker of a puppy--!"

"London Baby," Susan said, eagerly.

"He was airing the puppy, he SAID" Georgie added archly.

"One excuse as well as another!" Mary Lou laughed delightedly as she

kissed Susan's glowing cheek.

"He wouldn't come in," continued Georgie, "which was really just as

well, for Loretta and her prize idiot were in the parlor, and I

couldn't have asked him down here. Well, he's a darling. You have my

blessing, Sue."

"It's manners to wait until you're axed," Susan said demurely. But her

heart sang. She had to listen to a little dissertation upon the joys of

courtship, when she and Mary Lou were undressing, a little later,

tactfully concealing her sense of the contrast between their two

affairs.

"It's a happy, happy time," said Mary Lou, sighing, as she spread the

two halves of a shabby corset upon the bed, and proceeded to insert a

fresh lacing between them. "It takes me back to the first time Ferd

called upon me, but I was younger than you are, of course, Sue. And

Ferd--!" she laughed proudly, "Do you think you could have sent Ferd

away with an excuse? No, sir, he would have come in and waited until

you got home, poor Ferd! Not but what I think Peter--" He was already

Peter!--"did quite the correct thing! And I think I'm going to like

him, Sue, if for no other reason than that he had the sense to be

attracted to a plainly-dressed, hard-working little mouse like my Sue--"

"His grandfather ran a livery stable!" said Susan, smarting under the

role of the beggar maiden.

"Ah, well, there isn't a girl in society to-day who wouldn't give her

eyes to get him!" said Mary Lou wisely. And Susan secretly agreed.

She was kept out of bed by the corset-lacing, and so took a bath

to-night and brushed and braided her hair. Feeling refreshed in body

and spirit by these achievements, she finally climbed into bed, and

drifted off upon a sea of golden dreams. Georgie's teasing and Mary

Lou's inferences might be all nonsense, still, he HAD come to see her,

she had that tangible fact upon which to build a new and glorious

castle in Spain.

Thanksgiving broke dull and overcast, there was a spatter of rain on

the sidewalk, as Susan loitered over her late holiday breakfast, and

Georgie, who was to go driving that afternoon with an elderly admirer,

scolded violently over her coffee and rolls. No boarders happened to be

present. Mrs. Lancaster and Virginia were to go to a funeral, and dwelt

with a sort of melancholy pleasure upon the sad paradox of such an

event on such a day. Mary Lou felt a little guilty about not attending

the funeral, but she was responsible for the roasting of three great

turkeys to-day, and could not be spared. Mrs. Lancaster had stuffed the

fowls the night before.

"I'll roast the big one from two o'clock on," said Mary Lou, "and give

the little ones turn and turn about. The oven won't hold more than two."

"I'll be home in time to make the pudding sauce," her mother said, "but

open it early, dear, so that it won't taste tinny. Poor Hardings! A

sad, sad Thanksgiving for them!" And Mrs. Lancaster sighed. Her hair

was arranged in crisp damp scallops under her best bonnet and veil, and

she wore the heavy black skirt of her best suit. But her costume was

temporarily completed by a light kimono.

"We'll hope it's a happy, happy Thanksgiving for dear Mr. Harding, Ma,"

Virginia said gently.

"I know, dear," her mother said, "but I'm not like you, dear. I'm

afraid I'm a very poor, weak, human sort!"

"Rotten day for the game!" grumbled Susan.

"Oh, it makes me so darn mad!" Georgie added, "here I've been working

that precious idiot for a month up to the point where he would take his

old horse out, and now look at it!"

Everyone was used to Georgie's half-serious rages, and Mrs. Lancaster

only smiled at her absently.

"But you won't attempt to go to the game on a day like this!" she said

to Susan.

"Not if it pours," Susan agreed disconsolately.

"You haven't wasted your good money on a ticket yet, I hope, dear?"

"No-o," Susan said, wishing that she had her two and a half dollars

back. "That's just the way of it!" she said bitterly to Billy, a little

later. "Other girls can get up parties for the game, and give dinners

after it, and do everything decently! I can't even arrange to go with

Thorny, but what it has to rain!"

"Oh, cheer up," the boy said, squinting down the barrel of the rifle he

was lovingly cleaning. "It's going to be a perfect day! I'm going to

the game myself. If it rains, you and I'll go to the Orpheum mat., what

do you say?"

"Well--" said Susan, departing comforted. And true to his prediction

the sky really did clear at eleven o'clock, and at one o'clock, Susan,

the happiest girl in the world, walked out into the sunny street, in

her best hat and her best gown, her prettiest embroidered linen collar,

her heavy gold chain, and immaculate new gloves.

How could she possibly have hesitated about it, she wondered, when she

came near the ball-grounds, and saw the gathering crowds; tall young

men, with a red carnation or a shaggy great yellow chrysanthemum in

their buttonholes; girls in furs; dancingly impatient small boys, and

agitated and breathless chaperones. And here was Thorny, very pretty in

her best gown, with a little unusual and unnatural color on her cheeks,

and Billy Oliver, who would watch the game from the "dollar section,"

providentially on hand to help them through the crowd, and buy Susan a

chrysanthemum as a foil to Thorny's red ribbons. The damp cool air was

sweet with violets; a delightful stir and excitement thrilled the

moving crowd. Here was the gate. Tickets? And what a satisfaction to

produce them, and enter unchallenged into the rising roadway, leaving

behind a line of jealously watching and waiting people. With Billy's

help the seats were easily found, "the best seats on the field," said

Susan, in immense satisfaction, as she settled into hers. She and

Thorny were free to watch the little tragedies going on all about them,

people in the wrong seats, and people with one ticket too few.

Girls and young men--girls and young men--girls and young men--streamed

in the big gateways, and filed about the field. Susan envied no one

to-day, her heart was dancing. There was a racy autumnal tang in the

air, laughter and shouting. The "rooters" were already in place, their

leader occasionally leaped into the air like a maniac, and conducted a

"yell" with a vigor that needed every muscle of his body.

And suddenly the bleachers went mad and the air fluttered with banners,

as the big teams rushed onto the field. The players, all giants they

looked, in their clumsy, padded suits, began a little practice play

desperately and violently. Susan could hear the quarter's voice clear

and sharp, "Nineteen-four-eighty-eight!"

"Hello, Miss Brown!" said a voice at her knee. She took her eyes from

the field. Peter Coleman, one of a noisy party, was taking the seat

directly in front of her.

"Well!" she said, gaily, "be you a-follering of me, or be I a-follering

of you?"

"I don't know!--How do you do, Miss Thornton!" Peter said, with his

delighted laugh. He drew to Susan the attention of a stout lady in

purple velvet, beside him. "Mrs. Fox--Miss Brown," said he, "and Miss

Thornton--Mrs. Fox."

"Mrs. Fox," said Susan, pleasantly brief.

"Miss Brown," said Mrs. Fox, with a wintry smile.

"Pleased to meet any friend of Mr. Coleman's, I'm sure," Thorny said,

engagingly.

"Miss Thornton," Mrs. Fox responded, with as little tone as is possible

to the human voice.

After that the newcomers, twelve or fourteen in all, settled into their

seats, and a moment later everyone's attention was riveted on the

field. The men were lining up, big backs bent double, big arms hanging

loose, like the arms of gorillas. Breathless attention held the big

audience silent and tense.

"Don't you LOVE it?" breathed Susan, to Thorny.

"Crazy about it!" Peter Coleman answered her, without turning.

It was a wonderful game that followed. Susan never saw another that

seemed to her to have the same peculiar charm. Between halves, Peter

Coleman talked almost exclusively to her, and they laughed over the

peanuts that disappeared so fast.

The sun slipped down and down the sky, and the air rose chilly and

sweet from the damp earth. It began to grow dark. Susan began to feel a

nervous apprehension that somehow, in leaving the field, she and Thorny

would become awkwardly involved in Mrs. Fox's party, would seem to be

trying to include themselves in this distinguished group.

"We've got to rush," she muttered, buttoning up her coat.

"Oh, what's your hurry?" asked Thorny, who would not have objected to

the very thing Susan dreaded.

"It's so dark!" Susan said, pushing ahead. They were carried by the

crowd through the big gates, out to the street. Lights were beginning

to prick through the dusk, a long line of street cars was waiting,

empty and brightly lighted. Suddenly Susan felt a touch on her shoulder.

"Lord, you're in a rush!" said Peter Coleman, pushing through the crowd

to join them. He was somehow dragging Mrs. Fox with him, the lady

seemed outraged and was breathless. Peter brought her triumphantly up

to Susan.

"Now what is it that you want me to do, you ridiculous boy!" gasped

Mrs. Fox,--"ask Miss Brown to come and have tea with us, is that it?

I'm chaperoning a few of the girls down to the Palace for a cup of tea,

Miss Brown,--perhaps you will waive all formality, and come too?"

Susan didn't like it, the "waive all formality" showed her exactly how

Mrs. Fox regarded the matter. Her pride was instantly touched. But she

longed desperately to go. A sudden thought of the politely interested

Thorny decided her.

"Oh, thank you! Thank you, Mr. Coleman," she smiled, "but I can't,

to-night. Miss Thornton and I are just--"

"Don't decline on MY account, Miss Brown," said Thorny, mincingly, "for

I have an engagement this evening, and I have to go straight home--"

"No, don't decline on any account!" Peter said masterfully, "and don't

tell wicked lies, or you'll get your mouth washed out with soap! Now,

I'll put Miss Thornton on her car, and you talk to Hart here--Miss

Brown, this is Mr. Hart--Gordon, Miss Brown--until I come back!"

He disappeared with Thorny, and Susan, half terrified, half delighted,

talked to Mr. Hart at quite a desperate rate, as the whole party got on

the dummy of a car. Just as they started, Peter Coleman joined them,

and during the trip downtown Susan kept both young men laughing, and

was her gayest, happiest self.

The Palace Hotel, grimy and dull in a light rainfall, was nevertheless

the most enchanting place in the world to go for tea, as Susan knew by

instinct, or hearsay, or tradition, and as all these other young people

had proved a hundred times. A covered arcade from the street led

through a row of small, bright shops into the very center of the hotel,

where there was an enormous court called the "Palm-garden," walled by

eight rising tiers of windows, and roofed, far above, with glass. At

one side of this was the little waiting-room called the "Turkish Room,"

full of Oriental inlay and draperies, and embroideries of daggers and

crescents.

To Susan the place was enchanting beyond words. The coming and going of

strange people, the arriving carriages with their slipping horses, the

luggage plastered with labels, the little shops,--so full of

delightful, unnecessary things, candy and glace fruits, and orchids and

exquisite Chinese embroideries, and postal cards, and theater tickets,

and oranges, and paper-covered novels, and alligator pears! The very

sight of these things aroused in her heart a longing that was as keen

as pain. Oh, to push her way, somehow, into the world, to have a right

to enjoy these things, to be a part of this brilliant, moving show, to

play her part in this wonderful game!

Mrs. Fox led the girls of her party to the Turkish Room to-night,

where, with much laughter and chatter, they busied themselves with

small combs, mirrors powder boxes, hairpins and veils. One girl, a Miss

Emily Saunders, even loosened her long, thin, silky hair, and let it

fall about her shoulders, and another took off her collar while she

rubbed and powdered her face.

Susan sat rather stiffly on a small, uncomfortable wooden chair,

entirely ignored, and utterly miserable. She smiled, as she looked

pleasantly from one face to another, but her heart was sick within her.

No one spoke to her, or seemed to realize that she was in the room. A

steady stream of talk--such gay, confidential talk!--went on.

"Let me get there, Connie, you old pig, I'm next. Listen, girls, did

you hear Ward to-day? Wasn't that the richest ever, after last night!

Ward makes me tired, anyway. Did Margaret tell you about Richard and

Ward, last Sunday? Isn't that rich! I don't believe it, but to hear

Margaret tell it, you'd think--Wait a minute, Louise, while I pin this

up! Whom are you going with to-night? Are you going to dinner there?

Why don't you let us call for you? That's all right, bring him along.

Will you? All right. That's fine. No, and I don't care. If it comes

I'll wear it, and if it doesn't come I'll wear that old white

rag,--it's filthy, but I don't care. Telephone your aunt, Con, and then

we can all go together. Love to, darling, but I've got a suitor. You

have not! I have TOO! Who is it? Who is it, I like that! Isn't she

awful, Margaret? Mother has an awful crush on you, Mary, she said--Wait

a minute! I'm just going to powder my nose. Who said Joe Chickering

belonged to you? What nerve! He's mine. Isn't Joe my property? Don't

come in here, Alice, we're just talking about you--"

"Oh, if I could only slip out somehow!" thought Susan desperately. "Oh,

if only I hadn't come!"

Their loosened wraps were displaying all sorts of pretty little

costumes now. Susan knew that the simplest of blue linen shirtwaists

was under her own coat. She had not courage to ask to borrow a comb, to

borrow powder. She knew her hair was mussed, she knew her nose was

shiny--

Her heart was beating so fast, with angry resentment of their serene

rudeness, and shame that she had so readily accepted the casual

invitation that gave them this chance to be rude, that she could hardly

think. But it seemed to be best, at any cost, to leave the party now,

before things grew any worse. She would make some brief excuse to Mrs.

Fox,--headache or the memory of an engagement--

"Do you know where Mrs. Fox is?" she asked the girl nearest her. For

Mrs. Fox had sauntered out into the corridor with some idea of

summoning the men.

The girl did not answer, perhaps did not hear. Susan tried again.

"Do you know where Mrs. Fox went to?"

Now the girl looked at her for a brief instant, and rose, crossing the

little room to the side of another girl.

"No, I really don't," she said lightly, civilly, as she went.

Susan's face burned. She got up, and went to the door. But she was too

late. The young men were just gathering there in a noisy group. It

appeared that there was sudden need of haste. The "rooters" were to

gather in the court presently, for more cheering, and nobody wanted to

miss the sight.

"Come, girls! Be quick!" called Mrs. Fox. "Come, Louise, dear! Connie,"

this to her own daughter, "you and Peter run ahead, and ask for my

table. Peter, will you take Connie? Come, everybody!"

Somehow, they had all paired off, in a flash, without her. Susan needed

no further spur. With more assurance than she had yet shown, she

touched the last girl, as she passed, on the arm. It chanced to be Miss

Emily Saunders. She and her escort both stopped, laughing with that

nervous apprehension that seizes their class at the appearance of the

unexpected.

"Miss Saunders," said Susan quickly, "will you tell Mrs. Fox that my

headache is much worse. I'm afraid I'd better go straight home--"

"Oh, too bad!" Miss Saunders said, her round, pale, rather unwholesome

face, expressing proper regret. "Perhaps tea will help it?" she added

sweetly.

It was the first personal word Susan had won. She felt suddenly,

horrifyingly--near to tears.

"Oh, thank you, I'm afraid not!" she smiled bravely. "Thank you so

much. And tell her I'm sorry. Good-night."

"Good-night!" said Miss Saunders. And Susan went, with a sense of

escape and relief, up the long passageway, and into the cool, friendly

darkness of the streets. She had an unreasoning fear that they might

follow her, somehow bring her back, and walked a swift block or two,

rather than wait for the car where she might be found.

Half an hour later she rushed into the house, just as the Thanksgiving

dinner was announced, half-mad with excitement, her cheeks ablaze, and

her eyes unnaturally bright. The scene in the dining-room was not of

the gayest; Mrs. Lancaster and Virginia were tired and depressed, Mary

Lou nervously concerned for the dinner, Georgie and almost all of the

few boarders who had no alternative to dining in a boarding-house

to-day were cross and silent.

But the dinner was delicious, and Susan, arriving at the crucial

moment, had a more definite effect on the party than a case of

champagne would have had. She chattered recklessly and incessantly, and

when Mrs. Lancaster's mild "Sue, dear!" challenged one remark, she

capped it with another still less conventional.

Her spirits were infectious, the gaiety became general. Mrs. Parker

laughed until the tears streamed down her fat cheeks, and Mary Lord,

the bony, sallow-faced, crippled sister who was the light and joy of

Lydia Lord's drudging life, and who had been brought downstairs to-day

as a special event, at a notable cost to her sister's and William

Oliver's muscles, nearly choked over her cranberry sauce. Susan

insisted that everyone should wear the paper caps that came in the

bonbons, and looked like a pretty witch herself, under a cone-shaped

hat of pink and blue. When, as was usual on all such occasions, a

limited supply of claret came on with the dessert, she brought the

whole company from laughter very close to tears, as she proposed, with

pretty dignify, a toast to her aunt, "who makes this house such a happy

home for us all." The toast was drunk standing, and Mrs. Lancaster

cried into her napkin, with pride and tender emotion.

After dinner the diminished group trailed, still laughing and talking,

upstairs to the little drawing-room, where perhaps seven or eight of

them settled about the coal fire. Mrs. Lancaster, looking her best in a

low-necked black silk, if rather breathless after the hearty dinner,

eaten in too-tight corsets, had her big chair, Georgia curled girlishly

on a footstool at her feet. Miss Lydia Lord stealthily ate a soda mint

tablet now and then; her sister, propped with a dozen pillows on the

sofa, fairly glowed with the unusual pleasure and excitement. Little

Mrs. Cortelyou rocked back and forth; always loquacious, she was

especially talkative after to-night's glass of wine.

Virginia, who played certain simple melodies very prettily, went to the

piano and gave them "Maryland" and "Drink to Me Only with Thine Eyes,"

and was heartily applauded. Mary Lou was finally persuaded to sing

Tosti's "Farewell to Summer," in a high, sweet, self-conscious soprano.

Susan had disappeared. Just after dinner she had waylaid William

Oliver, with a tense, "Will you walk around the block with me, Billy? I

want to talk to you," and William, giving her a startled glance, had

quietly followed her through the dark lower hall, and into the

deserted, moonlighted, wind-swept street. The wind had fallen: stars

were shining.

"Billy," said Susan, taking his arm and walking him along very rapidly,

"I'm going away--"

"Going away?" he said sympathetically. This statement always meant that

something had gone very wrong with Susan.

"Absolutely!" Susan said passionately. "I want to go where nobody knows

me, where I can make a fresh start. I'm going to Chicago."

"What the DEUCE are you raving about?" Mr. Oliver asked, stopping short

in the street. "What have you been doing now?"

"Nothing!" Susan said, with suddenly brimming eyes. "But I hate this

place, and I hate everyone in it, and I'm simply sick of being treated

as if, just because I'm poor--"

"You sound like a bum second act, with somebody throwing a handful of

torn paper down from the wings!" Billy observed. But his tone was

kinder than his words, and Susan, laying a hand on his coat sleeve,

told him the story of the afternoon; of Mrs. Fox, with her supercilious

smile; of the girls, so bitterly insulting; of Peter, involving her in

these embarrassments and then forgetting to stand by her.

"If one of those girls came to us a stranger," Susan declared, with a

heaving breast, "do you suppose we'd treat her like that?"

"Well, that only proves we have better manners than they have!"

"Oh, Bill, what rot! If there's one thing society people have, it's

manners!" Susan said impatiently. "Do you wonder people go crazy to get

hold of money?" she added vigorously.

"Nope. You've GOT to have it. There are lots of other things in the

world," he agreed, "but money's first and foremost. The only reason _I_

want it," said Billy, "is because I want to show other rich people

where they make their mistakes."

"Do you really think you'll be rich some day, Billy?"

"Sure."

Susan walked on thoughtfully.

"There's where a man has the advantage," she said. "He can really work

toward the thing he wants."

"Well, girls ought to have the same chance," Billy said generously.

"Now I was talking to Mrs. Carroll Sunday--"

"Oh, how are the Carrolls?" asked Susan, diverted for an instant.

"Fine. They were awfully disappointed you weren't along.--And she was

talking about that very thing. And she said her three girls were going

to work just as Phil and Jim do."

"But Billy, if a girl has a gift, yes. But you can't put a girl in a

foundry or a grocery."

"Not in a foundry. But you could in a grocery. And she said she had

talked to Anna and Jo since they were kids, just as she did to the

boys, about their work."

"Wouldn't Auntie think she was crazy!" Susan smiled. After a while she

said more mildly:

"I don't believe Peter Coleman is quite as bad as the others!"

"Because you have a crush on him," suggested Billy frankly. "I think he

acted like a skunk."

"Very well. Think what you like!" Susan said icily. But presently, in a

more softened tone, she added, "I do feel badly about Thorny! I

oughtn't to have left her. It was all so quick! And she DID have a

date, at least I know a crowd of people were coming to their house to

dinner. And I was so utterly taken aback to be asked out with that

crowd! The most exclusive people in the city,--that set."

"You give me an awful pain when you talk like that," said Billy,

bluntly. "You give them a chance to sit on you, and they do, and then

you want to run away to Chicago, because you feel so hurt. Why don't

you stay in your own crowd?"

"Because I like nice people. And besides, the Fox crowd isn't ONE bit

better than I am!" said the inconsistent Susan, hotly. "Who were their

ancestors! Miners and servants and farmers! I'd like to go away," she

resumed, feverishly, "and work up to be something GREAT, and come back

here and have them tumbling over themselves to be nice to me--"

"What a pipe dream!" Billy observed. "Let 'em alone. And if Coleman

ever offers you another invitation--"

"He won't!" interposed Susan.

"--Why, you sit on him so quick it'll make his head spin! Get busy at

something, Susan. If you had a lot of work to do, and enough money to

buy yourself pretty clothes, and to go off on nice little trips every

Sunday,--up the mountain, or down to Santa Cruz, you'd forget this

bunch!"

"Get busy at what?" asked Susan, half-hopeful, half in scorn.

"Oh, anything!"

"Yes, and Thorny getting forty-five after twelve years!"

"Well, but you've told me yourself how Thorny wastes time, and makes

mistakes, and conies in late, and goes home early---"

"As if that made any difference! Nobody takes the least notice!" Susan

said hotly. But she was restored enough to laugh now, and a passing

pop-corn cart made a sudden diversion. "Let's get some crisps, Bill!

Let's get a lot, and take some home to the others!"

So the evening ended with Billy and Susan in the group about the fire,

listening idly to the reminiscences that the holiday mood awakened in

the older women. Mrs. Cortelyou had been a California pioneer, and

liked to talk of the old prairie wagons, of Indian raids, of flood and

fire and famine. Susan, stirred by tales of real trouble, forgot her

own imaginary ones. Indians and wolves in the strange woods all about,

a child at the breast, another at the knee, and the men gone for

food,--four long days' trip! The women of those days, thought Susan,

carried their share of the load. She had heard the story of the Hatch

child before, the three-year-old, who, playing about the wagons, at the

noontime rest on the plains, was suddenly missing! Of the desperate

hunt, the half-mad mother's frantic searching, her agonies when the

long-delayed start must be made, her screams when she was driven away

with her tinier child in her arms, knowing that behind one of those

thousands of mesquite or cactus bushes, the little yellow head must be

pillowed on the sand, the little beloved mouth smiling in sleep.

"Mrs. Hatch used to sit for hours, strainin' her eyes back of us,

toward St. Joe," Mrs. Cortelyou said, sighing. "But there was plenty of

trouble ahead, for all of us, too! It's a life of sorrow."

"You never said a truer word than that," Mrs. Lancaster agreed

mournfully. And the talk came about once more to the Harding funeral.

CHAPTER IV

"Good-morning!" said Susan, bravely, when Miss Thornton came into the

office the next morning. Miss Thornton glanced politely toward her.

"Oh, good-morning, Miss Brown!" said she, civilly, disappearing into

the coat closet. Susan felt her cheeks burn. But she had been lying

awake and thinking in the still watches of the night, and she was the

wiser for it. Susan's appearance was a study in simple neatness this

morning, a black gown, severe white collar and cuffs, severely braided

hair. Her table was already piled with bills, and she was working

busily. Presently she got up, and came down to Miss Thornton's desk.

"Mad at me, Thorny?" she asked penitently. She had to ask it twice.

"Why should I be?" asked Miss Thornton lightly then. "Excuse me--" she

turned a page, and marked a price. "Excuse me--" This time Susan's hand

was in the way.

"Ah, Thorny, don't be mad at me," said Susan, childishly.

"I hope I know when I am not wanted," said Miss Thornton stiffly, after

a silence.

"I don't!" laughed Susan, and stopped. Miss Thornton looked quickly up,

and the story came out. Thorny was instantly won. She observed with a

little complacence that she had anticipated just some such event, and

so had given Peter Coleman no chance to ask HER. "I could see he was

dying to," said Thorny, "but I know that crowd! Don't you care, Susan,

what's the difference?" said Thorny, patting her hand affectionately.

So that little trouble was smoothed away. Another episode made the day

more bearable for Susan.

Mr. Brauer called her into his office at ten o'clock. Peter was at his

desk, but Susan apparently did not see him.

"Will you hurry this bill, Miss Brown?" said Mr. Brauer, in his careful

English. "Al-zo, I wished to say how gratifite I am wiz your work,

before zese las' weeks,--zis monss. You work hardt, and well. I wish

all could do so hardt, and so well."

"Oh, thank you!" stammered Susan, in honest shame. Had one month's work

been so noticeable? She made new resolves for the month to come. "Was

that all, Mr. Brauer?" she asked primly.

"All? Yes."

"What was your rush yesterday?" asked Peter Coleman, turning around.

"Headache," said Susan, mildly, her hand on the door.

"Oh, rot! I bet it didn't ache at all!" he said, with his gay laugh.

But Susan did not laugh, and there was a pause. Peter's face grew red.

"Did--did Miss Thornton get home all right?" he asked. Susan knew he

was at a loss for something to say, but answered him seriously.

"Quite, thank you. She was a little--at least I felt that she might be

a little vexed at my leaving her, but she was very sweet about it."

"She should have come, too!" Peter said, embarrassedly.

Susan did not answer, she eyed him gravely for a few seconds, as one

waiting for further remarks, then turned and went out, sauntering to

her desk with the pleasant conviction that hers were the honors of war.

The feeling of having regained her dignity was so exhilarating that

Susan was careful, during the next few weeks, to preserve it. She bowed

and smiled to Peter, answered his occasional pleasantries briefly and

reservedly, and attended strictly to her affairs alone.

Thus Thanksgiving became a memory less humiliating, and on Christmas

Day joy came gloriously into Susan's heart, to make it memorable among

all the Christmas Days of her life. Easy to-day to sit for a laughing

hour with poor Mary Lord, to go to late service, and dream through a

long sermon, with the odor of incense and spicy evergreen sweet all

about her, to set tables, to dust the parlor, to be kissed by Loretta's

little doctor under the mistletoe, to sweep up tissue-paper and red

ribbon and nutshells and tinsel, to hook Mary Lou's best gown, and

accompany Virginia to evening service, and to lend Georgie her best

gloves. Susan had not had many Christmas presents: cologne and

handkerchiefs and calendars and candy, from various girl friends, five

dollars from the firm, a silk waist from Auntie, and a handsome

umbrella from Billy, who gave each one of the cousins exactly the same

thing.

These, if appreciated, were more or less expected, too. But beside

them, this year, was a great box of violets,--Susan never forgot the

delicious wet odor of those violets!--and inside the big box a smaller

one, holding an old silver chain with a pendant of lapis lazuli, set in

a curious and lovely design. Susan honestly thought it the handsomest

thing she had ever seen. And to own it, as a gift from him! Small

wonder that her heart flew like a leaf in a high wind. The card that

came with it she had slipped inside her silk blouse, and so wore

against her heart. "Mr. Peter Webster Coleman," said one side of the

card. On the other was written, "S.B. from P.--Happy Fourth of July!"

Susan took it out and read it a hundred times. The "P" indicated a

friendliness that brought the happy color over and over again to her

face. She dashed him off a gay little note of thanks; signed it

"Susan," thought better of that and re-wrote it, to sign it "Susan

Ralston Brown"; wrote it a third time, and affixed only the initials,

"S.B." All day long she wondered at intervals if the note had been too

chilly, and turned cold, or turned rosy wondering if it had been too

warm.

Mr. Coleman did not come into the office during the following week, and

one day a newspaper item, under the heading of "The Smart Set," jumped

at Susan with the familiar name. "Peter Coleman, who is at present the

guest of Mrs. Rodney Chauncey, at her New Year's house party," it ran,

"may accompany Mr. Paul Wallace and Miss Isabel Wallace in a short

visit to Mexico next week." The news made Susan vaguely unhappy.

One January Saturday she was idling along the deck, when he came

suddenly up behind her, to tell her, with his usual exuberant laughter,

that he WAS going away for a fortnight with the Wallaces, just a flying

trip, "in the old man's private car." He expected "a peach of a time."

"You certainly ought to have it!" smiled Susan gallantly, "Isabel

Wallace looks like a perfect darling!"

"She's a wonder!" he said absently, adding eagerly, "Say, why can't you

come and help me buy some things this afternoon? Come on, and we'll

have tea at the club?"

Susan saw no reason against it, they would meet at one.

"I'll be down in J.G.'s office," he said, and Susan went back to her

desk with fresh joy and fresh pain at her heart.

On Saturdays, because of the early closing, the girls had no lunch

hour. But they always sent out for a bag of graham crackers, which they

nibbled as they worked, and, between eleven and one, they took turns at

disappearing in the direction of the lunch-room, to return with well

scrubbed hands and powdered noses, fresh collars and carefully arranged

hair. Best hats were usually worn on Saturdays, and Susan rejoiced that

she had worn her best to-day. After the twelve o'clock whistle blew,

she went upstairs.

On the last flight, just below the lunch-room, she suddenly stopped

short, her heart giving a sick plunge. Somebody up there was

laughing--crying--making a horrible noise--! Susan ran up the rest of

the flight.

Thorny was standing by the table. One or two other girls were in the

room, Miss Sherman was mending a glove, Miss Cashell stood in the roof

doorway, manicuring her nails with a hairpin. Miss Elsie Kirk sat in

the corner seat, with her arm about the bowed shoulders of another

girl, who was crying, with her head on the table.

"If you would mind your own affairs for about five minutes, Miss

Thornton," Elsie Kirk was saying passionately, as Susan came in, "you'd

be a good deal better off!"

"I consider what concerns Front Office concerns me!" said Miss Thornton

loftily.

"Ah, don't!" Miss Sherman murmured pitifully.

"If Violet wasn't such a darn FOOL--" Miss Cashell said lightly, and

stopped.

"What IS it?" asked Susan.

Her voice died on a dead silence. Miss Thornton, beginning to gather up

veil and gloves and handbag scattered on the table, pursed her lips

virtuously. Miss Cashell manicured steadily. Miss Sherman bit off a

thread.

"It's nothing at all!" said Elsie Kirk, at last. "My sister's got a

headache, that's all, and she doesn't feel well." She patted the bowed

shoulders. "And parties who have nothing better to do," she added,

viciously turning to Miss Thornton, "have butted in about it!"

"I'm all right now," said Violet suddenly, raising a face so terribly

blotched and swollen from tears that Susan was genuinely horrified.

Violet's weak eyes were set in puffy rings of unnatural whiteness, her

loose, weak little mouth sagged, her bosom, in its preposterous,

transparent white lace shirtwaist, rose and fell convulsively. In her

voice was some shocking quality of unwomanliness, some lack of pride,

and reserve, and courage.

"All I wanted was to do like other girls do," said the swollen lips, as

Violet began to cry again, and to dab her eyes with a soaked rag of a

handkerchief. "I never meant nothing! 'N' Mamma says she KNOWS it

wasn't all my fault!" she went on, half maudlin in her abandonment.

Susan gasped. There was a general gasp.

"Don't, Vi!" said her sister tenderly. "It ain't your fault if there

are skunks in the world like Mr. Phil Hunter," she said, in a reckless

half-whisper. "If Papa was alive he'd shoot him down like a dog!"

"He ought to be shot down!" cried Susan, firing.

"Well, of course he ought!" Miss Elsie Kirk, strong under opposition,

softened suddenly under this championship, and began to tremble. "Come

on, Vi," said she.

"Well, of course he ought," Thorny said, almost with sympathy. "Here,

let's move the table a little, if you want to get out."

"Well, why do you make such a fuss about it?" Miss Cashell asked

softly. "You know as well as--as anyone else, that if a man gets a girl

into trouble, he ought to stand for--"

"Yes, but my sister doesn't take that kind of money!" flashed Elsie

bitterly.

"Well, of course not!" Miss Cashell said quickly, "but--"

"No, you're doing the dignified thing, Violet," Miss Thornton said,

with approval, "and you'll feel glad, later on, that you acted this

way. And, as far as my carrying tales, I never carried one. I DID say

that I thought I knew why you were leaving, and I don't deny it--Use my

powder, right there by the mirror--But as far as anything else goes--"

"We're both going," Elsie said. "I wouldn't take another dollar of

their dirty money if I was starving! Come on, Vi."

And a few minutes later they all said a somewhat subdued and

embarrassed farewell to the Misses Kirk, who went down the stairs,

veiled and silent, and out of the world of Hunter, Baxter & Hunter's

forever.

"Will she sue him, Thorny?" asked Susan, awed.

"Sue him? For what? She's not got anything to sue for." Miss Thornton

examined a finger nail critically. "This isn't the first time this has

happened down here," she said. "There was a lovely girl here--but she

wasn't such a fool as Violet is. She kept her mouth shut. Violet went

down to Phil Hunter's office this morning, and made a perfect scene.

He's going on East to meet his wife you know; it must have been

terribly embarrassing for him! Then old J.G. sent for Violet, and told

her that there'd been a great many errors in the crediting, and showed

'em to her, too! Poor kid--"

Susan went wondering back to Front Office. The crediting should be

hers, now, by all rights! But she felt only sorry, and sore, and

puzzled. "She wanted a good time and pretty things," said Susan to

herself. Just as Susan herself wanted this delightful afternoon with

Peter Coleman! "How much money has to do with life!" the girl thought.

But even the morning's events did not cloud the afternoon. She met

Peter at the door of Mr. Baxter's office, and they went laughing out

into the clear winter sunshine together.

Where first? To Roos Brothers, for one of the new folding trunks. Quite

near enough to walk, they decided, joining the released throng of

office workers who were streaming up to Kearney Street and the theater

district.

The trunk was found, and a very smart pigskin toilet-case to go in the

trunk; Susan found a sort of fascination in the ease with which a

person of Peter's income could add a box of silk socks to his purchase,

because their color chanced to strike his fancy, could add two or three

handsome ties. They strolled along Kearney Street and Post Street, and

Susan selected an enormous bunch of violets at Podesta and Baldocchi's,

declining the unwholesome-looking orchid that was Peter's choice. They

bought a camera, which was left that a neat "P.W.C." might be stamped

upon it, and went into Shreve's, a place always fascinating to Susan,

to leave Mr. Coleman's watch to be regulated, and look at new

scarf-pins. And finally they wandered up into "Chinatown," as the

Chinese quarter was called, laughing all the way, and keenly alert for

any little odd occurrence in the crowded streets. At Sing Fat's

gorgeous bazaar, Peter bought a mandarin coat for himself, the smiling

Oriental bringing its price down from two hundred dollars to less than

three-quarters of that sum, and Susan taking a great fancy to a little

howling teakwood god; he bought that, too, and they named it "Claude"

after much discussion.

"We can't carry all these things to the University Club for tea," said

Peter then, when it was nearly five o'clock. "So let's go home and have

tea with Aunt Clara--she'd love it!"

Tea at his own home! Susan's heart raced--

"Oh, I couldn't," she said, in duty bound.

"Couldn't? Why couldn't you?"

"Why, because Auntie mightn't like it. Suppose your aunt is out?"

"Shucks!" he pondered; he wanted his way. "I'll tell you," he said

suddenly. "We'll drive there, and if Aunt Clara isn't home you needn't

come in. How's that?"

Susan could find no fault with that. She got into a carriage in great

spirits.

"Don't you love it when we stop people on the crossings?" she asked

naively. Peter shouted, but she could see that he was pleased as well

as amused.

They bumped and rattled out Bush Street, and stopped at the stately

door of the old Baxter mansion. Mrs. Baxter fortunately was at home,

and Susan followed Peter into the great square hall, and into the

magnificent library, built in a day of larger homes and more splendid

proportions. Here she was introduced to the little, nervous mistress of

the house, who had been enjoying alone a glorious coal fire.

"Let in a little more light, Peter, you wild, noisy boy, you!" said

Mrs. Baxter, adding, to Susan, "This was a very sweet thing of you to

do, my dear, I don't like my little cup of tea alone."

"Little cup--ha!" said Peter, eying the woman with immense

satisfaction. "You'll see her drink five, Miss Brown!"

"We'll send him upstairs, that's what we'll do," threatened his aunt.

"Yes, tea, Burns," she added to the butler. "Green tea, dear?

Orange-Pekoe? I like that best myself. And muffins, Burns, and toast,

something nice and hot. And jam. Mr. Peter likes jam, and some of the

almond cakes, if she has them. And please ask Ada to bring me that box

of candy from my desk. Santa Barbara nougat, Peter, it just came."

"ISN'T this fun!" said Susan, so joyously that Mrs. Baxter patted the

girl's arm with a veiny, approving little hand, and Peter, eying his

aunt significantly, said: "Isn't SHE fun?"

It was a perfect hour, and when, at six, Susan said she must go, the

old lady sent her home in her own carriage. Peter saw her to the door,

"Shall you be going out to-night, sir?" Susan heard the younger

man-servant ask respectfully, as they passed. "Not to-night!" said

Peter, and, so sensitive was Susan now to all that concerned him, she

was unreasonably glad that he was not engaged to-night, not to see

other girls and have good times in which she had no share. It seemed to

make him more her own.

The tea, the firelight, the fragrant dying violets had worked a spell

upon her. Susan sat back luxuriously in the carriage, dreaming of

herself as Peter Coleman's wife, of entering that big hall as

familiarly as he did, of having tea and happy chatter ready for him

every afternoon before the fire----

There was no one at the windows, unfortunately, to be edified by the

sight of Susan Brown being driven home in a private carriage, and the

halls, as she entered, reeked of boiling cabbage and corned beef. She

groped in the darkness for a match with which to light the hall gas.

She could hear Loretta Barker's sweet high voice chattering on behind

closed doors, and, higher up, the deep moaning of Mary Lord, who was

going through one of her bad times. But she met nobody as she ran up to

her room.

"Hello, Mary Lou, darling! Where's everyone?" she asked gaily,

discerning in the darkness a portly form prone on the bed.

"Jinny's lying down, she's been to the oculist. Ma's in the

kitchen--don't light up, Sue," said the patient, melancholy voice.

"Don't light up!" Susan echoed, amazedly, instantly doing so, the

better to see her cousin's tear-reddened eyes and pale face. "Why,

what's the matter?"

"Oh, we've had sad, sad news," faltered Mary Lou, her lips trembling.

"A telegram from Ferd Eastman. They've lost Robbie!"

"No!" said Susan, genuinely shocked. And to the details she listened

sympathetically, cheering Mary Lou while she inserted cuff-links into

her cousin's fresh shirtwaist, and persuaded her to come down to

dinner. Then Susan must leave her hot soup while she ran up to

Virginia's room, for Virginia was late.

"Ha! What is it?" said Virginia heavily, rousing herself from sleep.

Protesting that she was a perfect fright, she kept Susan waiting while

she arranged her hair.

"And what does Verriker say of your eyes, Jinny?"

"Oh, they may operate, after all!" Virginia sighed. "But don't say

anything to Ma until we're sure," she said.

Not the congenial atmosphere into which to bring a singing heart! Susan

sighed. When they went downstairs Mrs. Parker's heavy voice was filling

the dining-room.

"The world needs good wives and mothers more than it needs nuns, my

dear! There's nothing selfish about a woman who takes her share of toil

and care and worry, instead of running away from it. Dear me! many of

us who married and stayed in the world would be glad enough to change

places with the placid lives of the Sisters!"

"Then, Mama," Loretta said sweetly and merrily, detecting the

inconsistency of her mother's argument, as she always did, "if it's

such a serene, happy life--"

Loretta always carried off the honors of war. Susan used to wonder how

Mrs. Parker could resist the temptation to slap her pretty, stupid

little face. Loretta's deep, wise, mysterious smile seemed to imply

that she, at nineteen, could afford to assume the maternal attitude

toward her easily confused and disturbed parent.

"No vocation for mine!" said Georgianna, hardily, "I'd always be

getting my habit mixed up, and coming into chapel without my veil on!"

This, because of its audacity, made everyone laugh, but Loretta fixed

on Georgie the sweet bright smile in which Susan already perceived the

nun.

"Are you so sure that you haven't a vocation, Georgie?" she asked

gently.

"Want to go to a bum show at the 'Central' to-night?" Billy Oliver

inquired of Susan in an aside. "Bartlett's sister is leading lady, and

he's handing passes out to everyone."

"Always!" trilled Susan, and at last she had a chance to add, "Wait

until I tell you what fun I've been having!"

She told him when they were on the car, and he was properly interested,

but Susan felt that the tea episode somehow fell flat; had no

significance for William.

"Crime he didn't take you to the University Club," said Billy, "they

say it's a keen club."

Susan, smiling over happy memories, did not contradict him.

The evening, in spite of the "bum" show, proved a great success,

and the two afterwards went to Zinkand's for sardine sandwiches and

domestic ginger-ale. This modest order was popular with them because of

the moderateness of its cost.

"But, Bill," said Susan to-night, "wouldn't you like to order once

without reading the price first and then looking back to see what it

was? Do you remember the night we nearly fainted with joy when we found

a ten cent dish at Tech's, and then discovered that it was Chili Sauce!"

They both laughed, Susan giving her usual little bounce of joy as she

settled into her seat, and the orchestra began a spirited selection.

"Look there, Bill, what are those people getting?" she asked.

"It's terrapin," said William, and Susan looked it up on the menu.

"Terrapin Parnasse, one-fifty," read Susan, "for seven of them,--Gee!

Gracious!" "Gracious" followed, because Susan had made up her mind not

to say "Gee" any more.

"His little supper will stand him in about fifteen dollars," estimated

Billy, with deep interest. "He's ordering champagne,--it'll stand him

in thirty. Gosh!"

"What would you order if you could, Bill?" Susan asked. It was all part

of their usual program.

"Planked steak," answered Billy, readily.

"Planked steak," Susan hunted for it, "would it be three dollars?" she

asked, awed.

"That's it."

"I'd have breast of hen pheasant with Virginia ham," Susan decided. A

moment later her roving eye rested on a group at a nearby table, and,

with the pleased color rushing into her race, she bowed to one of the

members of the party.

"That's Miss Emily Saunders," said Susan, in a low voice. "Don't look

now--now you can look. Isn't she sweet?"

Miss Saunders, beautifully gowned, was sitting with an old man, an

elderly woman, a handsome, very stout woman of perhaps forty, and a

very young man. She was a pale, rather heavy girl, with prominent eyes

and smooth skin. Susan thought her very aristocratic looking.

"Me for the fat one," said Billy simply. "Who's she?"

"I don't know. DON'T let them see us looking, Bill!" Susan brought her

gaze suddenly back to her own table, and began a conversation.

There were some rolls on a plate, between them, but there was no butter

on the table. Their order had not yet been served.

"We want some butter here," said Billy, as Susan took a roll, broke it

in two, and laid it down again.

"Oh, don't bother, Bill! I don't honestly want it!" she protested.

"Rot!" said William. "He's got a right to bring it!" In a moment a

head-waiter was bending over them, his eyes moving rapidly from one to

the other, under contracted brows.

"Butter, please," said William briskly.

"Beg pardon?"

"BUTTER. We've no butter."

"Oh, certainly!" He was gone in a second, and in another the butter was

served, and Susan and Billy began on the rolls.

"Here comes Miss---, your friend," said William presently.

Susan whirled. Miss Saunders and the very young man were looking toward

their table, as they went out. Catching Susan's eye, they came over to

shake hands.

"How do you do, Miss Brown?" said the young woman easily. "My cousin,

Mr. Brice. He's nicer than he looks. Mr. Oliver? Were you at the

Columbia?"

"We were--How do you do? No, we weren't at the Columbia," Susan

stammered, confused by the other's languid ease of manner, by the

memory of the playhouse they had attended, and by the arrival of the

sardines and ginger-ale, which were just now placed on the table.

"I'm coming to take you to lunch with me some day, remember," said Miss

Saunders, departing. And she smiled another farewell from the door.

"Isn't she sweet?" said Susan.

"And how well she would come along just as our rich and expensive order

is served!" Billy added, and they both laughed.

"It looks good to ME!" Susan assured him contentedly. "I'll give you

half that other sandwich if you can tell me what the orchestra is

playing now."

"The slipper thing, from 'Boheme'," Billy said scornfully. Susan's eyes

widened with approval and surprise. His appreciation of music was an

incongruous note in Billy's character.

There was presently a bill to settle, which Susan, as became a lady,

seemed to ignore. But she could not long ignore her escort's scowling

scrutiny of it.

"What's that?" demanded Mr. Oliver, scowling at the card. "Twenty cents

for WHAT?"

"For bread and butter, sir," said the waiter, in a hoarse, confidential

whisper. "Not served with sandwiches, sir." Susan's heart began to

thump.

"Billy--" she began.

"Wait a minute," Billy muttered. "Just wait a minute! It doesn't say

anything about that."

The waiter respectfully indicated a line on the menu card, which Mr.

Oliver studied fixedly, for what seemed to Susan a long time.

"That's right," he said finally, heavily, laying a silver dollar on the

check. "Keep it." The waiter did not show much gratitude for his tip.

Susan and Billy, ruffled and self-conscious, walked, with what dignity

they could, out into the night.

"Damn him!" said Billy, after a rapidly covered half-block.

"Oh, Billy, don't! What do you care!" Susan said, soothingly.

"I don't care," he snapped. Adding, after another brooding minute, "we

ought to have better sense than to go into such places!"

"We're as good as anyone else!" Susan asserted, hotly.

"No, we're not. We're not as rich," he answered bitterly.

"Billy, as if MONEY mattered!"

"Oh, of course, money doesn't matter," he said with fine satire. "Not

at all! But because we haven't got it, those fellows, on thirty per,

can throw the hooks into us at every turn. And, if we threw enough

money around, we could be the rottenest man and woman on the face of

the globe, we could be murderers and thieves, even, and they'd all be

falling over each other to wait on us!"

"Well, let's murder and thieve, then!" said Susan blithely.

"I may not do that--"

"You mayn't? Oh, Bill, don't commit yourself! You may want to, later."

"I may not do that," repeated Mr. Oliver, gloomily, "but, by George,

some day I'll have a wad in the bank that'll make me feel that I can

afford to turn those fellows down! They'll know that I've got it, all

right."

"Bill, I don't think that's much of an ambition," Susan said, candidly,

"to want so much money that you aren't afraid of a waiter! Get some

crisps while we're passing the man, Billy!" she interrupted herself to

say, urgently, "we can talk on the car!"

He bought them, grinning sheepishly.

"But honestly, Sue, don't you get mad when you think that about the

only standard of the world is money?" he resumed presently.

"Well, we know that we're BETTER than lots of rich people, Bill."

"How are we better?"

"More refined. Better born. Better ancestry."

"Oh, rot! A lot they care for that! No, people that have money can get

the best of people who haven't, coming and going. And for that reason,

Sue," they were on the car now, and Billy was standing on the running

board, just in front of her, "for that reason, Sue, I'm going to MAKE

money, and when I have so much that everyone knows it then I'll do as I

darn please. And I won't please to do the things they do, either!"

"You're very sure of yourself, Bill! How are you going to make it?"

"The way other men make it, by gosh!" Mr. Oliver said seriously. "I'm

going into blue-printing with Ross, on the side. I've got nearly three

thousand in Panhandle lots--"

"Oh, you have NOT!"

"Oh, I have, too! Spence put me onto it. They're no good now, but you

bet your life they will be! And I'm going to stick along at the foundry

until the old man wakes up some day, and realizes that I'm getting more

out of my men than any other two foremen in the place. Those boys would

do anything for me--"

"Because you're a very unusual type of man to be in that sort of place,

Bill!" Susan interrupted.

"Shucks," he said, in embarrassment. "Well," he resumed, "then some day

I'm going to the old man and ask him for a year's leave. Then I'll

visit every big iron-works in the East, and when I come back, I'll take

a job of casting from my own blue-prints, at not less than a hundred a

week. Then I'll run up some flats in the Panhandle--"

"Having married the beautiful daughter of the old man himself--" Susan

interposed. "And won first prize in the Louisiana lottery--"

"Sure," he said gravely. "And meanwhile," he added, with a

business-like look, "Coleman has got a crush on you, Sue. It'd be a

dandy marriage for you, and don't you forget it!"

"Well, of all nerve!" Susan said unaffectedly, and with flaming cheeks.

"There is a little motto, to every nation dear, in English it's

forget-me-not, in French it's mind your own business, Bill!"

"Well, that may be," he said doggedly, "but you know as well as I do

that it's up to you--"

"Suppose it is," Susan said, satisfied that he should think so. "That

doesn't give YOU any right to interfere with my affairs!"

"You're just like Georgie and Mary Lou," he told her, "always bluffing

yourself. But you've got more brains than they have, Sue, and it'd give

the whole crowd of them a hand up if you made a marriage like that.

Don't think I'm trying to butt in," he gave her his winning, apologetic

smile, "you know I'm as interested as your own brother could be, Sue!

If you like him, don't keep the matter hanging fire. There's no

question that he's crazy about you--everybody knows that!"

"No, there's no question about THAT," Susan said, softly.

But what would she not have given for the joy of knowing, in her secret

heart, that it was true!

Two weeks later, Miss Brown, summoned to Mr. Brauer's office, was asked

if she thought that she could do the crediting, at forty dollars a

month. Susan assented gravely, and entered that day upon her new work,

and upon a new era. She worked hard and silently, now, with only

occasional flashes of her old silliness. She printed upon a card, and

hung above her desk, these words:

"I hold it true, with him who sings

To one clear harp in divers tones,

That men may rise on stepping-stones

Of their dead selves, to higher things."

On stepping-stones of her dead selves, Susan mounted. She wore a

preoccupied, a responsible air, her voice softened, her manner was

almost too sweet, too bright and gentle. She began to take cold, or

almost cold, baths daily, to brush her hair and mend her gloves. She

began to say "Not really?" instead of "Sat-so?" and "It's of no

consequence," instead of "Don't matter." She called her long woolen

coat, familiarly known as her "sweater," her "field-jacket," and

pronounced her own name "Syusan." Thorny, Georgianna, and Billy had

separately the pleasure of laughing at Susan in these days.

"They should really have a lift, to take the girls up to the lunch

room," said Susan to Billy.

"Of course they should," said Billy, "and a sink to bring you down

again!"

Peter Coleman did not return to San Francisco until the middle of

March, but Susan had two of the long, ill-written and ill-spelled

letters that are characteristic of the college graduate. It was a wet

afternoon in the week before Holy Week when she saw him again. Front

Office was very busy at three o'clock, and Miss Garvey had been telling

a story.

"'Don't whistle, Mary, there's a good girl,' the priest says," related

Miss Garvey. "'I never like to hear a girl whistle,' he says. Well, so

that night Aggie,"--Aggie was Miss Kelly--"Aggie wrote a question, and

she put it in the question-box they had at church for questions during

the Mission. 'Is it a sin to whistle?' she wrote. And that night, when

he was readin' the questions out from the pulpit, he come to this one,

and he looked right down at our pew over his glasses, and he says, 'The

girl that asks this question is here,' he says, 'and I would say to

her, 'tis no sin to do anything that injures neither God nor your

neighbor!' Well, I thought Aggie and me would go through the floor!"

And Miss Kelly and Miss Garvey put their heads down on their desks, and

laughed until they cried.

Susan, looking up to laugh too, felt a thrill weaken her whole body,

and her spine grow cold. Peter Coleman, in his gloves and big overcoat,

with his hat on the back of his head, was in Mr. Brauer's office, and

the electric light, turned on early this dark afternoon, shone full in

his handsome, clean-shaven face.

Susan had some bills that she had planned to show to Mr. Brauer this

afternoon. Six months ago she would have taken them in to him at once,

and been glad of the excuse. But now she dropped her eyes, and busied

herself with her work. Her heart beat high, she attacked a particularly

difficult bill, one she had been avoiding for days, and disposed of it

in ten minutes.

A little later she glanced at Mr. Brauer's office. Peter was gone, and

Susan felt a sensation of sickness. She looked down at Mr. Baxter's

office, and saw him there, spreading kodak pictures over the old man's

desk, laughing and talking. Presently he was gone again, and she saw

him no more that day.

The next day, however, she found him at her desk when she came in. They

had ten minutes of inconsequential banter before Miss Cashell came in.

"How about a fool trip to the Chutes to-morrow night?" Peter asked in a

low tone, just before departing.

"Lent," Susan said reluctantly.

"Oh, so it is. I suppose Auntie wouldn't stand for a dinner?"

"Pos-i-to-ri-ly NOT!" Susan was hedged with convention.

"Positorily not? Well, let's walk the pup? What? All right, I'll come

at eight."

"At eight," said Susan, with a dancing heart.

She thought of nothing else until Friday came, slipped away from the

office a little earlier than usual, and went home planning just the

gown and hat most suitable. Visitors were in the parlor; Auntie,

thinking of pan-gravy and hot biscuits, was being visibly driven to

madness by them. Susan charitably took Mrs. Cobb and Annie and Daisy

off Mrs. Lancaster's hands, and listened sympathetically to a

dissertation upon the thanklessness of sons. Mrs. Cobb's sons, leaving

their mother and their unmarried sisters in a comfortable home, had

married the women of their own choice, and were not yet forgiven.

"And how's Alfie doing?" Mrs. Cobb asked heavily, departing.

"Pretty well. He's in Portland now, he has another job," Susan said

cautiously. Alfred was never criticized in his mother's hearing. A

moment later she closed the hall door upon the callers with a sigh of

relief, and ran downstairs.

The telephone bell was ringing. Susan answered it.

"Hello Miss Brown! You see I know you in any disguise!" It was Peter

Coleman's voice.

"Hello!" said Susan, with a chill premonition.

"I'm calling off that party to-night," said Peter. "I'm awfully sorry.

We'll do it some other night. I'm in Berkeley."

"Oh, very well!" Susan agreed, brightly.

"Can you HEAR me? I say I'm---"

"Yes, I hear perfectly."

"What?"

"I say I can hear!"

"And it's all right? I'm awfully sorry!"

"Oh, certainly!"

"All right. These fellows are making such a racket I can't hear you.

See you to-morrow!"

Susan hung up the receiver. She sat quite still in the darkness for

awhile, staring straight ahead of her. When she went into the

dining-room she was very sober. Mr. Oliver was there; he had taken one

of his men to a hospital, with a burned arm, too late in the afternoon

to make a return to the foundry worth while.

"Harkee, Susan wench!" said he, "do 'ee smell asparagus?"

"Aye. It'll be asparagus, Gaffer," said Susan dispiritedly, dropping

into her chair.

"And I nearly got my dinner out to-night!" Billy said, with a shudder.

"Say, listen, Susan, can you come over to the Carrolls, Sunday? Going

to be a bully walk!"

"I don't know, Billy," she said quietly.

"Well, listen what we're all going to do, some Thursday. We're going to

the theater, and then dawdle over supper at some cheap place, you know,

and then go down on the docks, at about three, to see the fishing fleet

come in? Are you on? It's great. They pile the fish up to their waists,

you know--"

"That sounds lovely!" said Susan, eying him scornfully. "I see Jo and

Anna Carroll enjoying THAT!"

"Lord, what a grouch you've got!" Billy said, with a sort of awed

admiration.

Susan began to mold the damp salt in an open glass salt-cellar with the

handle of a fork. Her eyes blurred with sudden tears.

"What's the matter?" Billy asked in a lowered voice.

She gulped, merely shook her head.

"You're dead, aren't you?" he said repentantly.

"Oh, all in!" It was a relief to ascribe it to that. "I'm awfully

tired."

"Too tired to go to church with Mary Lou and me, dear?" asked Virginia,

coming in. "Friday in Passion Week, you know. We're going to St.

Ignatius. But if you're dead--?"

"Oh, I am. I'm going straight to bed," Susan said. But after dinner,

when Mary Lou was dressing, she suddenly changed her mind, dragged

herself up from the couch where she was lying and, being Susan, brushed

her hair, pinned a rose on her coat lapel, and powdered her nose.

Walking down the street with her two cousins, Susan, storm-shaken and

subdued, still felt "good," and liked the feeling. Spring was in the

air, the early darkness was sweet with the odors of grass and flowers.

When they reached the church, the great edifice was throbbing with the

notes of the organ, a careless voluntary that stopped short, rambled,

began again. They were early, and the lights were only lighted here and

there; women, and now and then a man, drifted up the center aisle.

Boots cheeped unseen in the arches, sibilant whispers smote the

silence, pew-doors creaked, and from far corners of the church violent

coughing sounded with muffled reverberations. Mary Lou would have

slipped into the very last pew, but Virginia led the way up--up--up--in

the darkness, nearer and nearer the altar, with its winking red light,

and genuflected before one of the very first pews. Susan followed her

into it with a sigh of satisfaction; she liked to see and hear, and all

the pews were open to-night. They knelt for awhile, then sat back,

silent, reverential, but not praying, and interested in the arriving

congregation.

A young woman, seeing Virginia, came to whisper to her in a rasping

aside. She "had St. Joseph" for Easter, she said, would Virginia help

her "fix him"? Virginia nodded, she loved to assist those devout young

women who decorated, with exquisite flowers and hundreds of candles,

the various side altars of the church.

There was a constant crisping of shoes in the aisle now, the pews were

filling fast. "Lord, where do all these widows come from?" thought

Susan. A "Brother," in a soutane, was going about from pillar to

pillar, lighting the gas. Group after group of the pendent globes

sprang into a soft, moony glow; the hanging glass prisms jingled

softly. The altar-boys in red, without surplices, were moving about the

altar now, lighting the candles. The great crucifix, the

altar-paintings and the tall candle-sticks were swathed in purple

cloth, there were no flowers to-night on the High Altar, but it

twinkled with a thousand candles.

The hour began to have its effect on Susan. She felt herself a little

girl again, yielding to the spell of the devotion all about her; the

clicking rosary-beads, the whispered audible prayers, the very

odors,--odors of close-packed humanity,--that reached her were all a

part of this old mood. A little woman fluttered up the aisle, and

squeezed in beside her, panting like a frightened rabbit. Now there was

not a seat to be seen, even the benches by the confessionals were full.

And now the organ broke softly, miraculously, into enchanting and

enveloping sound, that seemed to shake the church bodily with its great

trembling touch, and from a door on the left of the altar the

procession streamed,--altar-boys and altar-boys and altar-boys,

followed through the altar-gate by the tall young priest who would "say

the Stations." Other priests, a score of them, filled the altar-stalls;

one, seated on the right between two boys, would presently preach.

The procession halted somewhere over in the distant: arches, the organ

thundered the "Stabat Mater." Susan could only see the candles and the

boys, but the priest's voice was loud and clear. The congregation knelt

and rose again, knelt and rose again, turned and swayed to follow the

slow movement of the procession about the church.

When priest and boys had returned to the altar, a wavering high soprano

voice floated across the church in an intricate "Veni Creator." Susan

and Mary Lou sat back in their seats, but Virginia knelt, wrapped in

prayer, her face buried in her hands, her hat forcing the woman in

front of her to sit well forward in her place.

The pulpit was pushed across a little track laid in the altar

enclosure, and the preacher mounted it, shook his lace cuffs into

place, laid his book and notes to one side, and composedly studied his

audience.

"In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost,

Amen. 'Ask and ye shall receive---'" suddenly the clear voice rang out.

Susan lost the sermon. But she got the text, and pondered it with new

interest. It was not new to her. She had "asked" all her life long; for

patience, for truthfulness, for "final perseverance," for help for

Virginia's eyes and Auntie's business and Alfie's intemperance, for the

protection of this widow, the conversion of that friend, "the speedy

recovery or happy death" of some person dangerously ill. Susan had

never slipped into church at night with Mary Lou, without finding some

special request to incorporate in her prayers.

To-night, in the solemn pause of Benediction, she asked for Peter

Coleman's love. Here was a temporal favor, indeed, indicating a lesser

spiritual degree than utter resignation to the Divine Will. Susan was

not sure of her right to ask it. But, standing to sing the "Laudate,"

there came a sudden rush of confidence and hope to her heart. She was

praying for this gift now, and that fact alone seemed to lift it above

the level of ordinary, earthly desires. Not entirely unworthy was any

hope that she could bring to this tribunal, and beg for on her knees.

CHAPTER V

Two weeks later she and Peter Coleman had their evening at the Chutes,

and a wonderful evening it was; then came a theater trip, and a Sunday

afternoon that they spent in idly drifting about Golden Gate Park,

enjoying the spring sunshine, and the holiday crowd, feeding the

animals and eating peanuts. Susan bowed to Thorny and the faithful

Wally on this last occasion and was teased by Thorny about Peter

Coleman the next day, to her secret pleasure. She liked anything that

made her friendship for Peter seem real, a thing noticed and accepted

by others, not all the romantic fabric of her own unfounded dreams.

Tangible proof of his affection there was indeed, to display to the

eyes of her world. But it was for intangible proof that Susan's heart

longed day after day. In spite of comment and of envy from the office,

in spite of the flowers and messages and calls upon which Auntie and

the girls were placing such flattering significance, Susan was far too

honest with life not to realize that she had not even a thread by which

to hold Peter Coleman, that he had not given an instant's thought, and

did not wish to give an instant's thought to her, or to any woman, as a

possible sweetheart and wife.

She surprised him, she amused him, she was the company he liked best,

easiest to entertain, most entertaining in turn, this she knew. He

liked her raptures over pleasures that would only have bored the other

girls he knew, he liked the ready nonsense that inspired answering

nonsense in him, the occasional flashes of real wit, the inexhaustible

originality of Susan's point-of-view. They had their own vocabulary,

phrases remembered from plays, good and bad, that they had seen

together, or overheard in the car; they laughed and laughed together at

a thousand things that Susan could not remember when she was alone, or,

remembering, found no longer amusing. This was all wonderful, but it

was not love.

But, perhaps, she consoled herself, courtship, in his class, was not

the serious affair she had always known it to be in hers. Rich people

took nothing very seriously, yet they married and made good husbands

for all that. Susan would blame herself for daring to criticize, even

in the tiniest particular, the great gift that the gods laid at her

feet.

One June day, when Susan felt rather ill, and was sitting huddled at

her desk, with chilled feet and burning cheeks, she was sent for by old

Mr. Baxter, and found Miss Emily Saunders in his office. The visitor

was chatting with Peter and the old man, and gaily carried Susan off to

luncheon, after Peter had regretted his inability to come too. They

went to the Palace Hotel, and Susan thought everything, Miss Emily

especially, very wonderful and delightful, and, warmed and sustained by

a delicious lunch, congratulated herself all during the afternoon that

she herself had risen to the demand of the occasion, had really been

"funny" and "nice," had really "made good." She knew Emily had been

amused and attracted, and suspected that she would hear from that

fascinating young person again.

A few weeks later a letter came from Miss Saunders asking Susan to

lunch with the family, in their San Rafael home. Susan admired the

handsome stationery, the monogram, the bold, dashing hand. Something in

Mary Lou's and Georgianna's pleasure in this pleasure for her made her

heart ache as she wrote her acceptance. She was far enough from the

world of ease and beauty and luxury, but how much further were these

sweet, uncomplaining, beauty-starved cousins of hers!

Mary Lou went with her to the ferry, when the Sunday came, just for a

ride on the hot day, and the two, being early, roamed happily over the

great ferry building, watching German and Italian picnics form and file

through the gateways, and late-comers rush madly up to the closing

doors. Susan had been to church at seven o'clock, and had since washed

her hair, and washed and pressed her best shirtwaist, but she felt

fresh and gay.

Presently, with a shout of pleasure that drew some attention to their

group, Peter Coleman came up to them. It appeared that he was to be

Miss Saunders' guest at luncheon, too, and he took charge of the

radiant Susan with evident satisfaction, and much laughter.

"Dear me! I wish I was going, too," said Mary Lou mildly, as they

parted. "But I presume a certain young man is very glad I am not," she

added, with deep finesse. Peter laughed out, but turned red, and Susan

wished impatiently that Mary Lou would not feel these embarrassing

inanities to be either welcome or in good taste.

But no small cloud could long shadow the perfect day. The Saunders'

home, set in emerald lawns, brightened by gay-striped awnings, fragrant

with flowers indoors and out, was quite the most beautiful she had ever

seen. Emily's family was all cordiality; the frail, nervous, richly

dressed little mother made a visible effort to be gracious to this

stranger, and Emily's big sister, Ella, in whom Susan recognized the

very fat young woman of the Zinkand party, was won by Susan's

irrepressible merriment to abandon her attitude of bored, good-natured

silence, and entered into the conversation at luncheon with sudden

zest. The party was completed by Mrs. Saunders' trained nurse, Miss

Baker, a placid young woman who did not seem, to Susan, to appreciate

her advantages in this wonderful place, and the son of the house,

Kenneth, a silent, handsome, pale young man, who confined his remarks

during luncheon to the single observation, made to Peter, that he was

"on the wagon."

The guest wondered what dinner would be, if this were luncheon merely.

Everything was beautifully served, smoking hot or icy cold, garnished

and seasoned miraculously. Subtle flavors contended with other flavors,

whipped cream appeared in most unexpected places--on the bouillon, and

in a rosette that topped the salad--of the hot bread and the various

chutneys and jellies and spiced fruits and cheeses and olives alone,

Susan could have made a most satisfactory meal. She delighted in the

sparkling glass, the heavy linen and silver, the exquisite flowers.

Together they seemed to form a lulling draught for her senses; Susan

felt as if undue cold, undue heat, haste and worry and work, the office

with its pencil-dust and ink-stains and her aunt's house, odorous,

dreary and dark, were alike a half-forgotten dream.

After luncheon they drove to a bright, wide tennis-court, set in

glowing gardens, and here Susan was introduced to a score of noisy,

white-clad young people, and established herself comfortably on a bench

near the older women, to watch the games. This second social experience

was far happier than her first, perhaps because Susan resolutely put

her thoughts on something else than herself to-day, watched and

laughed, talked when she could, was happily silent when she could not,

and battled successfully with the thought of neglect whenever it raised

its head. Bitter as her lesson had been she was grateful for it to-day.

Peter, very lithe, very big, gloriously happy, played in one set, and,

winning, came to throw himself on the grass at Susan's feet, panting

and hot. This made Susan the very nucleus of the gathering group, the

girls strolled up under their lazily twirling parasols, the men ranged

themselves beside Peter on the lawn. Susan said very little; again she

found the conversation a difficult one to enter, but to-day she did not

care; it was a curious, and, as she was to learn later, a

characteristic conversation, and she analyzed it lazily as she listened.

There was a bright insincerity about everything they said, a languid

assumption that nothing in the world was worth an instant's

seriousness, whether it was life or death, tragedy or pathos. Susan had

seen this before in Peter, she saw him in his element now. He laughed

incessantly, as they all did. The conversation called for no particular

effort; it consisted of one or two phrases repeated constantly, and

with varying inflections, and interspersed by the most trivial and

casual of statements. To-day the phrase, "Would a nice girl DO that?"

seemed to have caught the general fancy. Susan also heard the verb to

love curiously abused.

"Look out, George--your racket!" some girl said vigorously.

"Would a nice girl DO that? I nearly put your eye out, didn't I? I tell

you all I'm a dangerous character," her neighbor answered laughingly.

"Oh, I love that!" another girl's voice said, adding presently, "Look

at Louise's coat. Don't you love it?"

"I love it," said several voices. Another languidly added, "I'm crazy

about it."

"I'm crazy about it," said the wearer modestly, "Aunt Fanny sent it."

"Can a nice girl DO that?" asked Peter, and there was a general shout.

"But I'm crazy about your aunt," some girl asserted, "you know she told

Mother that I was a perfect little lady--honestly she did! Don't you

love that?"

"Oh, I LOVE that," Emily Saunders said, as freshly as if coining the

phrase. "I'm crazy about it!"

"Don't you love it? You've got your aunt's number," they all said. And

somebody added thoughtfully, "Can a nice girl DO that?"

How sure of themselves they were, how unembarrassed and how marvelously

poised, thought Susan. How casually these fortunate young women could

ask what friends they pleased to dinner, could plan for to-day,

to-morrow, for all the days that were! Nothing to prevent them from

going where they wanted to go, buying what they fancied, doing as they

pleased! Susan felt that an impassable barrier stood between their

lives and hers.

Late in the afternoon Miss Ella, driving in with a gray-haired young

man in a very smart trap, paid a visit to the tennis court, and was

rapturously hailed. She was evidently a great favorite.

"See here, Miss Brown," she called out, after a few moments, noticing

Susan, "don't you want to come for a little spin with me?"

"Very much," Susan said, a little shyly.

"Get down, Jerry," Miss Saunders said, giving her companion a little

shove with her elbow.

"Look here, who you pushing?" demanded the gray-haired young man,

without venom.

"I'm pushing you."

"'It's habit. I keep right on loving her!'" quoted Mr. Phillips to the

bystanders. But he got lazily down, and Susan got up, and they were

presently spinning away into the quiet of the lovely, warm summer

afternoon.

Miss Saunders talked rapidly, constantly, and well. Susan was amused

and interested, and took pains to show it. In great harmony they spent

perhaps an hour in driving, and were homeward bound when they

encountered two loaded buckboards, the first of which was driven by

Peter Coleman.

Miss Saunders stopped the second, to question her sister, who, held on

the laps of a girl and young man on the front seat, was evidently in

wild spirits.

"We're only going up to Cameroncourt!" Miss Emily shouted cheerfully.

"Keep Miss Brown to dinner! Miss Brown, I'll never speak to you again

if you don't stay!" And Susan heard a jovial echo of "Can a nice girl

DO that?" as they drove away.

"A noisy, rotten crowd," said Miss Saunders. "Mamma hates Emily to go

with them, and what my cousins--the Bridges and the Eastenbys of

Maryland are our cousins, I've just been visiting them--would say to a

crowd like that I hate to think! That's why I wanted Emily to come out

in Washington. You know we really have no connections here, and no old

friends. My uncle, General Botheby Hargrove, has a widowed daughter

living with him in Baltimore, Mrs. Stephen Kay, she is now,--well, I

suppose she's really in the most exclusive little set you could find

anywhere--"

Susan listened interestedly. But when they were home again, and Ella

was dressing for some dinner party, she very firmly declined the old

lady's eager invitation to remain. She was a little more touched by

Emily's rudeness than she would admit, a little afraid to trust herself

any further to so uncertain a hostess.

She went soberly home, in the summer twilight, soothed in spite of

herself by the beauty of the quiet bay, and pondering deeply. Had she

deserved this slight in any way? she wondered. Should she have come

away directly after luncheon? No, for they had asked her, with great

warmth, for dinner! Was it something that she should, in all dignity,

resent? Should Peter be treated a little coolly; Emily's next overture

declined?

She decided against any display of resentment. It was only the strange

way of these people, no claim of courtesy was strong enough to offset

the counter-claim of any random desire. They were too used to taking

what they wanted, to forgetting what it was not entirely convenient to

remember. They would think it absurd, even delightfully amusing in her,

to show the least feeling.

Arriving late, she gave her cousins a glowing account of the day, and

laughed with Georgie over the account of a call from Loretta's Doctor

O'Connor. "Loretta's beau having the nerve to call on me!" Georgie

said, with great amusement.

Almost hourly, in these days when she saw him constantly, Susan tried

to convince herself that her heart was not quite committed yet to Peter

Coleman's keeping. But always without success. The big, sweet-tempered,

laughing fellow, with his generosity, his wealth, his position, had

become all her world, or rather he had become the reigning personage in

that other world at whose doorway Susan stood, longing and enraptured.

A year ago, at the prospect of seeing him so often, of feeling so sure

of his admiration and affection, of calling him "Peter," Susan would

have felt herself only too fortunate. But these privileges, fully

realized now, brought her more pain than joy. A restless unhappiness

clouded their gay times together, and when she was alone Susan spent

troubled hours in analysis of his tones, his looks, his words. If a

chance careless phrase of his seemed to indicate a deepening of the

feeling between them, Susan hugged that phrase to her heart. If Peter,

on the other hand, eagerly sketched to her plans for a future that had

no place for her, Susan drooped, and lay wakeful and heartsick long

into the night. She cared for him truly and deeply, although she never

said so, even to herself, and she longed with all her ardent young soul

for the place in the world that awaited his wife. Susan knew that she

could fill it, that he would never be anything but proud of her; she

only awaited the word--less than a word!--that should give her the

right to enter into her kingdom.

By all the conventions of her world these thoughts should not have come

to her until Peter's attitude was absolutely ascertained. But Susan was

honest with herself; she must have been curiously lacking in human

tenderness, indeed, NOT to have yielded her affection to so joyous and

so winning a claimant.

As the weeks went by she understood his ideals and those of his

associates more and more clearly, and if Peter lost something of his

old quality as a god, by the analysis, Susan loved him all the more for

finding him not quite perfect. She knew that he was young, that his

head was perhaps a little turned by sudden wealth and popularity, that

life was sweet to him just as it was; he was not ready yet for

responsibilities and bonds. He thought Miss Susan Brown was the

"bulliest" girl he knew, loved to give her good times and resented the

mere mention of any other man's admiration for her. Of what could she

complain?

Of course--Susan could imagine him as disposing of the thought

comfortably--she DIDN'T complain. She took things just as he wanted her

to, had a glorious time whenever she was with him, and was just as

happy doing other things when he wasn't about. Peter went for a month

to Tahoe this summer, and wrote Susan that there wasn't a fellow at the

hotel that was half as much fun as she was. He told her that if she

didn't immediately answer that she missed him like Hannibal he would

jump into the lake.

Susan pondered over the letter. How answer it most effectively? If she

admitted that she really did miss him terribly--but Susan was afraid of

the statement, in cold black-and-white. Suppose that she hinted at

herself as consoled by some newer admirer? The admirer did not exist,

but Peter would not know that. She discarded this subterfuge as "cheap."

But how did other girls manage it? The papers were full of engagements,

men WERE proposing matrimony, girls WERE announcing themselves as

promised, in all happy certainty. Susan decided that, when Peter came

home, she would allow their friendship to proceed just a little further

and then suddenly discourage every overture, refuse invitations, and

generally make herself as unpleasant as possible, on the ground that

Auntie "didn't like it." This would do one of two things, either stop

their friendship off short,--it wouldn't do that, she was happily

confident,--or commence things upon a new and more definite basis.

But when Peter came back he dragged his little aunt all the way up to

Mr. Brauer's office especially to ask Miss Brown if she would dine with

them informally that very evening. This was definite enough! Susan

accepted and planned a flying trip home for a fresh shirtwaist at five

o'clock. But at five a troublesome bill delayed her, and Susan,

resisting an impulse to shut it into a desk drawer and run away from

it, settled down soberly to master it. She was conscious, as she shook

hands with her hostess two hours later, of soiled cuffs, but old Mr.

Baxter, hearing her apologies, brought her downstairs a beautifully

embroidered Turkish robe, in dull pinks and blues, and Susan, feeling

that virtue sometimes was rewarded, had the satisfaction of knowing

that she looked like a pretty gipsy during the whole evening, and was

immensely gratifying her old host as well. To Peter, it was just a

quiet, happy evening at home, with the pianola and flashlight

photographs, and a rarebit that wouldn't grow creamy in spite of his

and Susan's combined efforts. But to Susan it was a glimpse of Paradise.

"Peter loves to have his girl friends dine here," smiled old Mrs.

Baxter in parting. "You must come again. He has company two or three

times a week." Susan smiled in response, but the little speech was the

one blot on a happy evening.

Every happy time seemed to have its one blot. Susan would have her

hour, would try to keep the tenderness out of her "When do I see you

again, Peter?" to be met by his cheerful "Well, I don't know. I'm going

up to the Yellands' for a week, you know. Do you know Clare Yelland?

She's the dandiest girl you ever saw--nineteen, and a raving beauty!"

Or, wearing one of Peter's roses on her black office-dress, she would

have to smile through Thorny's interested speculations as to his

friendship for this society girl or that. "The Chronicle said yesterday

that he was supposed to be terribly crushed on that Washington girl,"

Thorny would report. "Of course, no names, but you could tell who they

meant!"

Susan began to talk of going away "to work."

"Lord, aren't you working now?" asked William Oliver in healthy scorn.

"Not working as hard as I could!" Susan said. "I can't--can't seem to

get interested--" Tears thickened her voice, she stopped short.

The two were sitting on the upper step of the second flight of stairs

in the late evening, just outside the door of the room where Alfred

Lancaster was tossing and moaning in the grip of a heavy cold and

fever. Alfred had lost his position, had been drinking again, and now

had come home to his mother for the fiftieth time to be nursed and

consoled. Mrs. Lancaster, her good face all mother-love and pity, sat

at his side. Mary Lou wept steadily and unobtrusively. Susan and Billy

were waiting for the doctor.

"No," the girl resumed thoughtfully, after a pause, "I feel as if I'd

gotten all twisted up and I want to go away somewhere and get started

fresh. I could work like a slave, Bill, in a great clean institution,

or a newspaper office, or as an actress. But I can't seem to straighten

things out here. This isn't MY house, I didn't have anything to do with

the making of it, and I can't feel interested in it. I'd rather do

things wrong, but do them MY way!"

"It seems to me you're getting industrious all of a sudden, Sue."

"No." She hardly understood herself. "But I want to GET somewhere in

this life, Bill," she mused. "I don't want to sit back and wait for

things to come to me. I want to go to them. I want some alternative. So

that--" her voice sank, "so that, if marriage doesn't come, I can say

to myself, 'Never mind, I've got my work!'"

"Just as a man would," he submitted thoughtfully.

"Just as a man would," she echoed, eager for his sympathy.

"Well, that's Mrs. Carroll's idea. She says that very often, when a

girl thinks she wants to get married, what she really wants is

financial independence and pretty clothes and an interest in life."

"I think that's perfectly true," Susan said, struck. "Isn't she wise?"

she added.

"Yes, she's a wonder! Wise and strong,--she's doing too much now,

though. How long since you've been over there, Sue?"

"Oh, ages! I'm ashamed to say. Months. I write to Anna now and then,

but somehow, on Sundays--"

She did not finish, but his thoughts supplied the reason. Susan was

always at home on Sundays now, unless she went out with Peter Coleman.

"You ought to take Coleman over there some day, Sue, they used to know

him when he was a kid. Let's all go over some Sunday."

"That would be fun!" But he knew she did not mean it. The atmosphere of

the Carrolls' home, their poverty, their hard work, their gallant

endurance of privation and restriction were not in accord with Susan's

present mood. "How are all of them?" she presently asked, after an

interval, in which Alfie's moaning and the hoarse deep voice of Mary

Lord upstairs had been the only sounds.

"Pretty good. Joe's working now, the little darling!"

"Joe is! What at?"

"She's in an architect's office, Huxley and Huxley. It's a pretty good

job, I guess."

"But, Billy, doesn't that seem terrible? Joe's so beautiful, and when

you think how rich their grandfather was! And who's home?"

"Well, Anna gets home from the hospital every other week, and Phil

comes home with Joe, of course. Jim's still in school, and Betsey helps

with housework. Betsey has a little job, too. She teaches an infant

class at that little private school over there."

"Billy, don't those people have a hard time! Is Phil behaving?"

"Better than he did. Yes, I guess he's pretty good now. But there are

all Jim's typhoid bills to pay. Mrs. Carroll worries a good deal.

Anna's an angel about everything, but of course Betts is only a kid,

and she gets awfully mad."

"And Josephine," Susan smiled. "How's she?"

"Honestly, Sue," Mr. Oliver's face assumed the engaging expression

reserved only for his love affairs, "she is the dearest little darling

ever! She followed me out to the porch on Sunday, and said 'Don't catch

cold, and die before your time,'--the little cutie!"

"Oh, Bill, you imbecile! There's nothing to THAT," Susan laughed out

gaily.

"Aw, well," he began affrontedly, "it was the little way she said it--"

"Sh-sh!" said Mary Lou, white faced, heavy-eyed, at Alfred's door.

"He's just dropped off... The doctor just came up the steps, Bill, will

you go down and ask him to come right up? Why don't you go to bed, Sue?"

"How long are you going to wait?" asked Susan.

"Oh, just until after the doctor goes, I guess," Mary Lou sighed.

"Well, then I'll wait for you. I'll run up and see Mary Lord a few

minutes. You stop in for me when you're ready."

And Susan, blowing her cousin an airy kiss, ran noiselessly up the last

flight of stairs, and rapped on the door of the big upper front bedroom.

This room had been Mary Lord's world for ten long years. The invalid

was on a couch just opposite the door, and looked up as Susan entered.

Her dark, rather heavy face brightened instantly.

"Sue! I was afraid it was poor Mrs. Parker ready to weep about

Loretta," she said eagerly. "Come in, you nice child! Tell me something

cheerful!"

"Raw ginger is a drug on the market," said Susan gaily. "Here, I

brought you some roses."

"And I have eleven guesses who sent them," laughed Miss Lord, drinking

in the sweetness and beauty of the great pink blossoms hungrily.

"When'd they come?"

"Just before dinner!" Susan told her. Turning to the invalid's sister

she said: "Miss Lydia, you're busy, and I'm disturbing you."

"I wish you'd disturb us a little oftener, then," said Lydia Lord,

affectionately. "I can work all the better for knowing that Mary isn't

dying to interrupt me."

The older sister, seated at a little table under the gaslight, was deep

in work.

"She's been doing that every night this week," said Miss Mary angrily,

"as if she didn't have enough to do!"

"What is it?" asked Susan. Miss Lydia threw down her pen, and stretched

her cramped fingers.

"Why, Mrs. Lawrence's sister is going to be married," she explained,

"and the family wants an alphabetic list of friends to send the

announcements to. This is the old list, and this the new one, and

here's his list, and some names her mother jotted down,--they're all to

be put in order. It's quite a job."

"At double pay, of course," Miss Mary said bitterly.

"I should hope so," Susan added.

Miss Lydia merely smiled humorously, benevolently, over her work.

"All in the day's work, Susan."

"All in your grandmother's foot," Susan said, inelegantly. Miss Lydia

laughed a little reproachfully, but the invalid's rare, hearty laugh

would have atoned to her for a far more irreverent remark.

"And no 'Halma'?" Susan said, suddenly. For the invalid lived for her

game, every night. "Why didn't you tell me. I could have come up every

night--" She got out the board, set up the men, shook Mary's pillows

and pushed them behind the aching back. "Come on, Macduff," said she.

"Oh, Susan, you angel!" Mary Lord settled herself for an hour of the

keenest pleasure she ever knew. She reared herself in her pillows, her

lanky yellow hand hovered over the board, she had no eyes for anything

but the absurd little red and yellow men.

She was a bony woman, perhaps forty-five, with hair cut across her

lined forehead in the deep bang that had been popular in her girlhood.

It was graying now, as were the untidy loops of hair above it, her face

was yellow, furrowed, and the long neck that disappeared into her

little flannel bed-sack was lined and yellowed too. She lay, restlessly

and incessantly shifting herself, in a welter of slipping quilts and

loose blankets, with her shoulders propped by fancy pillows,--some made

of cigar-ribbons, one of braided strips of black and red satin, one in

a shield of rough, coarse knotted lace, and one with a little boy

printed in color upon it, a boy whose trousers were finished with real

tin buttons. Mary Lord was always the first person Susan thought of

when the girls in the office argued, ignorantly and vigorously, for or

against the law of compensation. Here, in this stuffy boarding-house

room, the impatient, restless spirit must remain, chained and tortured

day after day and year after year, her only contact with the outer

world brought by the little private governess,--her sister--who was

often so tired and so dispirited when she reached home, that even her

gallant efforts could not hide her depression from the keen eyes of the

sick woman. Lydia taught the three small children of one of the city's

richest women, and she and Mary were happy or were despondent in exact

accord with young Mrs. Lawrence's mood. If the great lady were

ungracious, were cold, or dissatisfied, Lydia trembled, for the little

sum she earned by teaching was more than two-thirds of all that she and

Mary had. If Mrs. Lawrence were in a happier frame of mind, Lydia

brightened, and gratefully accepted the occasional flowers or candy,

that meant to both sisters so much more than mere carnations or mere

chocolates.

But if Lydia's life was limited, what of Mary, whose brain was so

active that merely to read of great and successful deeds tortured her

like a pain? Just to have a little share of the world's work, just to

dig and water the tiniest garden, just to be able to fill a glass for

herself with water, or to make a pudding, or to wash up the breakfast

dishes, would have been to her the most exquisite delight in the world.

As it was she lay still, reading, sometimes writing a letter, or

copying something for Lydia, always eager for a game of "Halma" or

"Parchesi," a greater part of the time out of pain, and for a certain

part of the twenty-four hours tortured by the slow-creeping agonies

that waited for her like beasts in the darkness of every night.

Sometimes Susan, rousing from the deep delicious sleep that always

befriended her, would hear in the early morning, rarely earlier than

two o'clock or later than four, the hoarse call in the front room,

"Lyddie! Lyddie!" and the sleepy answer and stumbling feet of the

younger sister, as she ran for the merciful pill that would send Miss

Mary, spent with long endurance, into deep and heavenly sleep. Susan

had two or three times seen the cruel trial of courage that went before

the pill, the racked and twisting body, the bitten lip, the tortured

eyes on the clock.

Twice or three times a year Miss Mary had very bad times, and had to

see her doctor. Perhaps four times a month Miss Lydia beamed at Susan

across the breakfast table, "No pill last night!" These were the

variations of the invalid's life.

Susan, while Mary considered her moves to-night, studied the room idly,

the thousand crowded, useless little possessions so dear to the sick;

the china statuettes, the picture post-cards, the photographs and

match-boxes and old calendars, the dried "whispering-grass" and the

penwipers. Her eyes reached an old photograph; Susan knew it by heart.

It represented an old-fashioned mansion, set in a sweeping lawn, shaded

by great trees. Before one wing an open barouche stood, with driver and

lackey on the box, and behind the carriage a group of perhaps ten or a

dozen colored girls and men were standing on the steps, in the

black-and-white of house servants. On the wide main steps of the house

were a group of people, ladies in spreading ruffled skirts, a bearded,

magnificent old man, young men with heavy mustaches of the sixties, and

some small children in stiff white. Susan knew that the heavy big baby

on a lady's lap was Lydia, and that among the children Mary was to be

found, with her hair pushed straight back under a round-comb, and

scallops on the top of her high black boots. The old man was her

grandfather, and the house the ancestral home of the Lords... Whose

fault was it that just a little of that ease had not been safely

guarded for these two lonely women, Susan wondered. What WAS the secret

of living honestly, with the past, with the present, with those who

were to come?

"Your play. Wake up. Sue!" laughed Mary. "I have you now, I can yard in

seven moves!"

"No skill to that," said Susan hardily, "just sheer luck!"

"Oh you wicked story-teller!" Mary laughed delightedly, and they set

the men for another game.

"No, but you're really the lucky one, Sue," said the older woman

presently.

"_I_ lucky!" and Susan laughed as she moved her man.

"Well, don't you think you are?"

"I think I'm darned unlucky!" the girl declared seriously.

"Here--here! Descriptive adjectives!" called Lydia, but the others paid

no heed.

"Sue, how can you say so!"

"Well, I admit, Miss Mary," Susan said with pretty gravity, "that God

hasn't sent me what he has sent you to bear, for some inscrutable

reason,--I'd go mad if He had! But I'm poor--"

"Now, look here," Mary said authoritatively. "You're young, aren't you?

And you're good-looking, aren't you?"

"Don't mince matters, Miss Mary. Say beautiful," giggled Susan.

"I'm in earnest. You're the youngest and prettiest woman in this house.

You have a good position, and good health, and no encumbrances--"

"I have a husband and three children in the Mission, Miss Mary. I never

mentioned them--"

"Oh, behave yourself, Sue! Well! And, more than that, you have--we

won't mention one special friend, because I don't want to make you

blush, but at least a dozen good friends among the very richest people

of society. You go to lunch with Miss Emily Saunders, and to Burlingame

with Miss Ella Saunders, you get all sorts of handsome presents--isn't

this all true?"

"Absolutely," said Susan so seriously, so sadly, that the invalid laid

a bony cold one over the smooth brown one arrested on the "Halma" board.

"Why, I wasn't scolding you, dearie!" she said kindly. "I just wanted

you to appreciate your blessings!"

"I know--I know," Susan answered, smiling with an effort. She went to

bed a little while later profoundly depressed.

It was all true, it was all true! But, now that she had it, it seemed

so little! She was beginning to be popular in the Saunders set,--her

unspoiled freshness appealed to more than one new friend, as it had

appealed to Peter Coleman and to Emily and Ella Saunders. She was

carried off for Saturday matinees, she was in demand for one Sunday

after another. She was always gay, always talkative, she had her value,

as she herself was beginning to perceive. And, although she met very

few society men, just now, being called upon to amuse feminine

luncheons or stay overnight with Emily when nobody else was at home,

still her social progress seemed miraculously swift to Thorny, to Billy

and Georgie and Virginia, even sometimes to herself. But she wanted

more--more--more! She wanted to be one of this group herself, to

patronize instead of accepting patronage.

Slowly her whole nature changed to meet this new hope. She made use of

every hour now, discarded certain questionable expressions, read good

books, struggled gallantly with her natural inclination to

procrastinate. Her speech improved, the tones of her voice, her

carriage, she wore quiet colors how, and became fastidious in the

matter of belts and cuffs, buttons and collars and corsets. She

diverted Mary Lou by faithfully practicing certain beautifying

calisthenics at night.

Susan was not deceived by the glittering, prismatic thing known as

Society. She knew that Peter Coleman's and Emily Saunders' reverence

for it was quite the weakest thing in their respective characters. She

knew that Ella's boasted family was no better than her own, and that

Peter's undeniable egoism was the natural result of Peter's

up-bringing, and that Emily's bright unselfish interest in her,

whatever it had now become, had commenced with Emily's simple desire to

know Peter through Susan, and have an excuse to come frequently to

Hunter, Baxter & Hunter's when Peter was there.

Still, she could not divest these three of the old glory of her first

impressions. She liked Emily and Ella none the less because she

understood them better, and felt that, if Peter had his human

weaknesses, he was all the nearer her for that.

Mrs. Lancaster would not allow her to dine down-town with him alone.

Susan laughed at the idea that she could possibly do anything

questionable, but kept the rule faithfully, and, if she went to the

theater alone with Peter, never let him take her to supper afterward.

But they had many a happy tea-hour together, and on Sundays lunched in

Sausalito, roamed over the lovely country roads, perhaps stopped for

tea at the Carrolls', or came back to the city and had it at the quiet

Palace. Twice Peter was asked to dine at Mrs. Lancaster's, but on the

first occasion he and Susan were begged by old Mrs. Baxter to come and

amuse her loneliness instead, and on the second Susan telephoned at the

last moment to say that Alfie was at home and that Auntie wanted to ask

Peter to come some other time.

Alfie was at home for a dreadful week, during which the devoted women

suffered agonies of shame and terror. After that he secured, in the

miraculous way that Alfie always did secure, another position and went

away again.

"I can stand Alfie," said Susan to Billy in strong disgust. "But it

does make me sick to have Auntie blaming his employers for firing him,

and calling him a dear unfortunate boy! She said to me to-day that the

other clerks were always jealous of Alfie, and tried to lead him

astray! Did you ever hear such blindness!"

"She's always talked that way," Billy answered, surprised at her

vehemence. "You used to talk that way yourself. You're the one that has

changed."

Winter came on rapidly. The mornings were dark and cold now when Susan

dressed, the office did not grow comfortably warm until ten o'clock,

and the girls wore their coats loose across their shoulders as they

worked.

Sometimes at noon Miss Thornton and Susan fared forth into the cold,

sunny streets, and spent the last half of the lunch-hour in a brisk

walk. They went into the high-vaulted old Post Street Library for

books, threaded their way along Kearney Street, where the noontide

crowd was gaily ebbing and flowing, and loitered at the Flower Market,

at Lotta's Fountain, drinking in the glory of violets and daffodils,

under the winter sun. Now and then they lunched uptown at some

inexpensive restaurant that was still quiet and refined. The big hotels

were far too costly but there were several pretty lunchrooms, "The Bird

of Paradise," "The London Tearoom," and, most popular of all, "The

Ladies Exchange."

The girls always divided a twenty-five-cent entree between them, and

each selected a ten-cent dessert, leaving a tip for the waitress out of

their stipulated half-dollar. It was among the unwritten laws that the

meal must appear to more than satisfy both.

"Thorny, you've got to have the rest of this rice!" Susan would urge,

gathering the slender remains of "Curried chicken family style" in her

serving spoon.

"Honestly, Susan, I couldn't! I've got more than I want here," was the

orthodox response.

"It'll simply go to waste here," Susan always said, but somehow it

never did. The girls loitered over these meals, watching the other

tables, and the women who came to the counters to buy embroidered

baby-sacques, and home-made cakes and jellies.

"Wouldn't you honestly like another piece of plum pie, Sue?" Thorny

would ask.

"I? Oh, I couldn't! But YOU have one, Thorny--"

"I simply couldn't!" So it was time to ask for the check.

They were better satisfied, if less elegantly surrounded, when they

went to one of the downtown markets, and had fried oysters for lunch.

Susan loved the big, echoing places, cool on the hottest day, never too

cold, lined with long rows of dangling, picked fowls, bright with boxes

of apples and oranges. The air was pleasantly odorous of cheeses and

cooked meats, cocks crowed unseen in crates and cages, bare-headed boys

pushed loaded trucks through the narrow aisles. Susan and Miss Thornton

would climb a short flight of whitewashed stairs to a little lunch-room

over one of the oyster stalls. Here they could sit at a small table,

and look down at the market, the shoppers coming and going, stout

matrons sampling sausages and cheeses, and Chinese cooks, bareheaded,

bare-ankled, dressed in dark blue duck, selecting broilers and roasts.

Their tablecloth here was coarse, but clean, and a generous management

supplied several sauces, a thick china bowl of crackers, a plate heaped

with bread, salty yellow butter, and saucers of boiled shrimps with

which guests might occupy themselves until the arrival of the oysters.

Presently the main dish arrived, some forty small, brown, buttery

oysters on each smoking hot plate. No pretense was necessary at this

meal, there was enough, and more than enough. Susan's cheeks would burn

rosily all afternoon. She and Thorny departing never tailed to remark,

"How can they do it for twenty-five cents?" and sometimes spent the

walk back to the office in a careful calculation of exactly what the

meal had cost the proprietor.

"Did he send you a Christmas present?" asked Thorny one January day,

when an irregular bill had brought her to Susan's desk.

"Who? Oh, Mr. Coleman?" Susan looked up innocently. "Yes, yes indeed he

did. A lovely silver bureau set. Auntie was in two minds about letting

me keep it." She studied the bill. "Well, that's the regular H. B. & H.

Talcum Powder," she said, "only he's made them a price on a dozen

gross. Send it back, and have Mr. Phil O. K. it!"

"A silver set! You lucky kid! How many pieces?"

"Oh, everything. Even toilet-water bottles, and a hatpin holder.

Gorgeous." Susan wrote "Mr. P. Hunter will please O. K." in the margin

against the questioned sale.

"You take it pretty coolly, Sue," Miss Thornton said, curiously.

"It's cool weather, Thorny dear." Susan smiled, locked her firm young

hands idly on her ledger, eyed Miss Thornton honestly. "How should I

take it?" said she.

The silver set had filled all Mrs. Lancaster's house with awed

admiration on Christmas Day, but Susan could not forget that Peter had

been out of town on both holidays, and that she had gained her only

knowledge of his whereabouts from the newspapers. A handsome present

had been more than enough to satisfy her wildest dreams, the year

before. It was not enough now.

"S'listen, Susan. You're engaged to him?"

"Honestly,--cross my heart!--I'm not."

"But you will be when he asks you?"

"Thorny, aren't you awful!" Susan laughed; colored brilliantly.

"Well, WOULDN'T you?" the other persisted.

"I don't suppose one thinks of those things until they actually

happen," Susan said slowly, wrinkling a thoughtful forehead. Thorny

watched her for a moment with keen interest, then her own face softened

suddenly.

"No, of course you don't!" she agreed kindly. "Do you mind my asking,

Sue?"

"No-o-o!" Susan reassured her. As a matter of fact, she was glad when

any casual onlooker confirmed her own secret hopes as to the

seriousness of Peter Coleman's intention.

Peter took her to church on Easter Sunday, and afterward they went to

lunch with his uncle and aunt, spent a delightful rainy afternoon with

books and the piano, and, in the casual way that only wealth makes

possible, were taken downtown to dinner by old Mr. Baxter at six

o'clock. Taking her home at nine o' clock, Peter told her that he was

planning a short visit to Honolulu with the Harvey Brocks. "Gee, I wish

you were going along!" he said.

"Wouldn't it be fun!" Susan agreed.

"Well, say! Mrs. Brock would love it--" he began eagerly.

"Oh, Peter, don't talk nonsense!" Susan felt, at a moment like this,

that she actually disliked him.

"I suppose it couldn't be worked," he said sadly. And no more of it was

said.

He came into the office but once that week. Late in a summer-like

afternoon Susan looked down at Mr. Baxter's office to see Peter

spreading his steamer tickets on the desk. He looked up and laughed at

her, and later ran up to the deck for a few minutes to say good-bye.

They said it laughingly, among the hot-water bags and surgical

accessories, but when Susan went back to her desk the laughter had died

from her eyes.

It was an unseasonably warm spring day, she was wearing the first

shirtwaist of the year, and had come downtown that morning through the

fresh early air on the dummy-front. It was hard to-day to be shut up in

a stuffy office. Outside, the watercarts were making the season's first

trip along Front Street and pedestrians chose the shady side to-day.

Susan thought of the big Oriental liner, the awnings that shaded the

decks, the exquisitely cool and orderly little cabins, the green water

rushing alongside. And for her the languorous bright afternoon had lost

its charm.

She did not see Peter Coleman again for a long time. Summer came, and

Susan went on quiet little Sunday picnics to the beach with Auntie and

Mary Lou, or stayed at home and pressed her collars and washed her

hair. Once or twice she and Billy went over to the Carrolls' Sausalito

home, to spend a happy, quiet week-end. Susan gossiped with the busy,

cheerful mother over the dish-pan, played "Parchesi" with

fifteen-year-old Jim and seventeen-year-old Betsey, reveled in a

confidential, sisterly attitude with handsome Phil, the oldest of the

half-dozen, and lay awake deep into the warm nights to talk, and talk,

and talk with Josephine, who, at her own age, seemed to Susan a much

finer, stronger and more developed character. If Anna, the lovely

serious oldest daughter, happened to be at home on one of her rare

absences from the training-hospital, Susan became her shadow. She loved

few people in the world as she loved Anna Carroll. But, in a lesser

degree, she loved them all, and found these hours in the shabby, frugal

little home among the very happiest of a lonely summer.

About once a month she was carried off by the Saunders, in whose

perfectly appointed guest-room she was by this time quite at home. The

Fourth of July fell on a Friday this year, and Mr. Brauer, of his own

volition, offered Susan the following day as a holiday, too. So that

Susan, with a heart as light as sunshine itself, was free to go with

Ella Saunders for a memorable visit to Del Monte and Santa Cruz.

It was one of the perfect experiences only possible to youth and

irresponsibility. They swam, they went for the Seventeen-Mile Drive,

they rode horseback. Ella knew every inch of the great hotels, even

some of the waiters and housekeepers. She had the best rooms, she saw

that Susan missed nothing. They dressed for dinner, loitered about

among the roses in the long twilight, and Susan met a young Englishman

who later wrote her three letters on his way home to Oxfordshire.

Ella's exquisite gowns had a chapter all to themselves when Susan was

telling her cousins about it, but Susan herself alternated contentedly

enough between the brown linen with the daisy-hat and the black net

with the pearl band in her hair. Miss Saunders' compliments, her

confidences, half-intoxicated the girl.

It was with a little effort that she came back to sober every-day

living. She gave a whole evening to Mary Lord, in her eagerness to

share her pleasure. The sick woman was not interested in gowns, but she

went fairly wild when Susan spoke of Monterey,--the riotous gardens

with their walls of white plaster topped with red pipe, the gulls

wheeling over the little town, the breakers creaming in lazy,

interlocking curves on the crescent of the beach, and the little old

plaster church, with its hundred-year-old red altar-cloth, and its

altar-step worn into grooves from the knees of the faithful.

"Oh, I must see the sea again!" cried Mary.

"Well, don't talk that way! You will," Lydia said cheerfully. But

Susan, seeing the shadow on the kind, plain face, wished that she had

held her tongue.

CHAPTER VI

It was late in July that Georgianna Lancaster startled and shocked the

whole boarding-house out of its mid-summer calm. Susan, chronically

affected by a wish that "something would happen," had been somewhat

sobered by the fact that in poor Virginia's case something HAD

happened. Suddenly Virginia's sight, accepted for years by them all as

"bad," was very bad indeed. The great eye-doctor was angry that it had

not been attended to before. "But it wasn't like this before!" Virginia

protested patiently. She was always very patient after that, so brave

indeed that the terrible thing that was coming swiftly and inevitably

down upon her seemed quite impossible for the others to credit. But

sometimes Susan heard her voice and Mrs. Lancaster's voice rising and

falling for long, long talks in the night. "I don't believe it!" said

Susan boldly, finding this attitude the most tenable in regard to

Virginia's blindness.

Georgie's news, if startling, was not all bad. "Perhaps it'll raise the

hoodoo from all of us old maids!" said Susan, inelegantly, to Mr.

Oliver. "O'Connor doesn't look as if he had sense enough to raise

anything, even the rent!" answered Billy cheerfully.

Susan heard the first of it on a windy, gritty Saturday afternoon, when

she was glad to get indoors, and to take off the hat that had been

wrenching her hair about. She came running upstairs to find Virginia

lying limp upon the big bed, and Mary Lou, red-eyed and pale, sitting

in the rocking-chair.

"Come in, dear, and shut it," said Mary Lou, sighing. "Sit down, Sue."

"What is it?" said Susan uneasily.

"Oh, Sue---!" began Virginia, and burst into tears.

"Now, now, darling!" Mary Lou patted her sister's hand.

"Auntie--" Susan asked, turning pale.

"No, Ma's all right," Mary Lou reassured her, "and there's nothing

really wrong, Sue. But Georgie--Georgie, dear, she's married to Joe

O'Connor! Isn't it DREADFUL?"

"But Ma's going to have it annulled," said Virginia instantly.

"Married!" Susan gasped. "You mean engaged!"

"No, dear, married," Mary Lou repeated, in a sad, musical voice. "They

were married on Monday night--"

"Tell me!" commanded Susan, her eyes flashing with pleasurable

excitement.

"We don't know much, Sue dear. Georgie's been acting rather odd and she

began to cry after breakfast this morning, and Ma got it out of her. I

thought Ma would faint, and Georgie just SCREAMED. I kept calling out

to Ma to be calm--" Susan could imagine the scene. "So then Ma took

Georgie upstairs, and Jinny and I worked around, and came up here and

made up this room. And just before lunch Ma came up, and--she looked

chalk-white, didn't she, Jinny?"

"She looked-well, as white as this spread," agreed Virginia.

"Well, but what accounts for it!" gasped Susan. "Is Georgie CRAZY! Joe

O'Connor! That snip! And hasn't he an awful old mother, or someone, who

said that she'd never let him come home again if he married?"

"Listen, Sue!--You haven't heard half. It seems that they've been

engaged for two months--"

"They HAVE!"

"Yes. And on Monday night Joe showed Georgie that he'd gotten the

license, and they got thinking how long it would be before they could

be married, what with his mother, and no prospects and all, and they

simply walked into St. Peter's and were married!"

"Well, he'll have to leave his mother, that's all!" said Susan.

"Oh, my dear, that's just what they quarreled about! He WON'T."

"He--WON'T?"

"No, if you please! And you can imagine how furious that made Georgie!

And when Ma told us that, she simply set her lips,--you know Ma! And

then she said that she was going to see Father Birch with Georgie this

afternoon, to have it annulled at once."

"Without saying a word to Joe!"

"Oh, they went first to Joe's. Oh, no, Joe is perfectly willing. It

was, as Ma says, a mistake from beginning to end."

"But how can it be annulled, Mary Lou?" Susan asked.

"Well, I don't understand exactly," Mary Lou answered coloring. "I

think it's because they didn't go on any honeymoon--they didn't set up

housekeeping, you know, or something like that!"

"Oh," said Susan, hastily, coloring too. "But wouldn't you know that if

any one of us did get married, it would be annulled!" she said

disgustedly. The others both began to laugh.

Still, it was all very exciting. When Georgie and her mother got home

at dinner-time, the bride was pale and red-eyed, excited, breathing

hard. She barely touched her dinner. Susan could not keep her eyes from

the familiar hand, with its unfamiliar ring.

"I am very much surprised and disappointed in Father Birch," said Mrs.

Lancaster, in a family conference in the dining-room just after dinner.

"He seems to feel that the marriage may hold, which of course is too

preposterous! If Joe O'Connor has so little appreciation--!"

"Ma!" said Georgie wearily, pleadingly.

"Well, I won't, my dear." Mrs. Lancaster interrupted herself with a

visible effort. "And if I am disappointed in Joe," she presently

resumed majestically. "I am doubly disappointed in Georgie. My

baby--that I always trusted--!"

Young Mrs. O'Connor began silently, bitterly, to cry. Susan went to sit

beside her, and put a comforting arm about her.

"I have looked forward to my girls' wedding days," said Mrs. Lancaster,

"with such feelings of joy! How could I anticipate that my own

daughter, secretly, could contract a marriage with a man whose

mother--" Her tone, low at first, rose so suddenly and so passionately

that she was unable to control it. The veins about her forehead swelled.

"Ma!" said Mary Lou, "you only lower yourself to her level!"

"Do you mean that she won't let him bring Georgie there?" asked Susan.

"Whether she would or not," Mrs. Lancaster answered, with admirable

loftiness, "she will not have a chance to insult my daughter. Joe, I

pity!" she added majestically. "He fell deeply and passionately in

love--"

"With Loretta," supplied Susan, innocently.

"He never cared for Loretta!" her aunt said positively. "No. With

Georgie. And, not being a gentleman, we could hardly expect him to act

like one! But we'll say no more about it. It will all be over in a few

days, and then we'll try to forget it!"

Poor Georgie, it was but a sorry romance! Joe telephoned, Joe called,

Father Birch came, the affair hung fire. Georgie was neither married

nor free. Dr. O'Connor would not desert his mother, his mother refused

to accept Georgie. Georgie cried day and night, merely asseverating

that she hated Joe, and loved Ma, and she wished people would let her

alone.

These were not very cheerful days in the boarding-house. Billy Oliver

was worried and depressed, very unlike himself. He had been recently

promoted to the post of foreman, was beginning to be a power among the

men who associated with him and, as his natural instinct for leadership

asserted itself, he found himself attracting some attention from the

authorities themselves. He was questioned about the men, about their

attitude toward this regulation or that superintendent. It was hinted

that the spreading of heresies among the laborers was to be promptly

discouraged. The men were not to be invited to express themselves as to

hours, pay and the advantages of unifying. In other words, Mr. William

Oliver, unless he became a little less interested and less active in

the wrongs and rights of his fellow-men in the iron-works, might be

surprised by a request to carry himself and his public sentiments

elsewhere.

Susan, in her turn, was a little disturbed by the rumor that Front

Office was soon to be abolished; begun for a whim, it might easily be

ended for another whim. For herself she did not very much care; a

certain confidence in the future was characteristic of her, but she

found herself wondering what would become of the other girls, Miss

Sherman and Miss Murray and Miss Cottle.

She felt far more deeply the pain that Peter's attitude gave her, a

pain that gnawed at her heart day and night. He was home from Honolulu

now, and had sent her several curious gifts from Hawaii, but, except

for distant glimpses in the office, she had not seen him.

One evening, just before dinner, as she was dressing and thinking sadly

of the weeks, the months, that had passed since their last happy

evening together, Lydia Lord came suddenly into the room. The little

governess looked white and sick, and shared her distress with Susan in

a few brief sentences. Here was Mrs. Lawrence's check in her hand, and

here Mrs. Lawrence's note to say that her services, as governess to

Chrissy and Donald and little Hazel, would be no longer required. The

blow was almost too great to be realized.

"But I brought it on myself, Sue, yes I did!" said Lydia, with dry

lips. She sat, a shapeless, shabby figure, on the side of the bed, and

pressed a veined hand tightly against her knobby temples, "I brought it

on myself. I want to tell you about it. I haven't given Mary even a

hint! Chrissy has been ill, her throat--they've had a nurse, but she

liked me to sit with her now and then. So I was sitting there awhile

this morning, and Mrs. Lawrence's sister, Miss Bacon, came in, and she

happened to ask me--oh, if only she HADN'T!--if I knew that they meant

to let Yates operate on Chrissy's throat. She said she thought it was a

great pity. Oh, if only I'd held my tongue, fool, fool, FOOL that I

was!" Miss Lydia took down her hand, and regarded Susan with hot, dry

eyes. "But, before I thought," she pursued distressedly, "I said yes, I

thought so too,--I don't know just what words I used, but no more than

that! Chrissy asked her aunt if it would hurt, and she said, 'No, no,

dear!' and I began reading. And now, here's this note from Mrs.

Lawrence saying that she cannot overlook the fact that her conduct was

criticized and discussed before Christina--! And after five years, Sue!

Here, read it!"

"Beast!" Susan scowled at the monogrammed sheet, and the dashing hand.

Miss Lydia clutched her wrist with a hot hand.

"What shall I do, Sue?" she asked, in agony.

"Well, I'd simply--" Susan began boldly enough. But a look at the

pathetic, gray-haired figure on the bed stopped her short. She came,

with the glory of her bright hair hanging loose about her face, to sit

beside Lydia. "Really, I don't know, dear," she said gently. "What do

YOU think?"

"Sue, I don't know!" And, to Susan's horror, poor Lydia twisted about,

rested her arm on the foot of the bed, and began to cry.

"Oh, these rich!" raged Susan, attacking her hair with angry sweeps of

the brush. "Do you wonder they think that the earth was made for them

and Heaven too! They have everything! They can dash you off a note that

takes away your whole income, they can saunter in late to church on

Easter Sunday and rustle into their big empty pews, when the rest of us

have been standing in the aisles for half an hour; they can call in a

doctor for a cut finger, when Mary has to fight perfect agonies before

she dares afford it--Don't mind me," she broke off, penitently, "but

let's think what's to be done. You couldn't take the public school

examinations, could you, Miss Lydia? it would be so glorious to simply

let Mrs. Lawrence slide!"

"I always meant to do that some day," said Lydia, wiping her eyes and

gulping, "but it would take time. And meanwhile--And there are Mary's

doctor's bills, and the interest on our Piedmont lot--" For the Lord

sisters, for patient years, had been paying interest, and an occasional

installment, on a barren little tract of land nine blocks away from the

Piedmont trolley.

"You could borrow--" began Susan.

But Lydia was more practical. She dried her eyes, straightened her hair

and collar, and came, with her own quiet dignity, to the discussion of

possibilities. She was convinced that Mrs. Lawrence had written in

haste, and was already regretting it.

"No, she's too proud ever to send for me," she assured Susan, when the

girl suggested their simply biding their time, "but I know that by

taking me back at once she would save herself any amount of annoyance

and time. So I'd better go and see her to-night, for by to-morrow she

might have committed herself to a change."

"But you hate to go, don't you?" Susan asked, watching her keenly.

"Ah, well, it's unpleasant of course," Lydia said simply. "She may be

unwilling to accept my apology. She may not even see me. One feels

so--so humiliated, Sue."

"In that case, I'm going along to buck you up," said Susan, cheerfully.

In spite of Lydia's protests, go she did. They walked to the Lawrence

home in a night so dark that Susan blinked when they finally entered

the magnificent, lighted hallway.

The butler obviously disapproved of them. He did not quite attempt to

shut the door on them, but Susan felt that they intruded.

"Mrs. Lawrence is at dinner, Miss Lord," he reminded Lydia, gravely.

"Yes, I know, but this is rather--important, Hughes," said Lydia,

clearing her throat nervously.

"You had better see her at the usual time to-morrow," suggested the

butler, smoothly. Susan's face burned. She longed to snatch one of the

iron Japanese swords that decorated the hall, and with it prove to

Hughes that his insolence was appreciated. But more reasonable tactics

must prevail.

"Will you say that I am here, Hughes?" Miss Lord asked quietly.

"Presently," he answered, impassively.

Susan followed him for a few steps across the hall, spoke to him in a

low tone.

"Too bad to ask you to interrupt her, Mr. Hughes," said she, in her

friendly little way, "but you know Miss Lord's sister has been having

one of her bad times, and of course you understand--?" The blue eyes

and the pitiful little smile conquered. Hughes became human.

"Certainly, Miss," he said hoarsely, "but Madam is going to the theater

to-night, and it's no time to see her."

"I know," Susan interposed, sympathetically.

"However, ye may depend upon my taking the best moment," Hughes said,

before disappearing, and when he came back a few moments later, he was

almost gracious.

"Mrs. Lawrence says that if you wish to see her you'll kindly wait,

Miss Lord. Step in here, will you, please? Will ye be seated, ladies?

Miss Chrissy's been asking for you the whole evening, Miss Lord."

"Is that so?" Lydia asked, brightening. They waited, with fast-beating

hearts, for what seemed a long time. The great entrance to the

flower-filled embrasure that led to the dining-room was in full view

from where they stood, and when Mrs. Lawrence, elegantly emacinated,

wonderfully gowned and jeweled, suddenly came out into the tempered

brilliance of the electric lights both girls went to meet her.

Susan's heart burned for Lydia, faltering out her explanation, in the

hearing of the butler.

"This is hardly the time to discuss this, Miss Lord," Mrs. Lawrence

said impatiently, "but I confess I am surprised that a woman who

apparently valued her position in my house should jeopardize it by such

an extraordinary indiscretion--"

Susan's heart sank. No hope here!

But at this moment some six or seven young people followed Mrs.

Lawrence out of the dining-room and began hurriedly to assume their

theater wraps, and Susan, with a leap of her heart, recognized among

them Peter Coleman, Peter splendid in evening dress, with a light

overcoat over his arm, and a silk hat in his hand. His face brightened

when he saw her, he dropped his coat, and came quickly across the hall,

hands outstretched.

"Henrietta! say that you remember your Percy!" he said joyously, and

Susan, coloring prettily, said "Oh, hush!" as she gave him her hand. A

rapid fire of questions followed, he was apparently unconscious of, or

indifferent to, the curiously watching group.

"Well, you two seem to be great friends," Mrs. Lawrence said

graciously, turning from her conversation with Miss Lord.

"This is our cue to sing 'For you was once My Wife,' Susan!" Peter

suggested. Susan did not answer him. She exchanged an amused, indulgent

look with Mrs. Lawrence. Perhaps the girl's quiet dignity rather

surprised that lady, for she gave her a keen, appraising look before

she asked, pleasantly:

"Aren't you going to introduce me to your old friend, Peter?"

"Not old friends," Susan corrected serenely, as they were introduced.

"But vurry, vurry de-ah," supplemented Peter, "aren't we?"

"I hope Mrs. Lawrence knows you well enough to know how foolish you

are, Peter!" Susan said composedly.

And Mrs. Lawrence said brightly, "Indeed I do! For we ARE very old

friends, aren't we, Peter?"

But the woman's eyes still showed a little puzzlement. The exact

position of this girl, with her ready "Peter," her willingness to

disclaim an old friendship, her pleasant unresponsiveness, was a little

hard to determine. A lady, obviously, a possible beauty, and entirely

unknown--

"Well, we must run," Mrs. Lawrence recalled herself to say suddenly.

"But why won't you and Miss Lord run up to see Chrissy for a few

moments, Miss Brown? The poor kiddy is frightfully dull. And you'll be

here in the morning as usual, Miss Lord? That's good. Good-night!"

"You did that, Sue, you darling!" exulted Lydia, as they ran down the

stone steps an hour later, and locked arms to walk briskly along the

dark street. "Your knowing Mr. Coleman saved the day!" And, in the

exuberance of her spirits, she took Susan into a brightly lighted

little candy-store, and treated her to ice-cream. They carried some

home in a dripping paper box for Mary, who was duly horrified, agitated

and rejoiced over the history of the day.

Through Susan's mind, as she lay wakeful in bed that night, one scene

after another flitted and faded. She saw Mrs. Lawrence, glittering and

supercilious, saw Peter, glowing and gay, saw the butler, with his

attempt to be rude, and the little daughter of the house, tossing about

in the luxurious pillows of her big bed. She thought of Lydia Lord's

worn gloves, fumbling in her purse for money, of Mary Lord, so

gratefully eating melting ice-cream from a pink saucer, with a silver

souvenir spoon!

Two different worlds, and she, Susan, torn between them! How far she

was from Peter's world, she felt that she had never realized until

to-night. How little gifts and pleasures signified from a man whose

life was crowded with nothing else! How helpless she was, standing by

while his life whirled him further and further away from the dull

groove in which her own feet were set!

Yet Susan's evening had not been without its little cause for

satisfaction. She had treated Peter coolly, with dignity, with reserve,

and she had seen it not only spur him to a sudden eagerness to prove

his claim to her friendship, but also have its effect upon his hostess.

This was the clue, at last.

"If ever I have another chance," decided Susan, "he won't have such

easy sailing! He will have to work for my friendship as if I were the

heiress, and he a clerk in Front Office."

August was the happiest month Susan had ever known, September even

better, and by October everybody at Mrs. Lancaster's boarding-house was

confidently awaiting the news of Susan Brown's engagement to the rich

Mr. Peter Coleman. Susan herself was fairly dazed with joy. She felt

herself the most extraordinarily fortunate girl in the world.

Other matters also prospered. Alfred Lancaster had obtained a position

in the Mission, and seemed mysteriously inclined to hold it, and to

conquer his besetting weakness. And Georgie's affair was at a peaceful

standstill. Georgie had her old place in the house, was changed in

nothing tangible, and, if she cried a good deal, and went about less

than before, she was not actively unhappy. Dr. O'Connor came once a

week to see her, an uncomfortable event, during which Georgie's mother

was with difficulty restrained from going up to the parlor to tell Joe

what she thought of a man who put his mother before his wife. Virginia

was bravely enduring the horrors of approaching darkness. Susan

reproached herself for her old impatience with Jinny's saintliness;

there was no question of her cousin's courage and faith during this

test. Mary Lou was agitatedly preparing for a visit to the stricken

Eastmans, in Nevada, deciding one day that Ma could, and the next that

Ma couldn't, spare her for the trip.

Susan walked in a golden cloud. No need to hunt through Peter's

letters, to weigh his words,--she had the man himself now unequivocally

in the attitude of lover.

Or if, in all honesty, she knew him to be a little less than that, at

least he was placing himself in that light, before their little world.

In that world theatre-trips, candy and flowers have their definite

significance, the mere frequency with which they were seen together

committed him, surely, to something! They paid dinner-calls together,

they went together to week-end visits to Emily Saunders, at least two

evenings out of every week were spent together. At any moment he might

turn to her with the little, little phrase that would settle this

uncertainty once and for all! Indeed it occurred to Susan sometimes

that he might think it already settled, without words. At least once a

day she flushed, half-delighted, half-distressed,--under teasing

questions on the subject from the office force, or from the boarders at

home; all her world, apparently, knew.

One day, in her bureau drawer, she found the little card that had

accompanied his first Christmas gift, nearly two years before. Why did

a keen pain stir her heart, as she stood idly twisting it in her

fingers? Had not the promise of that happy day been a thousand times

fulfilled?

But the bright, enchanting hope that card had brought had been so

sickeningly deferred! Two years!--she was twenty-three now.

Mrs. Lancaster, opening the bedroom door a few minutes later, found

Susan in tears, kneeling by the bed.

"Why, lovey! lovey!" Her aunt patted the bowed head. "What is it, dear?"

"Nothing!" gulped Susan, sitting back on her heels, and drying her eyes.

"Not a quarrel with Peter?"

"Oh, auntie, no!"

"Well," her aunt sighed comfortably, "of course it's an emotional time,

dear! Leaving the home nest--" Mrs. Lancaster eyed her keenly, but

Susan did not speak. "Remember, Auntie is to know the first of all!"

she said playfully. Adding, after a moment's somber thought, "If

Georgie had told Mama, things would be very different now!"

"Poor Georgie!" Susan smiled, and still kneeling, leaned on her aunt's

knees, as Mrs. Lancaster sat back in the rocking chair.

"Poor Georgie indeed!" said her mother vexedly. "It's more serious than

you think, dear. Joe was here last night. It seems that he's going to

that doctor's convention, at Del Monte a week from next Saturday, and

he was talking to Georgie about her going, too."

Susan was thunderstruck.

"But, Auntie, aren't they going to be divorced?"

Mrs. Lancaster rubbed her nose violently.

"They are if _I_ have anything to say!" she said, angrily. "But, of

course, Georgie has gotten herself into this thing, and now Mama isn't

going to get any help in trying to get her out! Joe was extremely rude

and inconsiderate about it, and got the poor child crying--!"

"But, Auntie, she certainly doesn't want to go!"

"Certainly she doesn't. And to come home to that dreadful WOMAN, his

mother? Use your senses, Susan!"

"Why don't you forbid Joe O'Connor the house, Auntie?"

"Because I don't want any little whipper-snapper of a medical graduate

from the Mission to DARE to think he can come here, in my own home, and

threaten me with a lawsuit, for alienating his wife's affections!" Mrs.

Lancaster said forcibly. "I never in my life heard such impudence!"

"Is he mad!" exclaimed Susan, in a low, horrified tone.

"Well, I honestly think he is!" Mrs. Lancaster, gratified by this show

of indignation, softened. "But I didn't mean to distress you with this,

dear," said she. "It will all work out, somehow. We mustn't have any

scandal in the family just now, whatever happens, for your sake!"

Pursuant to her new-formed resolutions, Susan was maintaining what

dignity she could in her friendship with Peter nowadays. And when, in

November, Peter stopped her on the "deck" one day to ask her, "How

about Sunday, Sue? I have a date, but I think I can get out of it?" she

disgusted him by answering briskly, "Not for me, Peter. I'm positively

engaged for Sunday."

"Oh, no, you're not!" he assured her, firmly.

"Oh, truly I am!" Susan nodded a good-by, and went humming into the

office, and that night made William Oliver promise to take her to the

Carrolls' in Sausalito for the holiday.

So on a hazy, soft November morning they found themselves on the

cable-car that in those days slipped down the steep streets of Nob

Hill, through the odorous, filthy gaiety of the Chinese quarter,

through the warehouse district, and out across the great crescent of

the water-front. Billy, well-brushed and clean-shaven, looked his best

to-day, and Susan, in a wide, dashing hat, with fresh linen at wrists

and collar, enjoyed the innocent tribute of many a passing glance from

the ceaseless current of men crossing and recrossing the ferry place.

"If they try to keep us for dinner, we'll bashfully remain," said

Billy, openly enchanted by the prospect of a day with his adored

Josephine.

But first they were to have a late second breakfast at Sardi's, the

little ramshackle Sausalito restaurant, whose tables, visible through

green arches, hung almost directly over the water. It was a cheap meal,

oily and fried, but Susan was quite happy, hanging over the rail to

watch the shining surface of the water that was so near. The reflection

of the sun shifted in a ceaselessly moving bright pattern on the

white-washed ceiling, the wash of the outgoing steamer surged through

the piles, and set to rocking all the nearby boats at anchor.

After luncheon, they climbed the long flights of steps that lead

straight through the village, which hangs on the cliff like a cluster

of sea-birds' nests. The gardens were bare and brown now, the trees

sober and shabby.

When the steps stopped, they followed a road that ran like a shelf

above the bay and waterfront far below, and that gave a wonderful

aspect of the wide sweep of hills and sky beyond, all steeped in the

thin, clear autumn haze. Billy pushed open a high gate that had scraped

the path beyond in a deep circular groove, and they were in a fine,

old-fashioned garden, filled with trees. Willow and pepper and

eucalyptus towered over the smaller growth of orange and lemon-verbena

trees; there were acacia and mock-orange and standard roses, and

hollyhock stalks, bare and dry. Only the cosmos bushes, tall and

wavering, were in bloom, with a few chrysanthemums and late asters, the

air was colder here than it had been out under the bright November sun,

and the path under the trees was green and slippery.

On a rise of ground stood the plain, comfortable old house, with a

white curtain blowing here and there at an open window and its front

door set hospitably ajar. But not a soul was in sight.

Billy and Susan were at home here, however, and went through the

hallway to open a back door that gave on the kitchen. It was an

immaculate kitchen, with a fire glowing sleepily behind the shining

iron grating of the stove, and sunshine lying on the well-scrubbed

floor. A tall woman was busy with plants in the bright window.

"Well, you nice child!" she exclaimed, her face brightening as Susan

came into her arms for her motherly kiss. "I was just thinking about

you! We've been hearing things about you, Sue, and wondering--and

wondering--! And Billy, too! The girls will be delighted!"

This was the mother of the five Carrolls, a mother to whom it was easy

to trace some of their beauty, and some of their courage. In the twelve

long years of her widowhood, from a useless, idle, untrained member of

a society to which all three adjectives apply, this woman had grown to

be the broad and brave and smiling creature who was now studying

Susan's face with the insatiable motherliness that even her household's

constant claims failed to exhaust. Manager and cook and houseworker,

seamstress and confidante to her restless, growing brood, still there

was a certain pure radiance that was never quite missing from her

smile, and Susan felt a mad impulse to-day to have a long comforting

cry on the broad shoulder. She thoroughly loved Mrs. Carroll, even if

she thought the older woman's interest in soups and darning and the

filling of lamps a masterly affectation, and pitied her for the bitter

fate that had robbed her of home and husband, wealth and position, at

the very time when her children needed these things the most.

They two went into the sitting-room now, while Billy raced after the

young people who had taken their luncheon, it appeared, and were

walking over the hills to a favorite spot known as "Gioli's" beach.

Susan liked this room, low-ceiled and wide, which ran the length of the

house. It seemed particularly pleasant to-day, with the uncertain

sunlight falling through the well-darned, snowy window-curtains, the

circle of friendly, shabby chairs, the worn old carpet, scrupulously

brushed, the reading-table with a green-shaded lamp, and the old square

piano loaded with music. The room was in Sunday order to-day, books,

shabby with much handling, were ranged neatly on their shelves, not a

fallen leaf lay under the bowl of late roses on the piano.

Susan had had many a happy hour in this room, for if the Carrolls were

poor to the point of absurdity, their mother had made a sort of science

of poverty, and concentrated her splendid mind on the questions of

meals, clothes, and the amusements of their home evenings. That it had

been a hard fight, was still a hard fight, Susan knew. Philip, the

handsome first-born, had the tendencies and temptations natural to his

six-and-twenty years; Anna, her mother's especial companion, was taking

a hard course of nursing in a city hospital; Josephine, the family

beauty, at twenty, was soberly undertaking a course in architecture, in

addition to her daily work in the offices of Huxley and Huxley; even

little Betsey was busy, and Jimmy still in school; so that the brunt of

the planning, of the actual labor, indeed, fell upon their mother. But

she had carried a so much heavier burden, that these days seemed bright

and easeful to Mrs. Carroll, and the face she turned to Susan now was

absolutely unclouded.

"What's all the news, Sue? Auntie's well, and Mary Lou? And what do

they say now of Jinny? Don't tell me about Georgie until the girls are

here! And what's this I hear of your throwing down Phil completely, and

setting up a new young man?"

"Please'm, you never said I wasn'ter," Susan laughed.

"No, indeed I never did! You couldn't do a more sensible thing!"

"Oh, Aunt Jo!" The title was only by courtesy. "I thought you felt that

every woman ought to have a profession!"

"A means of livelihood, my dear, not a profession necessarily! Yes, to

be used in case she didn't marry, or when anything went wrong if she

did," the older woman amended briskly. "But, Sue, marriage first for

all girls! I won't say," she went on thoughtfully, "that any marriage

is better than none at all, but I could ALMOST say that I thought that!

That is, given the average start, I think a sensible woman has nine

chances out of ten of making a marriage successful, whereas there never

was a really complete life rounded out by a single woman."

"My young man has what you'll consider one serious fault," said Susan,

dimpling.

"Dear, dear! And what's that?"

"He's rich."

"Peter Coleman, yes, of course he is!" Mrs. Carroll frowned

thoughtfully. "Well, that isn't NECESSARILY bad, Susan!"

"Aunt Josephine," Susan said, really shaken out of her nonsense by the

serious tone, "do you honestly think it's a drawback? Wouldn't you

honestly rather have Jo, say, marry a rich man than a poor man, other

things being equal?"

"Honestly no, Sue," said Mrs. Carroll.

"But if the rich man was just as good and brave and honest and true as

the poor one?" persisted the girl.

"But he couldn't be, Sue, he never is. The fibers of his moral and

mental nature are too soft. He's had no hardening. No," Mrs. Carroll

shook her head. "No, I've been rich, and I've been poor. If a man earns

his money honestly himself, he grows old during the process, and he may

or may not be a strong and good man. But if he merely inherits it, he

is pretty sure not to be one."

"But aren't there some exceptions?" asked Susan. Mrs. Carroll laughed

at her tone.

"There are exceptions to everything! And I really believe Peter Coleman

is one," she conceded smilingly. "Hark!" for feet were running down the

path outside.

"There you are, Sue!" said Anna Carroll, putting a glowing face in the

sitting-room door. "I came back for you! The others said they would go

slowly, and we can catch them if we hurry!"

She came in, a brilliant, handsome young creature, in rough, well-worn

walking attire, and a gipsyish hat. Talking steadily, as they always

did when together, she and Susan went upstairs, and Susan was loaned a

short skirt, and a cap that made her prettier than ever.

The house was old, there was a hint of sagging here and there, in the

worn floors, the bedrooms were plainly furnished, almost bare. In the

atmosphere there lingered, despite the open windows, the faint

undefinable odor common to old houses in which years of frugal and

self-denying living have set their mark, an odor vaguely compounded of

clean linen and old woodwork, hot soapsuds and ammonia. The children's

old books were preserved in old walnut cases, nothing had been renewed,

recarpeted, repapered for many years.

Still talking, the girls presently ran downstairs, and briskly followed

the road that wound up, above the village, to the top of the hill. Anna

chattered of the hospital, of the superintendent of nurses, who was a

trial to all the young nurses, "all superintendents are tyrants, I

think," said Anna, "and we just have to shut our teeth and bear it! But

it's all so unnecessarily hard, and it's wrong, too, for nursing the

sick is one thing, and being teased by an irritable woman like that is

another! However," she concluded cheerfully, "I'll graduate some day,

and forget her! And meantime, I don't want to worry mother, for Phil's

just taken a real start, and Bett's doctor's bills are paid, and the

landlord, by some miracle, has agreed to plaster the kitchen!"

They joined the others just below the top of the hill, and were

presently fighting the stiff wind that blew straight across the ridge.

Once over it, however, the wind dropped, the air was deliciously soft

and fresh and their rapid walking made the day seem warm. There was no

road; their straggling line followed the little shelving paths beaten

out of the hillside by the cows.

Far below lay the ocean, only a tone deeper than the pale sky. The line

of the Cliff House beach was opposite, a vessel under full sail was

moving in through the Golden Gate. The hills fell sharply away to the

beach, Gioli's ranch-house, down in the valley, was only one deeper

brown note among all the browns. Here and there cows were grazing,

cotton-tails whisked behind the tall, dried thistles.

The Carrolls loved this particular walk, and took it in all weathers.

Sometimes they had a guest or two,--a stray friend of Philip's, or two

or three of Anna's girl friends from the hospital. It did not matter,

for there was no pairing off at the Carroll picnics. Oftener they were

all alone, or, as to-day, with Susan and Billy, who were like members

of the family.

To-day Billy, Jimmy and Betsey were racing ahead like frolicking

puppies; up banks, down banks, shrieking, singing and shouting. Phil

and Josephine walked together, they were inseparable chums, and Susan

thought them a pretty study to-day; Josephine so demurely beautiful in

her middy jacket and tam-o-shanter cap, and Philip so obviously proud

of her.

She and Anna, their hands sunk in their coat-pockets, their hair

loosening under the breezes, followed the others rather silently.

And swiftly, subtly, the healing influences of the hour crept into

Susan's heart. What of these petty little hopes and joys and fears that

fretted her like a cloud of midges day and night? How small they seemed

in the wide silence of these brooding hills, with the sunlight lying

warm on the murmuring ocean below, and the sweet kindly earth underfoot!

"I wish I could live out here, Nance, and never go near to people and

things again!"

"Oh, DON'T you, Sue!"

There was a delay at the farmhouse for cream. The ranchers' damp

dooryard had been churned into deep mud by the cows, strong odors,

delicious to Susan, because they were associated with these happy days,

drifted about, the dairy reeked of damp earth, wet wood, and scoured

tinware. The cream, topping the pan like a circle of leather, was

loosened by a small, sharp stick, and pushed, thick and lumpy, into the

empty jam jar that Josephine neatly presented. A woman came to the

ranch-house door with a grinning Portuguese greeting, the air from the

kitchen behind her was close, and reeked of garlic and onions and other

odors. Susan and Anna went in to look at the fat baby, a brown cherub

whose silky black lashes curved back half an inch from his cheeks.

There were half a dozen small children in the kitchen, cats, even a

sickly chicken or two.

"Very different from the home life of our dear Queen!" said Susan, when

they were out in the air again.

The road now ran between marshy places full of whispering reeds,

occasional crazy fences must be crossed, occasional pools carefully

skirted. And then they were really crossing the difficult strip of

sandy dead grasses, and cocoanut shells, and long-dried seaweeds that

had been tossed up by the sea in a long ridge on the beach, and were

racing on the smooth sand, where the dangerous looking breakers were

rolling so harmlessly. They shouted to each other now, above the roar

of the water, as they gathered drift-wood for their fire, and when the

blaze was well started, indulged in the fascinating pastime of running

in long curves so near to the incoming level rush of the waves that

they were all soon wet enough to feel that no further harm could be

done by frankly wading in the shallows, posing for Philip's camera on

half-submerged rocks, and chasing each other through a frantic game of

beach tag. It was the prudent Josephine,--for Anna was too dreamy and

unpractical to bring her attention to detail,--who suggested a general

drying of shoes, as they gathered about the fire for the lunch--toasted

sandwiches, and roasted potatoes, and large wedges of apple-pie, and

the tin mugs of delicious coffee that crowned all these feasts. Only

sea-air accounted for the quantities in which the edibles disappeared;

the pasteboard boxes and the basket were emptied to the last crumb, and

the coffee-pot refilled and emptied again.

The meal was not long over, and the stiffened boots were being buttoned

with the aid of bent hairpins, when the usual horrifying discovery of

the time was made. Frantic hurrying ensued, the tin cups, dripping salt

water, were strung on a cord, the cardboard boxes fed the last flicker

of the fire, the coffee-pot was emptied into the waves.

And they were off again, climbing up--up--up the long rise of the

hills. The way home always seemed twice the way out, but Susan found it

a soothing, comforting experience to-day. The sun went behind a cloud;

cows filed into the ranch gates for milking; a fine fog blew up from

the sea.

"Wonderful day, Anna!" Susan said. The two were alone together again.

"These walks do make you over," Anna's bright face clouded a little as

she turned to look down the long road they had come. "It's all so

beautiful, Sue," she said, slowly, "and the spring is so beautiful, and

books and music and fires are so beautiful. Why aren't they enough?

Nobody can take those things away from us!"

"I know," Susan said briefly, comprehending.

"But we set our hearts on some silly thing not worth one of these

fogs," Anna mused, "and nothing but that one thing seems to count!"

"I know," Susan said again. She thought of Peter Coleman.

"There's a doctor at the hospital," Anna said suddenly. "A German,

Doctor Hoffman. Of course I'm only one of twenty girls to him, now. But

I've often thought that if I had pretty gowns, and the sort of

home,--you know what I mean, Sue! to which one could ask that type of

really distinguished man---"

"Well, look at my case---" began Susan.

It was almost dark when the seven stormed the home kitchen, tired,

chilly, happy, ravenous. Here they found Mrs. Carroll, ready to serve

the big pot-roast and the squares of yellow cornbread, and to have

Betsey and Billy burn their fingers trying to get baked sweet potatoes

out of the oven. And here, straddling a kitchen chair, and noisily

joyous as usual, was Peter Coleman. Susan knew in a happy instant that

he had gone to find her at her aunt's, and had followed her here, and

during the meal that followed, she was the maddest of all the mad

crowd. After dinner they had Josephine's violin, and coaxed Betsey to

recite, but more appreciated than either was Miss Brown's rendition of

selections from German and Italian opera, and her impersonation of an

inexperienced servant from Erin's green isle. Mrs. Carroll laughed

until the tears ran down her cheeks, as indeed they all did.

The evening ended with songs about the old piano, "Loch Lomond,"

"Love's Old Sweet Song," and "Asthore." Then Susan and Peter and Billy

must run for their hats and wraps.

"And Peter thinks there's MONEY in my window-washer!" said Mrs.

Carroll, when they were all loitering in the doorway, while Betts

hunted for the new time-table.

"Mother's invention" was a standing joke with the young Carrolls, but

their mother had a serene belief that some day SOMETHING might be done

with the little contrivance she had thought of some years ago, by which

the largest of windows might be washed outside as easily as inside. "I

believe I really thought of it by seeing poor maids washing fifth-story

windows by sitting on the sill and tipping out!" she confessed one day

to Susan. Now she had been deeply pleased by Peter's casual interest in

it.

"Peter says that there's NO reason---" she began.

"Oh, Mother!" Josephine laughed indulgently, as she stood with her arm

about her mother's waist, and her bright cheek against her mother's

shoulder, "you've NOT been taking Peter seriously!"

"Jo, when I ask you to take me seriously, it'll be time for you to get

so fresh!" said Peter neatly.

"Your mother is the Lady Edison of the Pacific Coast, and don't you

forget it! I'm going to talk to some men at the shop about this

thing---"

"Say, if you do, I'll make some blue prints," Billy volunteered.

"You're on!" agreed Mr. Coleman.

"You wouldn't want to market this yourself, Mrs. Carroll?"

"Well--no, I don't think so. No, I'm sure I wouldn't! I'd rather sell

it for a lump sum---"

"To be not less than three dollars," laughed Phil.

"Less than three hundred, you mean!" said the interested Peter.

"Three hundred!" Mrs. Carroll exclaimed. "Do you SUPPOSE so?"

"Why, I don't know--but I can find out"

The trio, running for their boat, left the little family rather

excited, for the first time, over the window-cleaner.

"But, Peter, is there really something in it?" asked Susan, on the boat.

"Well,--there might be. Anyway, it seemed a good chance to give them a

lift, don't you know?" he said, with his ingenuous blush. Susan loved

him for the generous impulse. She had sometimes fancied him a little

indifferent to the sufferings of the less fortunate, proof of the

contrary warmed her to the very heart! She had been distressed one day

to hear him gaily telling George Banks, the salesman who was coughing

himself to death despite the frantic care of his wife, a story of a

consumptive, and, on another occasion, when a shawled, shabby woman had

come up to them in the street, with the whined story of five little

hungry children, Susan had been shocked to hear Peter say, with his

irrepressible gaiety, "Well, here! Here's five cents; that's a cent

apiece! Now mind you don't waste it!"

She told herself to-night that these things proved no more than want of

thought. There was nothing wrong with the heart that could plan so

tactfully for Mrs. Carroll.

On the following Saturday Susan had the unexpected experience of

shopping with Mrs. Lancaster and Georgie for the latter's trousseau. It

was unlike any shopping that they had ever done before, inasmuch as the

doctor's unclaimed bride had received from her lord the sum of three

hundred dollars for the purpose. Georgie denied firmly that she was

going to start with her husband for the convention at Del Monte that

evening, but she went shopping nevertheless. Perhaps she could not

really resist the lure of the shining heap of gold pieces. She became

deeply excited and charmed over the buying of the pretty tailor-made,

the silk house dresses, the hat and shoes and linen. Georgie began to

play the bride, was prettily indignant with clerks, pouted at silks and

velvets. Susan did not miss her cousin's bright blush when certain

things, a linen suit, underlinen, a waist or two, were taken from the

mass of things to be sent, and put into Georgie's suitcase.

"And you're to have a silk waist, Ma, I INSIST."

"Now, Baby love, this is YOUR shopping. And, more than that, I really

need a pair of good corsets before I try on waists!"

"Then you'll have both!" Mrs. Lancaster laughed helplessly as the bride

carried her point.

At six o'clock the three met the doctor at the Vienna Bakery, for tea,

and Georgie, quite lofty in her attitude when only her mother and

cousin were to be impressed, seemed suddenly to lose her powers of

speech. She answered the doctor's outline of his plans only by

monosyllables. "Yes," "All right," "That's nice, Joe." Her face was

burning red.

"But Ma--Ma and I--and Sue, too, don't you, Sue?" she stammered

presently. "We think--and don't you think it would be as well,

yourself, Joe, if I went back with Ma to-night---"

Susan, anxiously looking toward the doctor, at this, felt a little

thrill run over her whole body at the sudden glimpse of the confident

male she had in his reply,--or rather, lack of reply. For, after a

vague, absent glance at Georgie, he took a time-table out of his

pocket, and addressed his mother-in-law.

"We'll be back next Sunday, Mrs. Lancaster. But don't worry if you

don't hear from Georgie that day, for we may be late, and Mother won't

naturally want us to run off the moment we get home. But on Monday

Georgie can go over, if she wants to. Perhaps I'll drive her over, if I

can."

"He was the coolest---!" Susan said, half-annoyed, half-admiring, to

Mary Lou, late that night. The boarding-house had been pleasantly

fluttered by the departure of the bride, Mrs. Lancaster, in spite of

herself, had enjoyed the little distinction of being that personage's

mother.

"Well, she'll be back again in a week!" Virginia, missing her sister,

sighed.

"Back, yes," Mrs. Lancaster admitted, "but not quite the same, dear!"

Georgie, whatever her husband, whatever the circumstances of her

marriage, was nearer her mother than any of the others now. As a wife,

she was admitted to the company of wives.

Susan spent the evening in innocently amorous dreams, over her game of

patience. What a wonderful thing, if one loved a man, to fare forth

into the world with him as his wife!----

"I have about as much chance with Joe Carroll as a dead rat," said

Billy suddenly. He was busied with his draughting board and the little

box of draughts-man's instruments that Susan always found fascinating,

and had been scowling and puffing over his work.

"Why?" Susan asked, laughing outright. "Oh, she's so darn busy!" Billy

said, and returned to his work.

Susan pondered it. She wished she were so "darned" busy that Peter

Coleman might have to scheme and plan to see her.

"That's why men's love affairs are considered so comparatively

unimportant, I suppose," she submitted presently. "Men are so busy!"

Billy paid no attention to the generality, and Susan pursued it no

further.

But after awhile she interrupted him again, this time in rather an odd

tone.

"Billy, I want to ask you something---"

"Ask away," said Billy, giving her one somewhat startled glance.

Susan did not speak immediately, and he did not hurry her. A few silent

minutes passed before she laid a card carefully in place, studied it

with her head on one side, and said casually, in rather a husky voice:

"Billy, if a man takes a girl everywhere, and gives her things, and

seems to want to be with her all the time, he's in love with her, isn't

he?"

Billy, apparently absorbed in what he was doing, cleared his throat

before he answered carelessly:

"Well, it might depend, Sue. When a man in my position does it, a girl

knows gosh darn well that if I spend my good hard money on her I mean

business!"

"But--it mightn't be so--with a rich man?" hazarded Susan bravely.

"Why, I don't know, Sue." An embarrassed red had crept into William's

cheeks. "Of course, if a fellow kissed her---"

"Oh, heavens!" cried Susan, scarlet in turn, "he never did anything

like THAT!"

"Didn't, hey?" William looked blank.

"Oh, never!" Susan said, meeting his look bravely. "He's--he's too much

of a gentleman, Bill!"

"Perhaps that's being a gentleman, and perhaps it's not," said Billy,

scowling. "He--but he--he makes love to you, doesn't he?" The crude

phrase was the best he could master in this delicate matter.

"I don't--I don't know!" said Susan, laughing, but with flaming cheeks.

"That's it! He--he isn't sentimental. I don't believe he ever would be,

it's not his nature. He doesn't take anything very seriously, you know.

We talk all the time, but not about really serious things." It sounded

a little lame. Susan halted.

"Of course, Coleman's a perfectly decent fellow---" Billy began, with

brotherly uneasiness.

"Oh, absolutely!" Susan could laugh, in her perfect confidence. "He

acts exactly as if I were his sister, or another boy. He never

even--put his arm about me," she explained, "and I--I don't know just

what he DOES mean---"

"Sure," said Billy, thoughtfully.

"Of course, there's no reason why a man and a girl can't be good

friends just as two men would," Susan said, more lightly, after a pause.

"Oh, yes there is! Don't you fool yourself!" Billy said, gloomily.

"That's all rot!"

"Well, a girl can't stay moping in the house until a man comes along

and says, 'If I take you to the theater it means I want to marry you!'"

Susan declared with spirit. "I--I can't very well turn to Peter now and

say, 'This ends everything, unless you are in earnest!'"

Her distress, her earnestness, her eagerness for his opinion, had

carried her quite out of herself. She rested her face in her hands, and

fixed her anxious eyes upon him.

"Well, here's the way I figure it out," Billy said, deliberately,

drawing his pencil slowly along the edge of his T-square, and squinting

at it absorbedly, "Coleman has a crush on you, all right, and he'd

rather be with you than anyone else---"

"Yes," nodded Susan. "I know that, because---"

"Well. But you see you're so fixed that you can't entertain him here,

Sue, and you don't run in his crowd, so when he wants to see you he has

to go out of his way to do it. So his rushing you doesn't mean as much

as it otherwise would."

"I suppose that's true," Susan said, with a sinking heart.

"The chances are that he doesn't want to get married at all yet,"

pursued Billy, mercilessly, "and he thinks that if he gives you a good

time, and doesn't--doesn't go any further, that he's playing fair."

"That's what I think," Susan said, fighting a sensation of sickness.

Her heart was a cold weight, she hoped that she was not going to cry.

"But all the same, Sue," Billy resumed more briskly, "You can see that

it wouldn't take much to bring an affair like that to a finish.

Coleman's rich, he can marry if he pleases, and he wants what he

wants---You couldn't just stop short, I suppose? You couldn't simply

turn down all his invitations, and refuse everything?" he broke off to

ask.

"Billy, how could I? Right in the next office!"

"Well, that's an advantage, in a way. It keeps the things in his mind.

Either way, you're no worse off for stopping everything now, Sue. If

he's in earnest, he'll not be put off by that, and if he's not, you

save yourself from--from perhaps beginning to care."

Susan could have kissed the top of Billy's rumpled head for the tactful

close. She had thrown her pride to the winds to-night, but she loved

him for remembering it.

"But he would think that I cared!" she objected.

"Let him! That won't hurt you. Simply say that your aunt disapproves of

your being so much with him, and stop short."

Billy went on working, and Susan shuffled her pack for a new game.

"Thank you, Bill," she said at last, gratefully. "I'm glad I told you."

"Oh, that's all right!" said William, gruffly.

There was a silence until Mary Lou came in, to rip up her old velvet

hat, and speculate upon the clangers of a trip to Virginia City.

CHAPTER VII

Life presented itself in a new aspect to Susan Brown. A hundred little

events and influences combining had made it seem to her less a

grab-bag, from which one drew good or bad at haphazard, and more a

rational problem, to be worked out with arbitrarily supplied materials.

She might not make herself either rich or famous, but she COULD,--she

began dimly to perceive,--eliminate certain things from her life and

put others in their places. The race was not to the swift, but to the

faithful. What other people had done, she, by following the old

copybook rules of the honest policy, the early rising, the power of

knowledge, the infinite capacity of taking pains that was genius, could

do, too. She had been the toy of chance too long. She would grasp

chance, now, and make it serve her. The perseverance that Anna brought

to her hospital work, that Josephine exercised in her studies, Susan,

lacking a gift, lacking special training, would seriously devote to the

business of getting married. Girls DID marry. She would presumably

marry some day, and Peter Coleman would marry. Why not, having advanced

a long way in this direction, to each other?

There was, in fact, no alternative in her case. She knew no other

eligible man half as well. If Peter Coleman went out of her life, what

remained? A somewhat insecure position in a wholesale drug-house, at

forty dollars a month, and half a third-story bedroom in a

boarding-house.

Susan was not a calculating person. She knew that Peter Coleman liked

her immensely, and that he could love her deeply, too. She knew that

her feeling for him was only held from an extreme by an inherited

feminine instinct of self-preservation. Marriage, and especially this

marriage, meant to her a great many pleasant things, a splendid,

lovable man with whom to share life, a big home to manage and delight

in, a conspicuous place in society, and one that she knew that she

could fill gracefully and well. Marriage meant children, dear little

white-clad sons, with sturdy bare knees, and tiny daughters

half-smothered in lace and ribbons; it meant power, power to do good,

to develop her own gifts; it meant, above all, a solution of the

problems of her youth. No more speculations, no more vagaries, safely

anchored, happily absorbed in normal cares and pleasures, Susan could

rest on her laurels, and look about her in placid content!

No more serious thought assailed her. Other thoughts than these were

not "nice." Susan safe-guarded her wandering fancies as sternly as she

did herself, would as quickly have let Peter, or any other man, kiss

her, as to have dreamed of the fundamental and essential elements of

marriage. These, said Auntie, "came later." Susan was quite content to

ignore them. That the questions that "came later" might ruin her life

or unmake her compact, she did not know. At this point it might have

made no difference in her attitude. Her affection for Peter was quite

as fresh and pure as her feeling for a particularly beloved brother

would have been.

"You're dated three-deep for Thursday night, I presume?"

"Peter--how you do creep up behind one!" Susan turned, on the deck, to

face him laughingly. "What did you say?"

"I said--but where are you going?"

"Upstairs to lunch. Where did you think?" Susan exhibited the little

package in her hand. "Do I look like a person about to go to a Browning

Cotillion, or to take a dip in the Pacific?"

"No," gurgled Peter, "but I was wishing we could lunch together.

However, I'm dated with Hunter. But what about Thursday night?"

"Thursday." Susan reflected. "Peter, I can't!"

"All foolishness. You can."

"No, honestly! Georgie and Joe are coming. The first time."

"Oh, but you don't have to be there!"

"Oh, but yes I do!"

"Well---" Mr. Coleman picked a limp rubber bathing cap from the top of

a case, and distended it on two well-groomed hands. "Well, Evangeline,

how's Sat.? The great American pay-day!"

"Busy Saturday, too. Too bad. I'm sorry, Peter."

"Woman, you lie!"

"Of course you can insult me, sir. I'm only a working girl!"

"No, but who have you got a date with?" Peter said curiously. "You're

blushing like mad! You're not engaged at all!"

"Yes, I am. Truly. Lydia Lord is taking the civil service examinations;

she wants to get a position in the public library. And I promised that

I'd take Mary's dinner up and sit with her."

"Oh, shucks! You could get out of that! However----I'll tell you what,

Susan. I was going off with Russ on Sunday, but I'll get out of it, and

we'll go see guard mount at the Presidio, and have tea with Aunt Clara,

what?"

"I don't believe they have guard mount on Sundays."

"Well, then we'll go feed the gold-fish in the Japanese gardens,--they

eat on Sundays, the poor things! Nobody ever converted them."

"Honestly, Peter---"

"Look here, Susan!" he exclaimed, suddenly aroused. "Are you trying to

throw me down? Well, of all gall!"

Susan's heart began to thump.

"No, of course I'm not!"

"Well, then, shall I get tickets for Monday night?"

"Not Monday."

"Look here, Susan! Somebody's been stuffing you, I can see it! Was it

Auntie? Come on, now, what's the matter, all of a sudden?"

"There's nothing sudden about it," Susan said, with dignity, "but

Auntie does think that I go about with you a good deal---"

Peter was silent. Susan, stealing a glance at his face, saw that it was

very red.

"Oh, I love that! I'm crazy about it!" he said, grinning. Then, with

sudden masterfulness, "That's all ROT! I'm coming for you on Sunday,

and we'll go feed the fishes!"

And he was gone. Susan ate her lunch very thoughtfully, satisfied on

the whole with the first application of the new plan.

On Sunday afternoon Mr. Coleman duly presented himself at the

boarding-house, but he was accompanied by Miss Fox, to whom Susan, who

saw her occasionally at the Saunders', had taken a vague dislike, and

by a Mr. Horace Carter, fat, sleepy, and slightly bald at twenty-six.

"I brought 'em along to pacify Auntie," said Peter on the car.

Susan made a little grimace.

"You don't like Con? Oh, she's loads of sport!" he assured her. "And

you'll like Carter, too, he's loads of fun!"

But Susan liked nobody and nothing that day. It was a failure from

beginning to end. The sky was overcast, gloomy. Not a leaf stirred on

the dripping trees, in the silent Park, fog filled all the little

canons. There were very few children on the merry-go-rounds, or in the

swings, and very few pleasure-seekers in the museum and the

conservatories. Miss Fox was quite comfortable in white furs, but Susan

felt chilly. She tried to strike a human spark from Mr. Carter, but

failed. Attempts at a general conversation also fell flat.

They listened to the band for a little while, but it was too cold to

sit still very long, and when Peter proposed tea at the Occidental,

Susan visibly brightened. But the shamed color rose in her face when

Miss Fox languidly assured him that if he wanted her mother to scalp

her, well and good; if not, he would please not mention tea downtown.

She added that Mama was having a tea herself to-day, or she would ask

them all to come home with her. This put Susan in an uncomfortable

position of which she had to make the best.

"If it wasn't for an assorted bunch of boarders," said Susan, "I would

ask you all to our house."

Miss Fox eyed her curiously a moment, then spoke to Peter.

"Well, do let's do something, Peter! Let's go to the Japanese garden."

To the Japanese garden they went, for a most unsatisfactory tea. Miss

Fox, it appeared, had been to Japan,--"with Dolly Ripley, Peter," said

she, carelessly mentioning the greatest of California's heiresses, and

she delighted the little bowing, smiling tea-woman with a few words in

her native tongue. Susan admired this accomplishment, with the others,

as she drank the tasteless fluid from tiny bowls.

Only four o'clock! What an endless afternoon it had been!

Peter took her home, and they chatted on the steps gaily enough, in the

winter twilight. But Susan cried herself to sleep that night. This

first departure from her rule had proven humiliating and disastrous;

she determined not to depart from it again.

Georgie and the doctor came to the house for the one o'clock Christmas

dinner, the doctor instantly antagonizing his wife's family by the

remark that his mother always had her Christmas dinner at night, and

had "consented" to their coming, on condition that they come home again

early in the afternoon. However, it was delightful to have Georgie back

again, and the cousins talked and laughed together for an hour, in Mary

Lou's room. Almost the first question from the bride was of Susan's

love-affair, and what Peter's Christmas gift had been.

"It hasn't come yet, so I don't know myself!" Susan said readily. But

that evening, when Georgie was gone and her aunt and cousins were at

church, she sat down to write to Peter.

MY DEAR PETER (wrote Susan):

This is a perfectly exquisite pin, and you are a dear to have

remembered my admiring a pearl crescent months ago. I

never saw a pin that I liked better, but it's far too handsome

a gift for me to keep. I haven't even dared show it to Auntie

and the girls! I am sending it back to you, though I hate to

let it go, and thank you a thousand times.

Always affectionately yours,

SUSAN BROWN.

Peter answered immediately from the country house where he was spending

the holidays. Susan read his letter in the office, two days after

Christmas.

DEAR PANSY IRENE:

I see Auntie's fine Italian hand in this! You wait till your

father gets home, I'll learn you to sass back! Tell Mrs. Lancaster

that it's an imitation and came in a box of lemon drops,

and put it on this instant! The more you wear the better, this

cold weather!

I've got the bulliest terrier ever, from George. Show him

to you next week. PETER.

Frowning thoughtfully, her eyes still on the scribbled half-sheet,

Susan sat down at her desk, and reached for paper and pen. She wrote

readily, and sent the letter out at once by the office boy.

DEAR PETER:

Please don't make any more fuss about the pin. I can't

accept it, and that's all there is to it. The candy was quite

enough--I thought you were going to send me books. Hadn't

you better change your mind and send me a book? As ever,

S. B.

To which Peter, after a week's interval, answered briefly:

DEAR SUSAN:

This fuss about the pin gives me a pain. I gave a dozen

gifts handsomer than that, and nobody else seems to be kicking.

Be a good girl, and Love the Giver. PETER.

This ended the correspondence. Susan put the pin away in the back of

her bureau-drawer, and tried not to think about the matter.

January was cold and dark. Life seemed to be made to match. Susan

caught cold from a worn-out overshoe, and spent an afternoon and a day

in bed, enjoying the rest from her aching head to her tired feet, but

protesting against each one of the twenty trips that Mary Lou made up

and downstairs for her comfort. She went back to the office on the

third day, but felt sick and miserable for a long time and gained

strength slowly.

One rainy day, when Peter Coleman was alone in Mr. Brauer's office, she

took the little jeweler's box in and laid it beside him on the desk.

"This is all darn foolishness!" Peter said, really annoyed.

"Well---" Susan shrugged wearily, "it's the way I feel about it."

"I thought you were more of a sport!" he said impatiently, holding the

box as if he did not quite know what to do with it.

"Perhaps I'm not," Susan said quietly. She felt as if the world were

slowly, dismally coming to an end, but she stood her ground.

An awkward silence ensued. Peter slipped the little box into his

pocket. They were both standing at his high desk, resting their elbows

upon it, and half-turned, so that they faced each other.

"Well," he said, discontentedly, "I've got to give you something or

other for Christmas. What'll it be?"

"Nothing at all, Peter," Susan protested, "just don't say anything more

about it!"

He meditated, scowling.

"Are you dated for to-morrow night?" he asked.

"Yes," Susan said simply. The absence of explanation was extremely

significant.

"So you're not going out with me any more?" he asked, after a pause.

"Not--for awhile," Susan agreed, with a little difficulty. She felt a

horrible inclination to cry.

"Well, gosh, I hope somebody is pleased at the trouble she has made!"

Peter burst out angrily.

"If you mean Auntie, Peter," indignation dried Susan's tears, "you are

quite mistaken! Anyway, she would be quite right not to want me to

accept expensive gifts from a man whose position is so different from

my own---"

"Rot!" said Peter, flushing, "that sounds like servants' talk!"

"Well, of course I know it is nonsense---" Susan began. And, despite

her utmost effort, two tears slipped down her cheeks.

"And if we were engaged it would be all right, is that it?" Peter said,

after an embarrassed pause.

"Yes, but I don't want you to think for one instant---" Susan began,

with flaming cheeks.

"I wish to the Lord people would mind their own business," Peter said

vexedly. There was a pause. Then he added, cheerfully, "Tell 'em we're

engaged then, that'll shut 'em up!"

The world rocked for Susan.

"Oh, but Peter, we can't--it wouldn't be true!"

"Why wouldn't it be true?" he demanded, perversely.

"Because we aren't!" persisted Susan, rubbing an old blot on the desk

with a damp forefinger.

"I thought one day we said that when I was forty-five and you were

forty-one we were going to get married?" Peter presently reminded her,

half in earnest, half irritated.

"D-d-did we?" stammered Susan, smiling up at him through a mist of

tears.

"Sure we did. We said we were going to start a stock-ranch, and raise

racers, don't you remember?"

A faint recollection of the old joke came to her.

"Well, then, are we to let people know that in twenty years we intend

to be married?" she asked, laughing uncertainly.

Peter gave his delighted shout of amusement. The conversation had

returned to familiar channels.

"Lord, don't tell anyone! WE'LL know it, that's enough!" he said.

That was all. There was no chance for sentiment, they could not even

clasp hands, here in the office. Susan, back at her desk, tried to

remember exactly what HAD been said and implied.

"Peter, I'll have to tell Auntie!" she had exclaimed.

Peter had not objected, had not answered indeed.

"I'll have to take my time about telling MY aunt," he had said, "but

there's time enough! See here, Susan, I'm dated with Barney White in

Berkeley to-night--is that all right?"

"Surely!" Susan had assured him laughingly.

"You see," Peter had explained, "it'll be a very deuce of a time before

we'll want everyone to know. There's any number of things to do. So

perhaps it's just as well if people don't suspect---"

"Peter, how extremely like you not to care what people think as long as

we're not engaged, and not to want them to suspect it when we are!"

Susan could say, smiling above the deep hurt in her heart.

And Peter laughed cheerfully again.

Then Mr. Brauer came in, and Susan went back to her desk, brain and

heart in a whirl. But presently one fact disengaged itself from a mist

of doubts and misgivings, hopes and terrors. She and Peter were engaged

to be married! What if vows and protestations, plans and confidences

were still all to come, what if the very first kiss was still to come?

The essential thing remained; they were engaged, the question was

settled at last.

Peter was not, at this time, quite the ideal lover. But in what was he

ever conventional; when did he ever do the expected thing? No; she

would gain so much more than any other woman ever had gained by her

marriage, she would so soon enter on a life that would make these days

seem only a troubled dream, that she could well afford to dispense with

some of the things her romantic nature half expected now. It might not

be quite comprehensible in him, but it was certainly a convenience for

her that he seemed to so dread an announcement just now. She must have

some gowns for the entertainments that would be given them; she must

have some money saved for trousseau; she must arrange a little tea at

home, when, the boarders being eliminated, Peter could come to meet a

few of the very special old friends. These things took time. Susan

spent the dreamy, happy afternoon in desultory planning.

Peter went out at three o'clock with Barney White, looking in to nod

Susan a smiling good-by. Susan returned to her dreams, determined that

she would find the new bond as easy or as heavy as he chose to make it.

She had only to wait, and fate would bring this wonderful thing her

way; it would be quite like Peter to want to do the thing suddenly,

before long, summon his aunt and uncle, her aunt and cousins, and

announce the wedding and engagement to the world at once.

Lost in happy dreams, she did not see Thorny watching her, or catch the

intense, wistful look with which Mr. Brauer so often followed her.

Susan had a large share of the young German's own dreams just now, a

demure little Susan in a checked gingham apron, tasting jelly on a

vine-shaded porch, or basting a chicken in a sunny kitchen, or pouring

her lord's coffee from a shining pot. The dream Susan's hair was

irreproachably neat, she wore shining little house-slippers, and she

always laughed out,--the ringing peal of bells that Henry Brauer had

once heard in the real Susan's laugh,--when her husband teased her

about her old fancy for Peter Coleman. And the dream Susan was the

happy mother of at least five little girls--all girls!--a little Susan

that was called "Sanna," and an Adelaide for the gross-mutter in the

old country, and a Henrietta for himself----

Clean and strong and good, well-born and ambitious, gentle, and full of

the love of books and music and flowers and children, here was a mate

at whose side Susan might have climbed to the very summit of her

dreams. But she never fairly looked at Mr. Brauer, and after a few

years his plump dark little dumpling of a Cousin Linda came from Bremen

to teach music in the Western city, and to adore clever Cousin

Heinrich, and then it was time to hunt for the sunny kitchen and buy

the shining coffee-pot and change little Sanna's name to Linchen.

For Susan was engaged to Peter Coleman! She went home on this

particular evening to find a great box of American Beauty roses waiting

for her, and a smaller box with them--the pearl crescent again! What

could the happy Susan do but pin on a rose with the crescent, her own

cheeks two roses, and go singing down to dinner?

"Lovey, Auntie doesn't like to see you wearing a pin like that!" Mrs.

Lancaster said, noticing it with troubled eyes. "Didn't Peter send it

to you?"

"Yes'm," said Susan, dimpling, as she kissed the older woman.

"Don't you know that a man has no respect for a girl who doesn't keep

him a little at a distance, dear?"

"Oh,--is--that--so!" Susan spun her aunt about, in a mad reel.

"Susan!" gasped Mrs. Lancaster. Her voice changed, she caught the girl

by the shoulders, and looked into the radiant face. "Susan?" she asked.

"My child---!"

And Susan strangled her with a hug, and whispered, "Yes--yes--yes! But

don't you dare tell anyone!"

Poor Mrs. Lancaster was quite unable to tell anyone anything for a few

moments. She sat down in her place, mechanically returning the evening

greetings of her guests. Her handsome, florid face was quite pale. The

soup came on and she roused herself to serve it; dinner went its usual

way.

But going upstairs after dinner, Mary Lou, informed of the great event

in some mysterious way, gave Susan's waist a girlish squeeze and said

joyously, "Ma had to tell me, Sue! I AM so glad!" and Virginia, sitting

with bandaged eyes in a darkened room, held out both hands to her

cousin, later in the evening, and said, "God bless our dear little

girl!" Billy knew it too, for the next morning he gave Susan one of his

shattering hand-grasps and muttered that he was "darned glad, and

Coleman was darned lucky," and Georgie, who was feeling a little better

than usual, though still pale and limp, came in to rejoice and exclaim

later in the day, a Sunday.

All of this made Susan vaguely uneasy. It was true, of course, and yet

somehow it was all too new, too strange to be taken quite happily as a

matter of course. She could only smile when Mary Lou assured her that

she must keep a little carriage; when Virginia sighed, "To think of the

good that you can do"; when Georgie warned her against living with the

old people.

"It's awful, take my word for it!" said Georgie, her hat laid aside,

her coat loosened, very much enjoying a cup of tea in the dining-room.

Young Mrs. O'Connor did not grow any closer to her husband's mother.

But it was to be noticed that toward her husband himself her attitude

was changed. Joe was altogether too smart to be cooped up there in the

Mission, it appeared; Joe was working much too hard, and yet he carried

her breakfast upstairs to her every morning; Joe was an angel with his

mother.

"I wish--of course you can explain to Peter now--but I wish that I

could give you a little engagement tea," said Georgie, very much the

matron.

"Oh, surely!" Susan hastened to reassure her. Nothing could have been

less to her liking than any festivity involving the O'Connors just now.

Susan had dined at the gloomy Mission Street house once, and retained a

depressing memory of the dark, long parlor, with only one shutter

opened in the bay window, the grim elderly hostess, in mourning, who

watched Georgie incessantly, the hard-faced elderly maid, so obviously

in league with her mistress against the new-comer, and the dinner that

progressed from a thick, sad-looking soup to a firm, cold apple pie.

There had been an altercation between the doctor and his mother on the

occasion of Susan's visit because there had been no fire laid in

Georgie's big, cold, upstairs bedroom. Susan, remembering all this,

could very readily excuse Georgie from the exercise of any hospitality

whatever.

"Don't give it another thought, Georgie!" said she.

"There'll be entertaining enough, soon!" said Mary Lou.

"But we aren't going to announce it for ever so long!" Susan said.

"Please, PLEASE don't tell anyone else, Auntie!" she besought over and

over again.

"My darling, not for the world! I can perfectly appreciate the delicacy

of feeling that makes you wish to leave all that to Peter! And who

knows? Only ourselves, and Billy, who is as close to you as a dear

brother could be, and Joe---"

"Oh, is Georgie going to tell Joe?" Susan asked, dismayed.

"Well, now, perhaps she won't," Mrs. Lancaster said soothingly. "And I

think you will find that a certain young gentleman is only too anxious

to tell his friends what a lovely girl he has won!" finished Auntie

archly.

Susan was somehow wretchedly certain that she would find nothing of the

kind. As a matter of fact, it chanced to be a week when she had no

engagements made with Peter, and two days went by--three--and still she

did not hear from him.

By Thursday she was acutely miserable. He was evidently purposely

avoiding her. Susan had been sleeping badly for several nights, she

felt feverish with anxiety and uncertainty. On Thursday, when the girls

filed out of the office at noon, she kept her seat, for Peter was in

the small office and she felt as if she must have a talk with him or

die. She heard him come into Front Office the moment she was alone, and

began to fuss with her desk without raising her eyes.

"Hello!" said Peter, sitting on a corner of the desk. "I've been

terribly busy with the Gerald theatricals, and that's why you haven't

seen me. I promised Mary Gerald two months ago that I'd be in 'em, but

by George! she's leaving the whole darn thing to me! How are you?"

So gay, so big, so infinitely dear! Susan's doubts melted like mist.

She only wanted not to make him angry.

"I've been wondering where you were," she said mildly.

"And a little bit mad in spots?" queried Peter.

"Well---" Susan took firm grip of her courage. "After our little talk

on Saturday," she reminded him, smilingly.

"Sure," said Peter. And after a moment, thoughtfully staring down at

the desk, he added again rather heavily, "Sure."

"I told my aunt--I had to," said Susan then.

"Well, that's all right," Peter responded, after a perceptible pause.

"Nobody else knows?"

"Oh, nobody!" Susan answered, her heart fluttering nervously at his

tone, and her courage suddenly failing.

"And Auntie will keep mum, of course," he said thoughtfully. "It would

be so deuced awkward, Susan," he began.

"Oh, I know it!" she said eagerly. It seemed so much, after the unhappy

apprehensions of the few days past, to have him acknowledge the

engagement, to have him only concerned that it should not be

prematurely made known!

"Can't we have dinner together this evening, Sue? And go see that man

at the Orpheum,--they say he's a wonder!"

"Why, yes, we could. Peter,---" Susan made a brave resolution. "Peter,

couldn't you dine with us, at Auntie's, I mean?"

"Why, yes, I could," he said hesitatingly. But the moment had given

Susan time to reconsider the impulsively given invitation. For a dozen

reasons she did not want to take Peter home with her to-night. The

single one that the girls and Auntie would be quite unable to conceal

the fact that they knew of her engagement was enough. So when Peter

said regretfully, "But I thought we'd have more fun alone! Telephone

your aunt and ask her if we can't have a pious little dinner at the

Palace, or at the Occidental--we'll not see anybody there!" Susan was

only too glad to agree.

Auntie of course consented, a little lenience was permissible now.

"... But not supper afterwards, dear," said Auntie. "If Peter teases,

tell him that he will have you to himself soon enough! And Sue," she

added, with a hint of reproach in her voice, "remember that we expect

to see Peter out here very soon. Of course it's not as if your mother

was alive, dear, I know that! Still, even an old auntie has some claim!"

"Well, Auntie, darling," said Susan, very low, "I asked him to dinner

to-night. And then it occurred to me, don't you know?---that it might

be better---"

"Gracious me, don't think of bringing him out here that way!"

ejaculated Mrs. Lancaster. "No, indeed. You're quite right. But arrange

it for very soon, Sue."

"Oh, surely I will!" Susan said, relievedly.

After an afternoon of happy anticipation it was a little disappointing

to find that she and Peter were not to be alone, a gentle, pretty Miss

Hall and her very charming brother were added to the party when Peter

met Susan at six o'clock.

"Friends of Aunt Clara's," Peter explained to Susan. "I had to!"

Susan, liking the Halls, sensibly made the best of them. She let Miss

Katharine monopolize Peter, and did her best to amuse Sam. She was in

high spirits at dinner, laughed, and kept the others laughing, during

the play,--for the plan had been changed for these guests, and

afterwards was so amusing and gay at the little supper party that Peter

was his most admiring self all the way home. But Susan went to bed with

a baffled aching in her heart. This was not being engaged,--something

was wrong.

She did not see Peter on Friday; caught only a glimpse of him on

Saturday, and on Sunday learned, from one of the newspapers, that "Mr.

Peter Coleman, who was to have a prominent part in the theatricals to

take place at Mrs. Newton Gerald's home next week, would probably

accompany Mr. Forrest Gerald on a trip to the Orient in February, to be

gone for some months."

Susan folded the paper, and sat staring blankly ahead of her for a long

time. Then she went to the telephone, and, half stunned by the violent

beating of her heart, called for the Baxter residence.

Burns answered. Mr. Coleman had gone out about an hour ago with Mr.

White. Burns did not know where. Mr. Coleman would be back for a seven

o'clock dinner. Certainly, Burns would ask him to telephone at once to

Miss Brown.

Excited, troubled, and yet not definitely apprehensive, Susan dressed

herself very prettily, and went out into the clear, crisp sunshine. She

decided suddenly to go and see Georgie. She would come home early, hear

from Peter, perhaps dine with him and his uncle and aunt. And, when she

saw him, she would tell him, in the jolliest and sweetest way, that he

must make his plans to have their engagement announced at once. Any

other course was unfair to her, to him, to his friends.

If Peter objected, Susan would assume an offended air. That would

subdue him instantly. Or, if it did not, they might quarrel, and Susan

liked the definiteness of a quarrel. She must force this thing to a

conclusion one way or the other now, her own dignity demanded it. As

for Peter, his own choice was as limited as hers. He must agree to the

announcement,--and after all, why shouldn't he agree to it?--or he must

give Susan up, once and for all. Susan smiled. He wouldn't do that!

It was a delightful day. The cars were filled with holiday-makers, and

through the pleasant sunshine of the streets young parents were guiding

white-coated toddlers, and beautifully dressed little girls were

wheeling dolls.

Susan found Georgie moping alone in the big, dark, ugly house; Aggie

was out, and Dr. O'Connor and his mother were making their annual

pilgrimage to the grave of their husband and father. The cousins

prepared supper together, in Aggie's exquisitely neat kitchen, not that

this was really necessary, but because the kitchen was so warm and

pleasant. The kettle was ticking on the back of the range, a scoured

empty milk-pan awaited the milk-man. Susan contrasted her bright

prospects with her cousin's dull lot, even while she cheerfully scolded

Georgie for being so depressed and lachrymose.

They fell to talking of marriage, Georgie's recent one, Susan's

approaching one. The wife gave delicate hints, the wife-to-be revealed

far more of her secret soul than she had ever dreamed of revealing.

Georgie sat, idly clasping the hands on which the wedding-ring had

grown loose, Susan turned and reversed the wheels of a Dover egg-beater.

"Marriage is such a mystery, before you're into it," Georgie said. "But

once you're married, why, you feel as if you could attract any man in

the world. No more bashfulness, Sue, no more uncertainty. You treat men

exactly as you would girls, and of course they like it!"

Susan pondered this going home. She thought she knew how to apply it to

her attitude toward Peter.

Peter had not telephoned. Susan, quietly determined to treat him, or

attempt to treat him, with at least the frank protest she would have

shown to another girl, telephoned to the Baxter house at once. Mr.

Coleman was not yet at home.

Some of her resolution crumbled. It was very hard to settle down, after

supper, to an evening of solitaire. In these quiet hours, Susan felt

less confident of Peter's attitude when she announced her ultimatum;

felt that she must not jeopardize their friendship now, must run no

risks.

She had worked herself into a despondent and discouraged frame of mind

when the telephone rang, at ten o'clock. It was Peter.

"Hello, Sue!" said Peter gaily. "I'm just in. Burns said that you

telephoned."

"Burns said no more than the truth," said Susan. It was the old note of

levity, anything but natural to to-night's mood and the matter in hand.

But it was what Peter expected and liked. She heard him laugh with his

usual gaiety.

"Yes, he's a truthful little soul. He takes after me. What was it?"

Susan made a wry mouth in the dark.

"Nothing at all," she said, "I just telephoned--I thought we might go

out somewhere together."

"GREAT HEAVEN, WE'RE ENGAGED!" she reminded her sinking heart, fiercely.

"Oh, too bad! I was at the Gerald's, at one of those darn rehearsals."

A silence.

"Oh, all right!" said Susan. A writhing sickness of spirit threatened

to engulf her, but her voice was quiet.

"I'm sorry, Sue," Peter said quickly in a lower tone, "I couldn't very

well get out of it without having them all suspect. You can see that!"

Susan knew him so well! He had never had to do anything against his

will. He couldn't understand that his engagement entailed any

obligations. He merely wanted always to be happy and popular, and have

everyone else happy and popular, too.

"And what about this trip to Japan with Mr. Gerald?" she asked.

There was another silence. Then Peter said, in an annoyed tone:

"Oh, Lord, that would probably be for a MONTH, or six weeks at the

outside!"

"I see," said Susan tonelessly.

"I've got Forrest here with me to-night," said Peter, apropos of

nothing.

"Oh, then I won't keep you!" Susan said.

"Well," he laughed, "don't be so polite about it!--I'll see you

to-morrow?"

"Surely," Susan said. "Good-night."

"Over the reservoir!" he said, and she hung up her receiver.

She did not sleep that night. Excitement, anger, shame kept her wakeful

and tossing, hour after hour. Susan's head ached, her face burned, her

thoughts were in a mad whirl. What to do--what to do--what to do----!

How to get out of this tangle; where to go to begin again, away from

these people who knew her and loved her, and would drive her mad with

their sympathy and curiosity!

The clock struck three--four--five. At five o'clock Susan, suddenly

realizing her own loneliness and loss, burst into bitter crying and

after that she slept.

The next day, from the office, she wrote to Peter Coleman:

MY DEAR PETER:

I am beginning to think that our little talk in the office a

week ago was a mistake, and that you think so. I don't say

anything of my own feelings; you know them. I want to ask

you honestly to tell me of yours. Things cannot go on this

way. Affectionately,

SUSAN.

This was on Monday. On Tuesday the papers recorded everywhere Mr. Peter

Coleman's remarkable success in Mrs. Newton Gerald's private

theatricals. On Wednesday Susan found a letter from him on her desk, in

the early afternoon, scribbled on the handsome stationery of his club.

MY DEAR SUSAN:

I shall always think that you are the bulliest girl I ever knew,

and if you throw me down on that arrangement for our old

age I shall certainly slap you on the wrist. But I know you

will think better of it before you are forty-one! What you

mean by "things" I don't know. I hope you're not calling ME

a thing!

Forrest is pulling my arm off. See you soon.

Yours as ever,

PETER.

The reading of it gave Susan a sensation of physical illness. She felt

chilled and weak. How false and selfish and shallow it seemed; had

Peter always been that? And what was she to do now, to-morrow and the

next day and the next? What was she to do this moment, indeed? She felt

as if thundering agonies had trampled the very life out of her heart;

yet somehow she must look up, somehow face the office, and the curious

eyes of the girls.

"Love-letter, Sue?" said Thorny, sauntering up with a bill in her hand.

"Valentine's Day, you know!"

"No, darling; a bill," answered Susan, shutting it in a drawer.

She snapped up her light, opened her ledger, and dipped a pen in the

ink.

PART TWO

Wealth

CHAPTER I

The days that followed were so many separate agonies, composed of an

infinite number of lesser agonies, for Susan. Her only consolation,

which weakened or strengthened with her moods, was that, inasmuch as

this state of affairs was unbearable she would not be expected to bear

it. Something must happen. Or, if nothing happened, she would simply

disappear,--go on the stage, accept a position as a traveling governess

or companion, run away to one of the big eastern cities where, under an

assumed name, she might begin life all over again.

Hour after hour shame and hurt had their way with her. Susan had to

face the office, to hide her heart from Thorny and the other girls, to

be reminded by the empty desk in Mr. Brauer's office, and by every

glimpse she had of old Mr. Baxter, of the happy dreams she had once

dreamed here in this same place.

But it was harder far at home. Mrs. Lancaster alternated between tender

moods, when she discussed the whole matter mournfully from beginning to

end, and moods of violent rebellion, when everyone but Susan was blamed

for the bitter disappointment of all their hopes. Mary Lou compared

Peter to Ferd Eastman, to Peter's disadvantage. Virginia recommended

quiet, patient endurance of whatever might be the will of Providence.

Susan hardly knew which attitude humiliated and distressed her most.

All her thoughts led her into bitterness now, and she could be

distracted only for a brief moment or two from the memories that

pressed so close about her heart. Ah, if she only had a little money,

enough to make possible her running away, or a profession into which

she could plunge, and in which she could distinguish herself, or a

great talent, or a father who would stand by her and take care of

her----

And the bright head would go down on her hands, and the tears have

their way.

"Headache?" Thorny would ask, full of sympathy.

"Oh, splitting!" And Susan would openly dry her eyes, and manage to

smile.

Sometimes, in a softer mood, her busy brain straightened the whole

matter out. Peter, returning from Japan, would rush to her with a full

explanation. Of course he cared for her--he had never thought of

anything else--of course he considered that they were engaged! And

Susan, after keeping him in suspense for a period that even Auntie

thought too long, would find herself talking to him, scolding,

softening, finally laughing, and at last--and for the first time!--in

his arms.

Only a lovers' quarrel; one heard of them continually. Something to

laugh about and to forget!

She took up the old feminine occupation of watching the post, weak with

sudden hope when Mary Lou called up to her, "Letter for you on the

mantel, Sue!" and sick with disappointment over and over again. Peter

did not write.

Outwardly the girl went her usual round, perhaps a little thinner and

with less laughter, but not noticeably changed. She basted cuffs into

her office suit, and cleaned it with benzine, caught up her lunch and

umbrella and ran for her car. She lunched and gossiped with Thorny and

the others, walked uptown at noon to pay a gas-bill, took Virginia to

the Park on Sundays to hear the music, or visited the Carrolls in

Sausalito.

But inwardly her thoughts were like whirling web. And in its very

center was Peter Coleman. Everything that Susan did began and ended

with the thought of him. She never entered the office without the hope

that a fat envelope, covered with his dashing scrawl, lay on the desk.

She never thought herself looking well without wishing that she might

meet Peter that day, or looking ill that she did not fear it. She

answered the telephone with a thrilling heart; it might be he! And she

browsed over the social columns of the Sunday papers, longing and

fearing to find his name. All day long and far into the night, her

brain was busy with a reconciliation,--excuses, explanations,

forgiveness. "Perhaps to-day," she said in the foggy mornings.

"To-morrow," said her undaunted heart at night.

The hope was all that sustained her, and how bitterly it failed her at

times only Susan knew. Before the world she kept a brave face, evading

discussion of Peter when she could, quietly enduring it when Mrs.

Lancaster's wrath boiled over. But as the weeks went by, and the full

wretchedness of the situation impressed itself upon her with quiet

force, she sank under an overwhelming sense of wrong and loss. Nothing

amazing was going to happen. She--who had seemed so free, so

independent!--was really as fettered and as helpless as Virginia and

Mary Lou. Susan felt sometimes as if she should go mad with suppressed

feeling. She grew thin, dyspeptic, irritable, working hard, and finding

her only relief in work, and reading in bed in the evening.

The days slowly pushed her further and further from those happy times

when she and Peter had been such good friends, had gone about so

joyfully together. It was a shock to Susan to realize that she had not

seen him nor heard from him for a month--for two months--for three.

Emily Saunders was in the hospital for some serious operation, would be

there for weeks; Ella was abroad. Susan felt as if her little glimpse

of their world and Peter's had been a curious dream.

Billy played a brother's part toward her now, always ready to take her

about with him when he was free, and quite the only person who could

spur her to anything like her old vigorous interest in life. They went

very often to the Carrolls, and there, in the shabby old sitting-room,

Susan felt happier than she did anywhere else. Everybody loved her,

loved to have her there, and although they knew, and she knew that they

knew, that something had gone very wrong with her, nobody asked

questions, and Susan felt herself safe and sheltered. There was a shout

of joy when she came in with Phil and Jo from the ferryboat. "Mother!

here's Sue!" Betsey would follow the older girls upstairs to chatter

while they washed their hands and brushed their hair, and, going down

again, Susan would get the motherly kiss that followed Jo's. Later,

when the lamp was lit, while Betsey and Jim wrangled amicably over

their game, and Philip and Jo toiled with piano and violin, Susan sat

next to Mrs. Carroll, and while they sewed, or between snatches of

reading, they had long, and to the girl at least, memorable talks.

It was all sweet and wholesome and happy. Susan used to wonder just

what made this house different from all other houses, and why she liked

to come here so much, to eat the simplest of meals, to wash dishes and

brush floors, to rise in the early morning and cross the bay before the

time she usually came downstairs at home. Of course, they loved her,

they laughed at her jokes, they wanted this thing repeated and that

repeated, they never said good-by to her without begging her to come

again and thought no special occasion complete without her. That

affected her, perhaps. Or perhaps the Carrolls were a little nicer than

most people; when Susan reached this point in her thoughts she never

failed to regret the loss of their money and position. If they had done

this in spite of poverty and obscurity, what MIGHTN'T they have done

with half a chance!

In one of the lamplight talks Peter was mentioned, in connection with

the patent window-washer, and Susan learned for the first time that he

really had been instrumental in selling the patent for Mrs. Carroll for

the astonishing sum of five hundred dollars!

"I BEGGED him to tell me if that wasn't partly from the washer and

partly from Peter Coleman," smiled Mrs. Carroll, "and he gave me his

word of honor that he had really sold it for that! So--there went my

doctor's bill, and a comfortable margin in the bank!"

She admitted Susan into the secret of all her little economies; the

roast that, cleverly alternated with one or two small meats, was served

from Sunday until Saturday night, and no one any the worse! Susan began

to watch the game that Mrs. Carroll made of her cooking; filling soups

for the night that the meat was short, no sweet when the garden

supplied a salad, or when Susan herself brought over a box of candy.

She grew to love the labor that lay behind the touch of the thin,

darned linen, the windows that shone with soapsuds, the crisp snowy

ruffles of curtains and beds. She and Betts liked to keep the house

vases filled with what they could find in the storm-battered garden,

lifted the flattened chrysanthemums with reverent fingers, hunted out

the wet violets. Susan abandoned her old idea of the enviable life of a

lonely orphan, and began to long for a sister, a tumble-headed brother,

for a mother above all. She loved to be included by the young Carrolls

when they protested, "Just ourselves, Mother, nobody but the family!"

and if Phil or Jimmy came to her when a coat-button was loose or a

sleeve-lining needed a stitch, she was quite pathetically touched. She

loved the constant happy noise and confusion in the house, Phil and

Billy Oliver tussling in the stair-closet among the overshoes, Betts

trilling over her bed-making, Mrs. Carroll and Jim replanting primroses

with great calling and conference, and she and Josephine talking, as

they swept the porches, as if they had never had a chance to talk

before.

Sometimes, walking at Anna's side to the beach on Sunday, a certain

peace and content crept into Susan's heart, and the deep ache lifted

like a curtain, and seemed to show a saner, wider, sweeter region

beyond. Sometimes, tramping the wet hills, her whole being thrilled to

some new note, Susan could think serenely of the future, could even be

glad of all the past. It was as if Life, into whose cold, stern face

she had been staring wistfully, had softened to the glimmer of a smile,

had laid a hand, so lately used to strike, upon her shoulder in token

of good-fellowship.

With the good salt air in their faces, and the gray March sky pressing

close above the silent circle of the hills about them, she and Anna

walked many a bracing, tiring mile. Now and then they turned and smiled

at each other, both young faces brightening.

"Noisy, aren't we, Sue?"

"Well, the others are making noise enough!"

Poverty stopped them at every turn, these Carrolls. Susan saw it

perhaps more clearly than they did. A hundred delightful and hospitable

plans came into Mrs. Carroll's mind, only to be dismissed because of

the expense involved. She would have liked to entertain, to keep her

pretty daughters becomingly and richly dressed; she confided to Susan

rather wistfully, that she was sorry not to be able to end the evenings

with little chafing-dish suppers; "that sort of thing makes home so

attractive to growing boys." Susan knew what Anna's own personal

grievance was. "These are the best years of my life," Anna said,

bitterly, one night, "and every cent of spending money I have is the

fifty dollars a year the hospital pays. And even out of that they take

breakage, in the laboratory or the wards!" Josephine made no secret of

her detestation of their necessary economies.

"Did you know I was asked to the Juniors this year?" she said to Susan

one night.

"The Juniors! You weren't!" Susan echoed incredulously. For the "Junior

Cotillion" was quite the most exclusive and desirable of the city's

winter dances for the younger set.

"Oh, yes, I was. Mrs. Wallace probably did it," Josephine assured her,

sighing. "They asked Anna last year," she said bitterly, "and I suppose

next year they'll ask Betts, and then perhaps they'll stop."

"Oh, but Jo-why couldn't you go! When so many girls are just CRAZY to

be asked!"

"Money," Josephine answered briefly.

"But not much!" Susan lamented. The "Juniors" were not to be estimated

in mere money.

"Twenty-five for the ticket, and ten for the chaperone, and a gown, of

course, and slippers and a wrap--Mother felt badly about it," Josephine

said composedly. And suddenly she burst into tears, and threw herself

down on the bed. "Don't let Mother hear, and don't think I'm an idiot!"

she sobbed, as Susan came to kneel beside her and comfort her,

"but--but I hate so to drudge away day after day, when I know I could

be having GORGEOUS times, and making friends---!"

Betts' troubles were more simple in that they were indefinite. Betts

wanted to do everything, regardless of cost, suitability or season, and

was quite as cross over the fact that they could not go camping in the

Humboldt woods in midwinter, as she was at having to give up her ideas

of a new hat or a theater trip. And the boys never complained

specifically of poverty. Philip, won by deep plotting that he could not

see to settle down quietly at home after dinner, was the gayest and

best of company, and Jim's only allusions to a golden future were made

when he rubbed his affectionate little rough head against his mother,

pony-fashion, and promised her every luxury in the world as soon as he

"got started."

When Peter Coleman returned from the Orient, early in April, all the

newspapers chronicled the fact that a large number of intimate friends

met him at the dock. He was instantly swept into the social currents

again; dinners everywhere were given for Mr. Coleman, box-parties and

house-parties followed one another, the club claimed him, and the

approaching opening of the season found him giving special attention to

his yacht. Small wonder that Hunter, Baxter & Hunter's caught only

occasional glimpses of him. Susan, somberly pursuing his name from

paper to paper, felt that she was beginning to dislike him. She managed

never to catch his eye, when he was in Mr. Brauer's office, and took

great pains not to meet him.

However, in the lingering sweet twilight of a certain soft spring

evening, when she had left the office, and was beginning the long walk

home, she heard sudden steps behind her, and turned to see Peter.

"Aren't you the little seven-leagued booter! Wait a minute, Susan!

C'est moi! How are you?"

"How do you do, Peter?" Susan said pleasantly and evenly. She put her

hand in the big gloved hand, and raised her eyes to the smiling eyes.

"What car are you making for?" he asked, falling in step.

"I'm walking," Susan said. "Too nice to ride this evening."

"You're right," he said, laughing. "I wish I hadn't a date, I'd like

nothing better than to walk it, too! However, I can go a block or two."

He walked with her to Montgomery Street, and they talked of Japan and

the Carrolls and of Emily Saunders. Then Peter said he must catch a

California Street car, and they shook hands again and parted.

It all seemed rather flat. Susan felt as if the little episode did not

belong in the stormy history of their friendship at all, or as if she

were long dead and were watching her earthly self from a distance with

wise and weary eyes. What should she be feeling now? What would a

stronger woman have done? Given him the cut direct, perhaps, or forced

the situation to a point when something dramatic--satisfying--must

follow.

"I am weak," said Susan ashamedly to herself; "I was afraid he would

think I cared,--would see that I cared!" And she walked on busy with

self-contemptuous and humiliated thoughts. She had made it easy for him

to take advantage of her. She had assumed for his convenience that she

had suffered no more than he through their parting, and that all was

again serene and pleasant between them. After to-night's casual,

friendly conversation, no radical attitude would be possible on her

part; he could congratulate himself that he still retained Susan's

friendship, and could be careful--she knew he would be careful!--never

to go too far again.

Susan's estimate of Peter Coleman was no longer a particularly

idealized one. But she had long ago come to the conclusion that his

faults were the faults of his type and his class, excusable and

understandable now, and to be easily conquered when a great emotion

should sweep him once and for all away from the thought of himself. As

he was absorbed in the thought of his own comfort, so, she knew, he

could become absorbed in the thought of what was due his wife, the

wider viewpoint would quickly become second nature with him; young Mrs.

Peter Coleman would be among the most indulged and carefully considered

of women. He would be as anxious that the relationship between his wife

and himself should be harmonious and happy, as he was now to feel when

he met her that he had no reason to avoid or to dread meeting Miss

Susan Brown.

If Susan would have preferred a little different attitude on his part,

she could find no fault with this one. She had for so many months

thought of Peter as the personification of all that she desired in life

that she could not readily dismiss him as unworthy. Was he not still

sweet and big and clean, rich and handsome and popular, socially

prominent and suitable in age and faith and nationality?

Susan had often heard her aunt and her aunt's friends remark that life

was more dramatic than any book, and that their own lives on the stage

would eclipse in sensational quality any play ever presented. But, for

herself, life seemed deplorably, maddeningly undramatic. In any book,

in any play, the situation between her and Peter must have been

heightened to a definite crisis long before this. The mildest of little

ingenues, as she came across a dimly lighted stage, in demure white and

silver, could have handled this situation far more skillfully than

Susan did; the most youthful of heroines would have met Peter to some

purpose,--while surrounded by other admirers at a dance, or while

galloping across a moor on her spirited pony.

What would either of these ladies have done, she wondered, at meeting

the offender when he appeared particularly well-groomed, prosperous and

happy, while she herself was tired from a long office day, conscious of

shabby gloves, of a shapeless winter hat? What could she do, except

appear friendly and responsive? Susan consoled herself with the thought

that her only alternative, an icy repulse of his friendly advances,

would have either convinced him that she was too entirely common and

childish to be worth another thought, or would have amused him hugely.

She could fancy him telling his friends of his experience of the cut

direct from a little girl in Front Office,--no names named--and hear

him saying that "he loved it--he was crazy about it!"

"You believe in the law of compensation, don't you, Aunt Jo?" asked

Susan, on a wonderful April afternoon, when she had gone straight from

the office to Sausalito. The two women were in the Carroll kitchen,

Susan sitting at one end of the table, her thoughtful face propped in

her hands, Mrs. Carroll busy making ginger cakes,--cutting out the flat

little circles with an inverted wine-glass, transferring them to the

pans with the tip of her flat knife, rolling the smooth dough, and

spilling the hot cakes, as they came back from the oven, into a deep

tin strainer to cool. Susan liked to watch her doing this, liked the

pretty precision of every movement, the brisk yet unhurried repetition

of events, her strong clever hands, the absorbed expression of her

face, her fine, broad figure hidden by a stiffly-starched gown of faded

blue cotton and a stiff white apron.

Beyond the open window an exquisite day dropped to its close. It was

the time of fruit-blossoms and feathery acacia, languid, perfumed

breezes, lengthening twilights, opening roses and swaying plumes of

lilac. Sausalito was like a little park, every garden ran over with

sweetness and color, every walk was fringed with flowers, and hedged

with the new green of young trees and blossoming hedges. Susan felt a

delicious relaxation run through her blood; winter seemed really

routed; to-day for the first time one could confidently prophesy that

there would be summer presently, thin gowns and ocean bathing and

splendid moons.

"Yes, I believe in the law of compensation, to a great extent," the

older woman answered thoughtfully, "or perhaps I should call it the law

of solution. I truly believe that to every one of us on this earth is

given the materials for a useful and a happy life; some people use them

and some don't. But the chance is given alike."

"Useful, yes," Susan conceded, "but usefulness isn't happiness."

"Isn't it? I really think it is."

"Oh, Aunt Jo," the girl burst out impatiently, "I don't mean for

saints! I dare say there ARE some girls who wouldn't mind being poor

and shabby and lonesome and living in a boarding-house, and who would

be glad they weren't hump-backed, or blind, or Siberian prisoners! But

you CAN'T say you think that a girl in my position has had a fair start

with a girl who is just as young, and rich and pretty and clever, and

has a father and mother and everything else in the world! And if you do

say so," pursued Susan, with feeling, "you certainly can't MEAN so---"

"But wait a minute, Sue! What girl, for instance?"

"Oh, thousands of girls!" Susan said, vaguely. "Emily Saunders, Alice

Chauncey---"

"Emily Saunders! SUSAN! In the hospital for an operation every other

month or two!" Mrs. Carroll reminded her.

"Well, but---" Susan said eagerly. "She isn't really ill. She just

likes the excitement and having them fuss over her. She loves the

hospital."

"Still, I wouldn't envy anyone whose home life wasn't preferable to the

hospital, Sue."

"Well, Emily is queer, Aunt Jo. But in her place I wouldn't necessarily

be queer."

"At the same time, considering her brother Kenneth's rather checkered

career, and the fact that her big sister neglects and ignores her, and

that her health is really very delicate, I don't consider Emily a happy

choice for your argument, Sue."

"Well, there's Peggy Brock. She's a perfect beauty---"

"She's a Wellington, Sue. You know that stock. How many of them are

already in institutions?"

"Oh, but Aunt Jo!" Susan said impatiently, "there are dozens of girls

in society whose health is good, and whose family ISN'T insane,--I

don't know why I chose those two! There are the Chickerings---"

"Whose father took his own life, Sue."

"Well, they couldn't help THAT. They're lovely girls. It was some money

trouble, it wasn't insanity or drink."

"But think a moment, Sue. Wouldn't it haunt you for a long, long time,

if you felt that your own father, coming home to that gorgeous house

night after night, had been slowly driven to the taking of his own

life?"

Susan looked thoughtful.

"I never thought of that," she admitted. Presently she added brightly,

"There are the Ward girls, Aunt Jo, and Isabel Wallace. You couldn't

find three prettier or richer or nicer girls! Say what you will," Susan

returned undauntedly to her first argument, "life IS easier for those

girls than for the rest of us!"

"Well, I want to call your attention to those three," Mrs. Carroll

said, after a moment. "Both Mr. Wallace and Mr. Ward made their own

money, started in with nothing and built up their own fortunes. Phil

may do that, or Billy may do that--we can't tell. Mrs. Ward and Mrs.

Wallace are both nice, simple women, not spoiled yet by money, not

inflated on the subject of family and position, bringing up their

families as they were brought up. I don't know Mrs. Ward personally,

but Mrs. Wallace came from my own town, and she likes to remember the

time when her husband was only a mining engineer, and she did her own

work. You may not see it, Sue, but there's a great difference there.

Such people are happy and useful, and they hand happiness on. Peter

Coleman's another, he's so exceptionally nice because he's only one

generation removed from working people. If Isabel Wallace,--and she's

very young; life may be unhappy enough for her yet, poor

child!--marries a man like her father, well and good. But if she

marries a man like--well, say Kenneth Saunders or young Gerald, she

simply enters into the ranks of the idle and useless and unhappy,

that's all."

"She's beautiful, and she's smart too," Susan pursued, disconsolately,

"Emily and I lunched there one day and she was simply sweet to the

maids, and to her mother. And German! I wish you could hear her. She

may not be of any very remarkable family but she certainly is an

exceptional girl!"

"Exceptional, just because she ISN'T descended from some dead, old,

useless stock," amended Mrs. Carroll. "There is red blood in her veins,

ambition and effort and self-denial, all handed down to her. But marry

that pampered little girl to some young millionaire, Sue, and what will

her children inherit? And what will theirs, in time?--Peel these, will

you?" went on Mrs. Carroll, interrupting her work to put a bowl of

apples in Susan's hands. "No," she went on presently, "I married a

millionaire, Sue. I was one of the 'lucky' ones!"

"I never knew it was as much as that!" Susan said impressed.

"Yes," Mrs. Carroll laughed wholesomely at some memory. "Yes; I began

my married life in the very handsomest home in our little town with the

prettiest presents and the most elaborate wardrobe--the papers were

full of Miss Josie van Trent's extravagances. I had four house

servants, and when Anna came everybody in town knew that her little

layette had come all the way from Paris!"

"But,--good heavens, what happened?"

"Nothing, for awhile. Mr. Carroll, who was very young, had inherited a

half-interest in what was then the biggest shoe-factory in that part of

the world. My father was his partner. Philip--dear me! it seems like a

lifetime ago!--came to visit us, and I came home from an Eastern

finishing school. Sue, those were silly, happy, heavenly days! Well! we

were married, as I said. Little Phil came, Anna came. Still we went on

spending money. Phil and I took the children to Paris,--Italy. Then my

father died, and things began to go badly at the works. Phil discharged

his foreman, borrowed money to tide over a bad winter, and said that he

would be his own superintendent. Of course he knew nothing about it. We

borrowed more money. Jo was the baby then, and I remember one ugly

episode was that the workmen, who wanted more money, accused Phil of

getting his children's clothes abroad because his wife didn't think

American things were good enough for them."

"YOU!" Susan said, incredulously.

"It doesn't sound like me now, does it? Well; Phil put another foreman

in, and he was a bad man--in league with some rival factory, in fact.

Money was lost that way, contracts broken---"

"BEAST!" said Susan.

"Wicked enough," the other woman conceded, "but not at all an uncommon

thing, Sue, where people don't know their own business. So we borrowed

more money, borrowed enough for a last, desperate fight, and lost it.

The day that Jim was three years old, we signed the business away to

the other people, and Phil took a position under them, in his own

factory."

"Oo-oo!" Susan winced.

"Yes, it was hard. I did what I could for my poor old boy, but it was

very hard. We lived very quietly; I had begun to come to my senses

then; we had but one maid. But, even then, Sue, Philip wasn't capable

of holding a job of that sort. How could he manage what he didn't

understand? Poor Phil---" Mrs. Carroll's bright eyes brimmed with

tears, and her mouth quivered. "However, we had some happy times

together with the babies," she said cheerfully, "and when he went away

from us, four years later, with his better salary we were just

beginning to see our way clear. So that left me, with my five, Sue,

without a cent in the world. An old cousin of my father owned this

house, and she wrote that she would give us all a home, and out we

came,--Aunt Betty's little income was barely enough for her, so I sold

books and taught music and French, and finally taught in a little

school, and put up preserves for people, and packed their houses up for

the winter---"

"How did you DO it!"

"Sue, I don't know! Anna stood by me,--my darling!" The last two words

came in a passionate undertone. "But of course there were bad times.

Sometimes we lived on porridges and milk for days, and many a night

Anna and Phil and I have gone out, after dark, to hunt for dead

branches in the woods for my kitchen stove!" And Mrs. Carroll,

unexpectedly stirred by the pitiful memory, broke suddenly into tears,

the more terrible to Susan because she had never seen her falter before.

It was only for a moment. Then Mrs. Carroll dried her eyes and said

cheerfully:

"Well, those times only make these seem brighter! Anna is well started

now, we've paid off the last of the mortgage, Phil is more of a comfort

than he's ever been--no mother could ask a better boy!--and Jo is

beginning to take a real interest in her work. So everything is coming

out better than even my prayers."

"Still," smiled Susan, "lots of people have things comfortable, WITHOUT

such a terrible struggle!"

"And lots of people haven't five fine children, Sue, and a home in a

big garden. And lots of mothers don't have the joy and the comfort and

the intimacy with their children in a year that I have every day. No,

I'm only too happy now, Sue. I don't ask anything better than this. And

if, in time, they go to homes of their own, and we have some more

babies in the family--it's all LIVING, Sue, it's being a part of the

world!"

Mrs. Carroll carried away her cakes to the big stone jar in the pantry.

Susan, pensively nibbling a peeled slice of apple, had a question ready

for her when she came back.

"But suppose you're one of those persons who get into a groove, and

simply can't live? I want to work, and do heroic things, and grow to BE

something, and how can I? Unless---" her color rose, but her glance did

not fall, "unless somebody marries me, of course."

"Choose what you want to do, Sue, and do it. That's all."

"Oh, that SOUNDS simple! But I don't want to do any of the things you

mean. I want to work into an interesting life, somehow. I'll--I'll

never marry," said Susan.

"You won't? Well; of course that makes it easier, because you can go

into your work with heart and soul. But perhaps you'll change your

mind, Sue. I hope you will, just as I hope all the girls will marry.

I'm not sure," said Mrs. Carroll, suddenly smiling, "but what the very

quickest way for a woman to marry off her girls is to put them into

business. In the first place, a man who wants them has to be in

earnest, and in the second, they meet the very men whose interests are

the same as theirs. So don't be too sure you won't. However, I'm not

laughing at you, Sue. I think you ought to seriously select some work

for yourself, unless of course you are quite satisfied where you are."

"I'm not," said Susan. "I'll never get more than forty where I am. And

more than that, Thorny heard that Front Office is going to be closed up

any day."

"But you could get another position, dear."

"Well, I don't know. You see, it's a special sort of bookkeeping. It

wouldn't help any of us much elsewhere."

"True. And what would you like best to do, Sue?"

"Oh, I don't know. Sometimes I think the stage. Or something with lots

of traveling in it." Susan laughed, a little ashamed of her vagueness.

"Why not take a magazine agency, then? There's a lot of money---"

"Oh, no!" Susan shuddered. "You're joking!"

"Indeed I'm not. You're just the sort of person who would make a fine

living selling things. The stage--I don't know. But if you really mean

it, I don't see why you shouldn't get a little start somewhere."

"Aunt Jo, they say that Broadway in New York is simply LINED with girls

trying---"

"New York! Well, very likely. But you try here. Go to the manager of

the Alcazar, recite for him---"

"He wouldn't let me," Susan asserted, "and besides, I don't really know

anything."

"Well, learn something. Ask him, when next some manager wants to make

up a little road company---"

"A road company! Two nights in Stockton, two nights in

Marysville--horrors!" said Susan.

"But that wouldn't be for long, Sue. Perhaps two years. Then five or

six years in stock somewhere---"

"Aunt Jo, I'd be past thirty!" Susan laughed and colored charmingly.

"I--honestly, I couldn't give up my whole life for ten years on the

chance of making a hit," she confessed.

"Well, but what then, Sue?"

"Now, I'll tell you what I've often wanted to do," Susan said, after a

thoughtful interval.

"Ah, now we're coming to it!" Mrs. Carroll said, with satisfaction.

They had left the kitchen now, and were sitting on the top step of the

side porch, reveling in the lovely panorama of hillside and waterfront,

and the smooth and shining stretch of bay below them.

"I've often thought I'd like to be the matron of some very smart school

for girls," said Susan, "and live either in or near some big Eastern

city, and take the girls to concerts and lectures and walking in the

parks, and have a lovely room full of books and pictures, where they

would come and tell me things, and go to Europe now and then for a

vacation!"

"That would be a lovely life, Sue. Why not work for that?"

"Why, I don't know how. I don't know of any such school."

"Well, now let us suppose the head of such a school wants a matron,"

Mrs. Carroll said, "she naturally looks for a lady and a linguist, and

a person of experience---"

"There you are! I've had no experience!" Susan said, instantly

depressed. "I could rub up on French and German, and read up the

treatment for toothache and burns--but experience!"

"But see how things work together, Sue!" Mrs. Carroll exclaimed, with a

suddenly bright face.

"Here's Miss Berrat, who has the little school over here, simply CRAZY

to find someone to help her out. She has eight--or nine, I forget--day

scholars, and four or five boarders. And such a dear little cottage!

Miss Pitcher is leaving her, to go to Miss North's school in Berkeley,

and she wants someone at once!"

"But, Aunt Jo, what does she pay?"

"Let me see---" Mrs. Carroll wrinkled a thoughtful brow. "Not much, I

know. You live at the school, of course. Five or ten dollars a month, I

think."

"But I COULDN'T live on that!" Susan exclaimed.

"You'd be near us, Sue, for one thing. And you'd have a nice bright

sunny room. And Miss Berrat would help you with your French and German.

It would be a good beginning."

"But I simply COULDN'T--" Susan stopped short. "Would you advise it,

Aunt Jo?" she asked simply.

Mrs. Carroll studied the bright face soberly for a moment.

"Yes, I'd advise it, Sue," she said then gravely. "I don't think that

the atmosphere where you are is the best in the world for you just now.

It would be a fine change. It would be good for those worries of yours."

"Then I'll do it!" Susan said suddenly, the unexplained tears springing

to her eyes.

"I think I would. I'll go and see Miss Berrat next week," Mrs. Carroll

said. "There's the boat making the slip, Sue," she added, "let's get

the table set out here on the porch while they're climbing the hill!"

Up the hill came Philip and Josephine, just home from the city,

escorted by Betsey and Jim who had met them at the boat. Susan received

a strangling welcome from Betts, and Josephine, who looked a little

pale and tired after this first enervating, warm spring day, really

brightened perceptibly when she went upstairs with Susan to slip into a

dress that was comfortably low-necked and short-sleeved.

Presently they all gathered on the porch for dinner, with the sweet

twilighted garden just below them and anchor lights beginning to prick,

one by one, through the soft dusky gloom of the bay.

"Well, 'mid pleasures and palaces---" Philip smiled at his mother.

"Charades to-night!" shrilled Betts, from the kitchen where she was

drying lettuce.

"Oh, but a walk first!" Susan protested. For their aimless strolls

through the dark, flower-scented lanes were a delight to her.

"And Billy's coming over to-morrow to walk to Gioli's," Josephine added

contentedly.

That evening and the next day Susan always remembered as terminating a

certain phase of her life, although for perhaps a week the days went on

just as usual. But one morning she found confusion reigning, when she

arrived at Hunter, Baxter & Hunter's. Front Office was to be

immediately abolished, its work was over, its staff already dispersing.

Workmen, when she arrived, were moving out cases and chairs, and Mr.

Brauer, eagerly falling upon her, begged her to clean out her desk, and

to help him assort the papers in some of the other desks and cabinets.

Susan, filled with pleasant excitement, pinned on her paper cuffs, and

put her heart and soul into the work. No bills this morning! The

office-boy did not even bring them up.

"Now, here's a soap order that must have been specially priced," said

Susan, at her own desk, "I couldn't make anything of it yesterday---"

"Let it go--let it go!" Mr. Brauer said. "It iss all ofer!"

As the other girls came in they were pressed into service, papers and

papers and papers, the drift of years, were tossed out of drawers and

cubby-holes. Much excited laughter and chatter went on. Probably not

one girl among them felt anything but pleasure and relief at the

unexpected holiday, and a sense of utter confidence in the future.

Mr. Philip, fussily entering the disordered room at ten o'clock,

announced his regret at the suddenness of the change; the young ladies

would be paid their salaries for the uncompleted month--a murmur of

satisfaction arose--and, in short, the firm hoped that their

association had been as pleasant to them as it had been to his partners

and himself.

"They had a directors' meeting on Saturday," Thorny said, later, "and

if you ask me my frank opinion, I think Henry Brauer is at the bottom

of all this. What do you know about his having been at that meeting on

Saturday, and his going to have the office right next to J. G.'s--isn't

that the extension of the limit? He's as good as in the firm now."

"I've always said that he knew something that made it very well worth

while for this firm to keep his mouth shut," said Miss Cashell, darkly.

"I'll bet you there's something in that," Miss Cottle agreed.

"H. B. & H. is losing money hand over fist," Thorny stated, gloomily,

with that intimate knowledge of an employer's affairs always displayed

by an obscure clerk.

"Brauer asked me if I would like to go into the big office, but I don't

believe I could do the work," Susan said.

"Yes; I'm going into the main office, too," Thorny stated. "Don't you

be afraid, Susan. It's as easy as pie."

"Mr. Brauer said I could try it," Miss Sherman shyly contributed. But

no other girl had been thus complimented. Miss Kelly and Miss Garvey,

both engaged to be married now, Miss Kelly to Miss Garvey's brother,

Miss Garvey to Miss Kelly's cousin, were rather congratulating

themselves upon the turn of events; the other girls speculated as to

the wisest step to take next, some talking vaguely of post-office or

hospital work; Miss Cashell, as Miss Thornton later said to Susan,

hopelessly proving herself no lady by announcing that she could get

better money as a coat model, and meant to get into that line of work

if she could.

"Are we going to have lunch to-day?" somebody asked. Miss Thornton

thoughtfully drew a piece of paper toward her, and wet her pencil in

her mouth.

"Best thing we can do, I guess," she said.

"Let's put ten cents each in," Susan suggested, "and make it a real

party."

Thorny accordingly expanded her list to include sausages and a pie,

cheese and rolls, besides the usual tea and stewed tomatoes. The girls

ate the little meal with their hats and wraps on, a sense of change

filled the air, and they were all a little pensive, even with an

unexpected half-holiday before them.

Then came good-bys. The girls separated with many affectionate

promises. All but the selected three were not to return. Susan and Miss

Sherman and Thorny would come back to find their desks waiting for them

in the main office next day.

Susan walked thoughtfully uptown, and when she got home, wrote a formal

application for the position open in her school to little Miss Berrat

in Sausalito.

It was a delightful, sunshiny afternoon. Mary Lou, Mrs. Lancaster and

Virginia were making a mournful trip to the great institution for the

blind in Berkeley, where Virginia's physician wanted to place her for

special watching and treatment. Susan found two or three empty hours on

her hands, and started out for a round of calls.

She called on her aunt's old friends, the Langs, and upon the bony,

cold Throckmorton sisters, rich, nervous, maiden ladies, shivering

themselves slowly to death in their barn of a house, and finally, and

unexpectedly, upon Mrs. Baxter.

Susan had planned a call on Georgie, to finish the afternoon, for her

cousin, slowly dragging her way up the last of the long road that ends

in motherhood, was really in need of cheering society.

But the Throckmorton house chanced to be directly opposite the old

Baxter mansion, and Susan, seeing Peter's home, suddenly decided to

spend a few moments with the old lady.

After all, why should she not call? She had had no open break with

Peter, and on every occasion his aunt had begged her to take pity on an

old woman's loneliness. Susan was always longing, in her secret heart,

for that accident that should reopen the old friendship; knowing Peter,

she knew that the merest chance would suddenly bring him to her side

again; his whole life was spent in following the inclination of the

moment. And today, in her pretty new hat and spring suit, she was

looking her best.

Peter would not be at home, of course. But his aunt would tell him that

that pretty, happy Miss Brown was here, and that she was going to leave

Hunter, Baxter & Hunter's for something not specified. And then Peter,

realizing that Susan had entirely risen above any foolish old memory----

Susan crossed the street and rang the bell. When the butler told her,

with an impassive face, that he would find out if Mrs. Baxter were in,

Susan hoped, in a panic, that she was not. The big, gloomy, handsome

hall rather awed her. She watched Burns's retreating back fearfully,

hoping that Mrs. Baxter really was out, or that Burns would be

instructed to say so.

But he came back, expressionless, placid, noiseless of step, to say in

a hushed, confidential tone that Mrs. Baxter would be down in a moment.

He lighted the reception room brilliantly for Susan, and retired

decorously. Susan sat nervously on the edge of a chair. Suddenly her

call seemed a very bold and intrusive thing to do, even an indelicate

thing, everything considered. Suppose Peter should come in; what could

he think but that she was clinging to the association with which he had

so clearly indicated that he was done?

What if she got up and went silently, swiftly out? Burns was not in

sight, the great hall was empty. She had really nothing to say to Mrs.

Baxter, and she could assume that she had misunderstood his message if

the butler followed her----

Mrs. Baxter, a little figure in rustling silk, came quickly down the

stairway. Susan met her in the doorway of the reception room, with a

smile.

"How do you do, how do you do?" Mrs. Baxter said nervously. She did not

sit down, but stood close to Susan, peering up at her shortsightedly,

and crumpling the card she held in her hand. "It's about the office,

isn't it?" she said quickly. "Yes, I see. Mr. Baxter told me that it

was to be closed. I'm sorry, but I never interfere in those

things,--never. I really don't know ANYTHING about it! I'm sorry. But

it would hardly be my place to interfere in business, when I don't know

anything about it, would it? Mr. Baxter always prides himself on the

fact that I don't interfere. So I don't really see what I could do."

A wave of some supreme emotion, not all anger, nor all contempt, nor

all shame, but a composite of the three, rose in Susan's heart. She had

not come to ask a favor of this more fortunate woman, but--the thought

flashed through her mind--suppose she had? She looked down at the

little silk-dressed figure, the blinking eyes, the veiny little hand,

and the small mouth, that, after sixty years, was composed of nothing

but conservative and close-shut lines. Pity won the day over her hurt

girlish feeling and the pride that claimed vindication, and Susan

smiled kindly.

"Oh, I didn't come about Front Office, Mrs. Baxter! I just happened to

be in the neighborhood---" Two burning spots came into the older

woman's face, not of shame, but of anger that she had misunderstood,

had placed herself for an instant at a disadvantage.

"Oh," she said vaguely. "Won't you sit down? Peter---" she paused.

"Peter is in Santa Barbara, isn't he?" asked Susan, who knew he was not.

"I declare I don't know where he is half the time," Mrs. Baxter said,

with her little, cracked laugh. They both sat down. "He has SUCH a good

time!" pursued his aunt, complacently.

"Doesn't he?" Susan said pleasantly.

"Only I tell the girls they mustn't take Peter too seriously," cackled

the sweet, old voice. "Dreadful boy!"

"I think they understand him." Susan looked at her hostess

solicitously. "You look well," she said resolutely. "No more neuritis,

Mrs. Baxter?"

Mrs. Baxter was instantly diverted. She told Susan of her new

treatment, her new doctor, the devotion of her old maid; Emma, the

servant of her early married life, was her close companion now, and

although Mrs. Baxter always thought of her as a servant, Emma was

really the one intimate friend she had.

Susan remained a brief quarter of an hour, chatting easily, but burning

with inward shame. Never, never, never in her life would she pay

another call like this one! Tea was not suggested, and when the girl

said good-by, Mrs. Baxter did not leave the reception room. But just as

Burns opened the street-door for her Susan saw a beautiful little coupe

stop at the curb, and Miss Ella Saunders, beautifully gowned, got out

of it and came up the steps with a slowness that became her enormous

size.

"Hello, Susan Brown!" said Miss Saunders, imprisoning Susan's hand

between two snowy gloves. "Where've you been?"

"Where've YOU been?" Susan laughed. "Italy and Russia and Holland!"

"Don't be an utter little hypocrite, child, and try to make talk with a

woman of my years I I've been home two weeks, anyway."

"Emily home?"

Miss Saunders nodded slowly, bit her lip, and stared at Susan in a

rather mystifying and very pronounced way.

"Emily is home, indeed," she said absently. Then abruptly she added:

"Can you lunch with me to-morrow--no, Wednesday--at the Town and

Country, infant?"

"Why, I'd love to!" Susan answered, dimpling.

"Well; at one? Then we can talk. Tell me," Miss Saunders lowered her

voice, "is Mrs. Baxter in? Oh, damn!" she added cheerfully, as Susan

nodded. Susan glanced back, before the door closed, and saw her meet

the old lady in the hall and give her an impulsive kiss.

CHAPTER II

The little Town and Country Club, occupying two charmingly-furnished,

crowded floors of what had once been a small apartment house on Post

Street, next door to the old library, was a small but remarkable

institution, whose members were the wealthiest and most prominent women

of the fashionable colonies of Burlingame and San Mateo, Ross Valley

and San Rafael. Presumably only the simplest and least formal of

associations, it was really the most important of all the city's social

institutions, and no woman was many weeks in San Francisco society

without realizing that the various country clubs, and the Junior

Cotillions were as dust and ashes, and that her chances of achieving a

card to the Browning dances were very slim if she could not somehow

push her name at least as far as the waiting list of the Town and

Country Club.

The members pretended, to a woman, to be entirely unconscious of their

social altitude. They couldn't understand how such ideas ever got

about, it was "delicious"; it was "too absurd!" Why, the club was just

the quietest place in the world, a place where a woman could run in to

brush her hair and wash her hands, and change her library book, and

have a cup of tea. A few of them had formed it years ago, just half a

dozen of them, at a luncheon; it was like a little family circle, one

knew everybody there, and one felt at home there. But, as for being

exclusive and conservative, that was all nonsense! And besides, what

did other women see in it to make them want to come in! Let them form

another club, exactly like it, wouldn't that be the wiser thing?

Other women, thus advised and reassured, smiled, instead of gnashing

their teeth, and said gallantly that after all they themselves were too

busy to join any club just now, merely happened to speak of the Town

and Country. And after that they said hateful and lofty and insulting

things about the club whenever they found listeners.

But the Town and Country Club flourished on unconcernedly, buzzing six

days a week with well-dressed women, echoing to Christian names and

intimate chatter, sheltering the smartest of pigskin suitcases and

gold-headed umbrellas and rustling raincoats in its tiny closets,

resisting the constant demand of the younger element for modern club

conveniences and more room.

No; the old members clung to its very inconveniences, to the gas-lights

over the dressing-tables, and the narrow halls, and the view of ugly

roofs and buildings from its back windows. They liked to see the

notices written in the secretary's angular hand and pinned on the

library door with a white-headed pin. The catalogue numbers of books

were written by hand, too--the ink blurred into the shiny linen bands.

At tea-time a little maid quite openly cut and buttered bread in a

corner of the dining-room; it was permissible to call gaily, "More

bread here, Rosie! I'm afraid we're a very hungry crowd to-day!"

Susan enormously enjoyed the club; she had been there more than once

with Miss Saunders, and found her way without trouble to-day to a big

chair in a window arch, where she could enjoy the passing show without

being herself conspicuous. A constant little stream of women came and

went, handsome, awkward school-girls, in town for the dentist or to be

fitted to shoes, or for the matinee; debutantes, in their exquisite

linens and summer silks, all joyous chatter and laughter; and

plainly-gowned, well-groomed, middle-aged women, escorting or

chaperoning, and pausing here for greetings and the interchange of news.

Miss Saunders, magnificent, handsome, wonderfully gowned, was

surrounded by friends the moment she came majestically upstairs. Susan

thought her very attractive, with her ready flow of conversation, her

familiar, big-sisterly attitude with the young girls, her positiveness

when there was the slightest excuse for her advice or opinions being

expressed. She had a rich, full voice, and a drawling speech. She had

to decline ten pressing invitations in as many minutes.

"Ella, why can't you come home with me this afternoon?--I'm not

speaking to you, Ella Saunders, you've not been near us since you got

back!--Mama's so anxious to see you, Miss Ella!--Listen, Ella, you've

got to go with us to Tahoe; Perry will have a fit if you don't!"

"Mama's not well, and the kid is just home," Miss Saunders told them

all good-naturedly, in excuse. She carried Susan off to the lunch-room,

announcing herself to be starving, and ordered a lavish luncheon. Ella

Saunders really liked this pretty, jolly, little book-keeper from

Hunter, Baxter & Hunter's. Susan amused her, and she liked still better

the evidence that she amused Susan. Her indifferent, not to say

irreverent, air toward the sacred traditions and institutions of her

class made Susan want to laugh and gasp at once.

"But this is a business matter," said Miss Saunders, when they had

reached the salad, "and here we are talking! Mama and Baby and I have

talked this thing all over, Susan," she added casually, "and we want to

know what you'd think of coming to live with us?"

Susan fixed her eyes upon her as one astounded, not a muscle of her

face moved. She never was quite natural with Ella; above the sudden

rush of elation and excitement came the quick intuition that Ella would

like a sensational reception of her offer. Her look expressed the

stunned amazement of one who cannot credit her ears. Ella's laugh

showed an amused pleasure.

"Don't look so aghast, child. You don't have to do it!" she said.

Again Susan did the dramatic and acceptable thing, typical of what she

must give the Saunders throughout their relationship. Instead of the

natural "What on earth are you talking about?" she said slowly,

dazedly, her bewildered eyes on Ella's face:

"You're joking---"

"Joking! You'll find the Saunders family no joke, I can promise you

that!" Ella said, humorously. And again Susan laughed.

"No, but you see Emily's come home from Fowler's a perfect nervous

wreck," explained Miss Ella, "and; she can't be left alone for

awhile,--partly because her heart's not good, partly because she gets

blue, and partly because, if she hasn't anyone to drive and walk and

play tennis with, and so on, she simply mopes from morning until night.

She hates Mama's nurse; Mama needs Miss Baker herself anyway, and we've

been wondering and wondering how we could get hold of the right person

to fill the bill. You'd have a pretty easy time in one way, of course,

and do everything the Kid does, and I'll stand right behind you. But

don't think it's any snap!"

"Snap!" echoed Susan, starry-eyed, crimson-cheeked. "---But you don't

mean that you want ME?"

"I wish you could have seen her; she turned quite pale," Miss Saunders

told her mother and sister later. "Really, she was overcome. She said

she'd speak to her aunt to-night; I don't imagine there'll be any

trouble. She's a nice child. I don't see the use of delay, so I said

Monday."

"You were a sweet to think of it," Emily said, gratefully, from the

downy wide couch where she was spending the evening.

"Not at all, Kid," Ella answered politely. She yawned, and stared at

the alabaster globe of the lamp above Emily's head. A silence fell. The

two sisters never had much to talk about, and Mrs. Saunders, dutifully

sitting with the invalid, was heavy from dinner, and nearly asleep.

Ella yawned again.

"Want some chocolates?" she finally asked.

"Oh, thank you, Ella!"

"I'll send Fannie in with 'em!" Miss Ella stood up, bent her head to

study at close range an engraving on the wall, loitered off to her own

room. She was rarely at home in the evening and did not know quite what

to do with herself.

Susan, meanwhile, walked upon air. She tasted complete happiness for

almost the first time in her life; awakened in the morning to blissful

reality, instead of the old dreary round, and went to sleep at night

smiling at her own happy thoughts. It was all like a pleasant dream!

She resigned from her new position at Hunter, Baxter & Hunter's exactly

as she resigned in imagination a hundred times. No more drudgery over

bills, no more mornings spent in icy, wet shoes, and afternoons heavy

with headache. Susan was almost too excited to thank Mr. Brauer for his

compliments and regrets.

Parting with Thorny was harder; Susan and she had been through many a

hard hour together, had shared a thousand likes and dislikes, had loved

and quarreled and been reconciled.

"You're doing an awfully foolish thing, Susan. You'll wish you were

back here inside of a month," Thorny prophesied when the last moment

came. "Aw, don't you do it, Susan!" she pleaded, with a little real

emotion. "Come on into Main Office, and sit next to me. We'll have

loads of sport."

"Oh, I've promised!" Susan held out her hand. "Don't forget me!" she

said, trying to laugh. Miss Thornton's handsome eyes glistened with

tears. With a sudden little impulse they kissed each other for the

first time.

Then Susan, a full hour before closing, went down from the lunch-room,

and past all the familiar offices; the sadness of change tugging at her

heart-strings. She had been here a long time, she had smelled this same

odor of scorching rubber, and oils and powders through so many slow

afternoons, in gay moods and sad, in moods of rebellion and distaste.

She left a part of her girlhood here. The cashier, to whom she went for

her check, was all kindly interest, and the young clerks and salesmen

stopped to offer her their good wishes. Susan passed the time-clock

without punching her number for the first time in three years, and out

into the sunny, unfamiliar emptiness of the streets.

At the corner her heart suddenly failed her. She felt as if she could

not really go away from these familiar places and people. The

warehouses and wholesale houses, the wholesale liquor house with a live

eagle magnificently caged in one window, the big stove establishment,

with its window full of ranges in shining steel and nickel-plate; these

had been her world for so long!

But she kept on her way uptown, and by the time she reached the old

library, where Mary Lou, very handsome in her well-brushed suit and

dotted veil, with white gloves still odorous of benzine, was waiting,

she was almost sure that she was not making a mistake.

Mary Lou was a famous shopper, capable of exhausting any saleswoman for

a ten-cent purchase, and proportionately effective when, as to-day, a

really considerable sum was to be spent. She regretfully would decline

a dozen varieties in handkerchiefs or ribbons, saying with pleasant

plaintiveness to the saleswoman: "Perhaps I am hard to please. My

mother is an old Southern lady--the Ralstons, you know?--and her linen

is, of course, like nothing one can get nowadays! No; I wouldn't care

to show my mother this.

"My cousin, of course, only wants this for a little hack hat," she

added to Susan's modest suggestion of price to the milliner, and in the

White House she consented to Susan's selections with a consoling

reminder, "It isn't as if you didn't have your lovely French underwear

at home, Sue! These will do very nicely for your rough camping trip!"

Compared to Mary Lou, Susan was a very poor shopper. She was always

anxious to please the saleswoman, to buy after a certain amount of

looking had been done, for no other reason than that she had caused

most of the stock to be displayed.

"I like this, Mary Lou," Susan would murmur nervously. And, as the

pompadoured saleswoman turned to take down still another heap of

petticoats, Susan would repeat noiselessly, with an urgent nod, "This

will do!"

"Wait, now, dear," Mary Lou would return, unperturbed, arresting

Susan's hand with a white, well-filled glove. "Wait, dear. If we can't

get it here we can get it somewhere else. Yes, let me see those you

have there---"

"Thank you, just the same," Susan always murmured uncomfortably,

averting her eyes from the saleswoman, as they went away. But the

saleswoman, busily rearranging her stock, rarely responded.

To-day they bought, besides the fascinating white things, some tan

shoes, and a rough straw hat covered with roses, and two linen skirts,

and three linen blouses, and a little dress of dotted lavender lawn.

Everything was of the simplest, but Susan had never had so many new

things in the course of her life before, and was elated beyond words as

one purchase was made after another.

She carried home nearly ten dollars, planning to keep it until the

first month's salary should be paid, but Auntie was found, upon their

return in the very act of dissuading the dark powers known as the

"sewing-machine men" from removing that convenience, and Susan, only

too thankful to be in time, gladly let seven dollars fall into the oily

palm of the carrier in charge.

"Mary Lou," said she, over her fascinating packages, just before

dinner, "here's a funny thing! If I had gone bad, you know, so that I

could keep buying nice, pretty, simple things like this, as fast as I

needed them, I'd feel better--I mean truly cleaner and more moral--than

when I was good!"

"Susan! Why, SUSAN!" Her cousin turned a shocked face from the window

where she was carefully pasting newly-washed handkerchiefs, to dry in

the night. "Do you remember who you ARE, dear, and don't say dreadful

things like that!"

In the next few days Susan pressed her one suit, laundered a score of

little ruffles and collars, cleaned her gloves, sewed on buttons and

strings generally, and washed her hair. Late on Sunday came the joyful

necessity of packing. Mary Lou folded and refolded patiently, Georgie

came in with a little hand-embroidered handkerchief-case for Susan's

bureau, Susan herself rushed about like a mad-woman, doing almost

nothing.

"You'll be back inside the month," said Billy that evening, looking up

from Carlyle's "Revolution," to where Susan and Mary Lou were busy with

last stitches, at the other side of the dining-room table. "You can't

live with the rotten rich any more than I could!"

"Billy, you don't know how awfully conceited you sound when you say a

thing like that!"

"Conceited? Oh, all right!" Mr. Oliver accompanied the words with a

sound only to be described as a snort, and returned, offended, to his

book.

"Conceited, well, maybe I am," he resumed with deadly calm, a moment

later. "But there's no conceit in my saying that people like the

Saunders can't buffalo ME!"

"You may not see it, but there IS!" persisted Susan.

"You give me a pain, Sue! Do you honestly think they are any better

than you are?"

"Of course they're not better," Susan said, heatedly, "if it comes

right down to morals and the Commandments! But if I prefer to spend my

life among people who have had several generations of culture and

refinement and travel and education behind them, it's my own affair! I

like nice people, and rich people ARE more refined than poor, and

nobody denies it! I may feel sorry for a girl who marries a man on

forty a week, and brings up four or five little kids on it, but that

doesn't mean I want to do it myself! And I think a man has his nerve to

expect it!"

"I didn't make you an offer, you know, Susan," said William pleasantly.

"I didn't mean you!" Susan answered angrily. Then with sudden calm and

sweetness, she resumed, busily tearing up and assorting old letters the

while, "But now you're trying to make me mad, Billy, and you don't care

what you say. The trouble with you," she went on, with sisterly

kindness and frankness, "is that you think you are the only person who

really ought to get on in the world. You know so much, and study so

hard, that you DESERVE to be rich, so that you can pension off every

old stupid German laborer at the works who still wants a job when they

can get a boy of ten to do his work better than he can! You mope away

over there at those cottages, Bill, until you think the only important

thing in the world is the price of sausages in proportion to wages. And

for all that you pretend to despise people who use decent English, and

don't think a bath-tub is a place to store potatoes; I notice that you

are pretty anxious to study languages and hear good music and keep up

in your reading, yourself! And if that's not cultivation---"

"I never said a word about cultivation!" Billy, who had been apparently

deep in his book, looked up to snap angrily. Any allusion to his

efforts at self-improvement always touched him in a very sensitive

place.

"Why, you did TOO! You said---"

"Oh, I did not! If you're going to talk so much, Sue, you ought to have

some faint idea what you're talking about!"

"Very well," Susan said loftily, "if you can't address me like a

gentleman, we won't discuss it. I'm not anxious for your opinion,

anyway."

A silence. Mr. Oliver read with passionate attention. Susan sighed,

sorted her letters, sighed again.

"Billy, do you love me?" she asked winningly, after a pause.

Another silence. Mr. Oliver turned a page.

"Are you sure you've read every word on that page, Bill,--every little

word?"

Silence again.

"You know, you began this, Bill," Susan said presently, with childish

sweet reproach. "Don't say anything, Bill; I can't ask that! But if you

still love me, just smile!"

By some miracle, Billy preserved his scowl.

"Not even a glimmer!" Susan said, despondently. "I'll tell you, Bill,"

she added, gushingly. "Just turn a page, and I'll take it for a sign of

love!" She clasped her hands, and watched him breathlessly.

Mr. Oliver reached the point where the page must be turned. He moved

his eyes stealthily upward.

"Oh, no you don't! No going back!" exulted Susan. She jumped up,

grabbed the book, encircled his head with her arms, kissed her own hand

vivaciously and made a mad rush for the stairs. Mr. Oliver caught her

half-way up the flight, with more energy than dignity, and got his book

back by doubling her little finger over with an increasing pressure

until Susan managed to drop the volume to the hall below.

"Bill, you beast! You've broken my finger!" Susan, breathless and

dishevelled, sat beside him on the narrow stair, and tenderly worked

the injured member, "It hurts!"

"Let Papa tiss it!"

"You try it once!"

"Sh-sh! Ma says not so much noise!" hissed Mary Lou, from the floor

above, where she had been summoned some hours ago, "Alfie's just

dropped off!"

On Monday a new life began for Susan Brown. She stepped from the dingy

boarding-house in Fulton Street straight into one of the most beautiful

homes in the state, and, so full were the first weeks, that she had no

time for homesickness, no time for letters, no time for anything but

the briefest of scribbled notes to the devoted women she left behind

her.

Emily Saunders herself met the newcomer at the station, looking very

unlike an invalid,--looking indeed particularly well and happy, if

rather pale, as she was always pale, and a little too fat after the

idle and carefully-fed experience in the hospital. Susan peeped into

Miss Ella's big room, as they went upstairs. Ella was stretched

comfortably on a wide, flowery couch, reading as her maid rubbed her

loosened hair with some fragrant toilet water, and munching chocolates.

"Hello, Susan Brown!" she called out. "Come in and see me some time

before dinner,--I'm going out!"

Ella's room was on the second floor, where were also Mrs. Saunders'

room, various guest-rooms, an upstairs music-room and a sitting-room.

But Emily's apartment, as well as her brother's, were on the third

floor, and Susan's delightful room opened from Emily's. The girls had a

bathroom as large as a small bedroom, and a splendid deep balcony

shaded by gay awnings was accessible only to them. Potted geraniums

made this big outdoor room gay, a thick Indian rug was on the floor,

there were deep wicker chairs, and two beds, in day-covers of green

linen, with thick brightly colored Pueblo blankets folded across them.

The girls were to spend all their days in the open air, and sleep out

here whenever possible for Emily's sake.

While Emily bathed, before dinner, Susan hung over the balcony rail,

feeling deliciously fresh and rested, after her own bath, and eager not

to miss a moment of the lovely summer afternoon. Just below her, the

garden was full of roses. There were other flowers, too, carnations and

velvety Shasta daisies, there were snowballs that tumbled in great

heaps of white on the smooth lawn, and syringas and wall-flowers and

corn-flowers, far over by the vine-embroidered stone wall, and late

Persian lilacs, and hydrangeas, in every lovely tone between pink and

lavender, filled a long line of great wooden Japanese tubs, leading, by

a walk of sunken stones, to the black wooden gates of the Japanese

garden. But the roses reigned supreme--beautiful standard roses, with

not a shriveled leaf to mar the perfection of blossoms and foliage; San

Rafael roses, flinging out wherever they could find a support, great

sprays of pinkish-yellow and yellowish-pink, and gold and cream and

apricot-colored blossoms. There were moss roses, sheathed in dark-green

film, glowing Jacqueminot and Papagontier and La France roses, white

roses, and yellow roses,--Susan felt as if she could intoxicate herself

upon the sweetness and the beauty of them all.

The carriage road swept in a great curve from the gate, its smooth

pebbled surface crossed sharply at regular intervals by the clean-cut

shadows of the elm trees. Here and there on the lawns a sprinkler flung

out its whirling circles of spray, and while Susan watched a gardener

came into view, picked up a few fallen leaves from the roadway and

crushed them together in his hand.

On the newly-watered stretch of road that showed beyond the wide gates,

carriages and carts, and an occasional motor-car were passing, flinging

wheeling shadows beside them on the road, and driven by girls in light

gowns and wide hats or by grooms in livery. Presently one very smart,

high English cart stopped, and Mr. Kenneth Saunders got down from it,

and stood whipping his riding-boot with his crap and chatting with the

young woman who had driven him home. Susan thought him a very

attractive young man, with his quiet, almost melancholy expression, and

his air of knowing exactly the correct thing to do, whenever he cared

to exert himself at all.

She watched him now with interest, not afraid of detection, for a small

head, on a third story balcony, would be quite lost among the details

of the immense facade of the house. He walked toward the stable, and

whistled what was evidently a signal, for three romping collies came

running to meet him, and were leaping and tumbling about him as he went

around the curve of the drive and out of sight. Then Susan went back to

her watching and dreaming, finding something new to admire and delight

in every moment. The details confused her, but she found the whole

charming.

Indeed, she had been in San Rafael for several weeks before she found

the view of the big house from the garden anything but bewildering.

With its wings and ells, its flowered balconies and French windows, its

tiled pergola and flower-lined Spanish court, it stood a monument to

the extraordinary powers of the modern architect; nothing was

incongruous, nothing offended. Susan liked to decide into which room

this casement window fitted, or why she never noticed that particular

angle of wall from the inside. It was always a disappointment to

discover that some of the quaintest of the windows lighted only

linen-closets or perhaps useless little spaces under a sharp angle of

roof, and that many of the most attractive lines outside were so cut

and divided as to be unrecognizable within.

It was a modern house, with beautifully-appointed closets tucked in

wherever there was an inch to spare, with sheets of mirror set in the

bedroom doors, with every conceivable convenience in nickel-plate

glittering in its bathrooms, and wall-telephones everywhere.

The girl's adjectives were exhausted long before she had seen half of

it. She tried to make her own personal choice between the dull, soft,

dark colors and carved Circassian walnut furniture in the dining-room,

and the sharp contrast of the reception hall, where the sunlight

flooded a rosy-latticed paper, an old white Colonial mantel and

fiddle-backed chairs, and struck dazzling gleams from the brass

fire-dogs and irons. The drawing-room had its own charm; the largest

room in the house, it had French windows on three sides, each one

giving a separate and exquisite glimpse of lawns and garden beyond.

Upon its dark and shining floor were stretched a score of silky Persian

rugs, roses mirrored themselves in polished mahogany, and here and

there were priceless bits of carved ivory, wonderful strips of

embroidered Chinese silks, miniatures, and exquisite books. Four or

five great lamps glowing under mosaic shades made the place lovely at

night, but in the heat of a summer day, shaded, empty, deliciously airy

and cool, Susan thought it at its loveliest. At night heavy brocaded

curtains were drawn across the windows, and a wood fire crackled in the

fireplace, in a setting of creamy tiles. There was a small grand-piano

in this room, a larger piano in the big, empty reception room on the

other side of the house, Susan and Emily had a small upright for their

own use, and there were one or two more in other parts of the house.

Everywhere was exquisite order, exquisite peace. Lightfooted maids came

and went noiselessly, to brush up a fallen daisy petal, or straighten a

rug. Not the faintest streak of dust ever lay across the shining

surface of the piano, not the tiniest cloud ever filmed the clear

depths of the mirrors. A slim Chinese houseboy, in plum-color and pale

blue, with his queue neatly coiled, and his handsome, smooth young face

always smiling, padded softly to and fro all day long, in his

thick-soled straw slippers, with letters and magazines, parcels and

messages and telegrams.

"Lizzie-Carrie--one of you girls take some sweet-peas up to my room,"

Ella would say at breakfasttime, hardly glancing up from her mail. And

an hour later Susan, looking into Miss Saunders' apartment to see if

she still expected Emily to accompany her to the Holmes wedding, or to

say that Mrs. Saunders wanted to see her eldest daughter, would notice

a bowl of the delicately-tinted blossoms on the desk, and another on

the table.

The girls' beds were always made, when they went upstairs to freshen

themselves for luncheon; tumbled linen and used towels had been

spirited away, fresh blotters were on the desk, fresh flowers

everywhere, windows open, books back on their shelves, clothes

stretched on hangers in the closets; everything immaculately clean and

crisp.

It was apparently impossible to interrupt the quiet running of the

domestic machinery. If Susan and Emily left wet skirts and umbrellas

and muddy overshoes in one of the side hallways, on returning from a

walk, it was only a question of a few hours, before the skirts, dried

and brushed and pressed, the umbrellas neatly furled, and the

overshoes, as shining as ever, were back in their places. If the girls

wanted tea at five o'clock, sandwiches of every known, and frequently

of new types, little cakes and big, hot bouillons, or a salad, or even

a broiled bird were to be had for the asking. It was no trouble, the

tray simply appeared and Chow Yew or Carrie served them as if it were a

real pleasure to do so.

Whoever ordered for the Saunders kitchen--Susan suspected that it was a

large amiable person in black whom she sometimes met in the halls, a

person easily mistaken for a caller or a visiting aunt, but respectful

in manner, and with a habit of running her tongue over her teeth when

not speaking that vaguely suggested immense capability--did it on a

very large scale indeed. It was not, as in poor Auntie's case, a

question of selecting stewed tomatoes as a suitable vegetable for

dinner, and penciling on a list, under "five pounds round steak,"

"three cans tomatoes." In the Saunders' house there was always to be

had whatever choicest was in season,--crabs or ducks, broilers or

trout, asparagus an inch in diameter, forced strawberries and peaches,

even pomegranates and alligator pears and icy, enormous grapefruit--new

in those days--and melons and nectarines. There were crocks and boxes

of cakes, a whole ice-chest just for cream and milk, another for

cheeses and olives and pickles and salad-dressings. Susan had seen the

cook's great store-room, lined with jars and pots and crocks, tins and

glasses and boxes of delicious things to eat, brought from all over the

world for the moment when some member of the Saunders family fancied

Russian caviar, or Chinese ginger, or Italian cheese.

Other people's brains and bodies were constantly and pleasantly at work

to spare the Saunders any effort whatever, and as Susan, taken in by

the family, and made to feel absolutely one of them, soon found herself

taking hourly service quite as a matter of course, as though it was

nothing new to her luxury-loving little person. If she hunted for a

book, in a dark corner of the library, she did not turn her head to see

which maid touched the button that caused a group of lights, just above

her, to spring suddenly into soft bloom, although her "Thank you!"

never failed; and when she and Emily came in late for tea in the

drawing-room, she piled her wraps into some attendant's arms without so

much as a glance. Yet Susan personally knew and liked all the maids,

and they liked her, perhaps because her unaffected enjoyment of this

new life and her constant allusions to the deprivations of the old days

made them feel her a little akin to themselves.

With Emily and her mother Susan was soon quite at home; with Ella her

shyness lasted longer; and toward a friendship with Kenneth Saunders

she seemed to make no progress whatever. Kenneth addressed a few

kindly, unsmiling remarks to his mother during the course of the few

meals he had at home; he was always gentle with her, and deeply

resented anything like a lack of respect toward her on the others'

parts. He entirely ignored Emily, and if he held any conversation at

all with the spirited Ella, it was very apt to take the form of a

controversy, Ella trying to persuade him to attend some dance or

dinner, or Kenneth holding up some especial friend of hers for scornful

criticism. Sometimes he spoke to Miss Baker, but not often. Kenneth's

friendships were mysteries; his family had not the most remote idea

where he went when he went out every evening, or where he was when he

did not come home. Sometimes he spoke out in sudden, half-amused praise

of some debutante, she was a "funny little devil," or "she was the

decentest kid in this year's crop," and perhaps he would follow up this

remark with a call or two upon the admired young girl, and Ella would

begin to tease him about her. But the debutante and her mother

immediately lost their heads at this point, called on the Saunders,

gushed at Ella and Emily, and tried to lure Kenneth into coming to

little home dinners or small theater parties. This always ended matters

abruptly, and Kenneth returned to his old ways.

His valet, a mournful, silent fellow named Mycroft, led rather a

curious life, reporting at his master's room in the morning not before

ten, and usually not in bed before two or three o'clock the next

morning. About once a fortnight, sometimes oftener, as Susan had known

for a long time, a subtle change came over Kenneth. His mother saw it

and grieved; Ella saw it and scolded everyone but him. It cast a

darkness over the whole house. Kenneth, always influenced more or less

by what he drank, was going down, down, down, through one dark stage

after another, into the terrible state whose horrors he dreaded with

the rest of them. He was moping for a day or two, absent from meals,

understood to be "not well, and in bed." Then Mycroft would agitatedly

report that Mr. Kenneth was gone; there would be tears and Ella's

sharpest voice in Mrs. Saunders' room, pallor and ill-temper on Emily's

part, hushed distress all about until Kenneth was brought home from

some place unknown by Mycroft, in a cab, and gotten noisily upstairs

and visited three times a day by the doctor. The doctor would come

downstairs to reassure Mrs. Saunders; Mycroft would run up and down a

hundred times a day to wait upon the invalid. Perhaps once during his

convalescence his mother would go up to see him for a little while, to

sit, constrained and tender and unhappy, beside his bed, wishing

perhaps that there was one thing in the wide world in which she and her

son had a common interest.

She was a lonesome, nervous little lady, and at these times only a

little more fidgety than ever. Sometimes she cried because of Kenneth,

in her room at night, and Ella braced her with kindly, unsympathetic,

well-meant, uncomprehending remarks, and made very light of his

weakness; but Emily walked her own room nervously, raging at Ken for

being such a beast, and Mama for being such a fool.

Susan, coming downstairs in the morning sunlight, after an evening of

horror and strain, when the lamps had burned for four hours in an empty

drawing-room, and she and Emily, early in their rooms, had listened

alternately to the shouting and thumping that went on in Kenneth's room

and the consoling murmur of Ella's voice downstairs, could hardly

believe that life was being so placidly continued; that silence and

sweetness still held sway downstairs; that Ella, in a foamy robe of

lace and ribbon, at the head of the table, could be so cheerfully

absorbed in the day's news and the Maryland biscuit, and that Mrs.

Saunders, pottering over her begonias, could show so radiant a face

over the blossoming of the double white, that Emily, at the telephone

could laugh and joke.

She was a great favorite with them all now, this sunny, pretty Susan;

even Miss Baker, the mouse-like little trained nurse, beamed for her,

and congratulated her upon her influence over every separate member of

the family. Miss Baker had held her place for ten years and cherished

no illusions concerning the Saunders.

Susan had lost some few illusions herself, but not many. She was too

happy to be critical, and it was her nature to like people for no

better reason than that they liked her.

Emily Saunders, with whom she had most to do, who was indeed her daily

and hourly companion, was at this time about twenty-six years old, and

so two years older than Susan, although hers was a smooth-skinned,

baby-like type, and she looked quite as young as her companion. She had

had a very lonely, if extraordinarily luxurious childhood, and a sickly

girlhood, whose principal events were minor operations on eyes or ears,

and experiments in diets and treatments, miserable sieges with oculists

and dentists and stomach-pumps. She had been sent to several schools,

but ill-health made her progress a great mortification, and finally she

had been given a governess, Miss Roche, a fussily-dressed, effusive

Frenchwoman, who later traveled with her. Emily's only accounts of her

European experience dealt with Miss Roche's masterly treatment of

ungracious officials, her faculty for making Emily comfortable at short

notice and at any cost or place, and her ability to bring certain small

possessions through the custom-house without unnecessary revelations.

And at eighteen the younger Miss Saunders had been given a large

coming-out tea, had joined the two most exclusive Cotillions,--the

Junior and the Browning--had lunched and dined and gone to the play

with the other debutantes, and had had, according to the admiring and

attentive press, a glorious first season.

As a matter of fact, however, it had been a most unhappy time for the

person most concerned. Emily was not a social success. Not more than

one debutante in ten is; Emily was one of the nine. Before every dance

her hopes rose irrepressibly, as she gazed at her dainty little person

in the mirror, studied her exquisite frock and her pearls, and the

smooth perfection of the hair so demurely coiled under its wreath of

rosebuds, or band of shining satin. To-night, she would be a success,

to-night she would wipe out old scores. This mood lasted until she was

actually in the dressing-room, in a whirl of arriving girls. Then her

courage began to ebb. She would watch them, as the maid took off her

carriage shoes; pleasantly take her turn at the mirror, exchange a shy,

half-absent greeting with the few she knew; wish, with all her heart,

that she dared put herself under their protection. Just a few were cool

enough to enter the big ballroom in a gale of mirth, surrender

themselves for a few moments of gallant dispute to the clustered young

men at the door, and be ready to dance without a care, the first dozen

dances promised, and nothing to do but be happy.

But Emily drifted out shyly, fussed carefully with fans or glove-clasps

while looking furtively about for possible partners, returned in a

panic to the dressing-room on a pretense of exploring a slipper-bag for

a handkerchief, and made a fresh start. Perhaps this time some group of

chattering and laughing girls and men would be too close to the door

for her comfort; not invited to join them, Emily would feel obliged to

drift on across the floor to greet some gracious older woman, and sink

into a chair, smiling at compliments, and covering a defeat with a

regretful:

"I'm really only looking on to-night. Mama worries so if I overdo."

And here she would feel out of the current indeed, hopelessly shelved.

Who would come looking for a partner in this quiet corner, next to old

Mrs. Chickering whose two granddaughters were in the very center of the

merry group at the door? Emily would smilingly rise, and go back to the

dressing-room again.

The famous Browning dances, in their beginning, a generation earlier,

had been much smaller, less formal and more intimate than they were

now. The sixty or seventy young persons who went to those first dances

were all close friends, in a simpler social structure, and a less

self-conscious day. They had been the most delightful events in Ella's

girlhood, and she felt it to be entirely Emily's fault that Emily did

not find them equally enchanting.

"But I don't know the people who go to them very well!" Emily would

say, half-confidential, half-resentful. Ella always met this argument

with high scorn.

"Oh, Baby, if you'd stop whining and fretting, and just get in and

enjoy yourself once!" Ella would answer impatiently. "You don't have to

know a man intimately to dance with him, I should hope! Just GO, and

have a good time! My Lord, the way we all used to laugh and talk and

rush about, you'd have thought we were a pack of children!"

Ella and her contemporaries always went to these balls even now, the

magnificent matrons of forty showing rounded arms and beautiful bosoms,

and gowns far more beautiful than those the girls wore. Jealousy and

rivalry and heartaches all forgot, they sat laughing and talking in

groups, clustered along the walls, or played six-handed euchre in the

adjoining card-room, and had, if the truth had been known, a far better

time than the girls they chaperoned.

After a winter or two, however, Emily stopped going, except perhaps

once in a season. She began to devote a great deal of her thought and

her conversation to her health, and was not long in finding doctors and

nurses to whom the subject was equally fascinating. Emily had a

favorite hospital, and was frequently ordered there for experiences

that touched more deeply the chords of her nature than anything else

ever did in her life. No one at home ever paid her such flattering

devotion as did the sweet-faced, low-voiced nurses, and the

doctor--whose coming, twice a day, was such an event. The doctor was a

model husband and father, his beautiful wife a woman whom Ella knew and

liked very well, but Emily had her nickname for him, and her little

presents for him, and many a small, innocuous joke between herself and

the doctor made her feel herself close to him. Emily was always glad

when she could turn from her mother's mournful solicitude, Kenneth's

snubs and Ella's imperativeness, and the humiliating contact with a

society that could get along very well without her, to the universal

welcome she had from all her friends in Mrs. Fowler's hospital.

To Susan the thought of hypodermics, anesthetics, antisepsis and clinic

thermometers, charts and diets, was utterly mysterious and abhorrent,

and her healthy distaste for them amused Emily, and gave Emily a good

reason for discussing and defending them.

Susan's part was to listen and agree, listen and agree, listen and

agree, on this as on all topics. She had not been long at "High

Gardens" before Emily, in a series of impulsive gushes of confidence,

had volunteered the information that Ella was so jealous and selfish

and heartless that she was just about breaking Mama's heart, never

happy unless she was poisoning somebody's mind against Emily, and never

willing to let Emily keep a single friend, or do anything she wanted to

do.

"So now you see why I am always so dignified and quiet with Ella," said

Emily, in the still midnight when all this was revealed. "That's the

ONE thing that makes her mad!"

"I can't believe it!" said Susan, aching for sleep, and yawning under

cover of the dark.

"I keep up for Mama's sake," Emily said. "But haven't you noticed how

Ella tries to get you away from me? You MUST have! Why, the very first

night you were here, she called out, 'Come in and see me on your way

down!' Don't you remember? And yesterday, when I wasn't dressed and she

wanted you to go driving, after dinner! Don't you remember?"

"Yes, but---" Susan began. She could dismiss this morbid fancy with a

few vigorous protests, with a hearty laugh. But she would probably

dismiss herself from the Saunders' employ, as well, if she pursued any

such bracing policy.

"You poor kid, it's pretty hard on you!" she said, admiringly. And for

half an hour she was not allowed to go to sleep.

Susan began to dread these midnight talks. The moon rose, flooded the

sleeping porch, mounted higher. The watch under Susan's pillow ticked

past one o'clock, past half-past one--

"Emily, you know really Ella is awfully proud of you," she was finally

saying, "and, as for trying to influence your mother, you can't blame

her. You're your mother's favorite--anyone can see that--and I do think

she feels--"

"Well, that's true!" Emily said, mollified. A silence followed. Susan

began to settle her head by imperceptible degrees into the pillow;

perhaps Emily was dropping off! Silence--silence--heavenly delicious

silence. What a wonderful thing this sleeping porch was, Susan thought

drowsily, and how delicious the country night--

"Susan, why do you suppose I am Mama's favorite?" Emily's clear,

wide-awake voice would pursue, with pensive interest.

Or, "Susan, when did you begin to like me?" she would question, on

their drives. "Susan, when I was looking straight up into Mrs. Carter's

face,--you know the way I always do!--she laughed at me, and said I was

a madcap monkey? Why did she say that?" Emily would pout, and wrinkle

her brows in pretty, childish doubt. "I'm not a monkey, and _I_ don't

think I'm a madcap? Do you?"

"You're different, you see, Emily. You're not in the least like anybody

else!" Susan would say.

"But WHY am I different?" And if it was possible, Emily might even come

over to sit on the arm of Susan's chair, or drop on her knees and

encircle Susan's waist with her arms.

"Well, in the first place you're terribly original, Emily, and you

always say right out what you mean--" Susan would begin.

With Ella, when she grew to know her well, Susan was really happier.

She was too honest to enjoy the part she must always play with Emily,

yet too practically aware of the advantages of this new position, to

risk it by frankness, and eventually follow the other companions, the

governesses and trained nurses who had preceded her. Emily

characterized these departed ladies as "beasts," and still flushed a

deep resentful red when she mentioned certain ones among them.

Susan found in Ella, in the first place, far more to admire than she

could in Emily. Ella's very size made for a sort of bigness in

character. She looked her two hundred and thirty pounds, but she looked

handsome, glowing and comfortable as well. Everything she wore was

loose and dashing in effect; she was a fanatic about cleanliness and

freshness, and always looked as if freshly bathed and brushed and

dressed. Ella never put on a garment, other than a gown or wrap, twice.

Sometimes a little heap of snowy, ribboned underwear was carried away

from her rooms three or four times a day.

She was dictatorial and impatient and exacting, but she was witty and

good-natured, too, and so extremely popular with men and women of her

own age that she could have dined out three times a night. Ella was

fondly nicknamed "Mike" by her own contemporaries, and was always in

demand for dinners and lunch parties and card parties. She was beloved

by the younger set, too. Susan thought her big-sisterly interest in the

debutantes very charming to see and, when she had time to remember her

sister's little companion now and then, she would carry Susan off for a

drive, or send for her when she was alone for tea, and the two laughed

a great deal together. Susan could honestly admire here, and Ella liked

her admiration.

Miss Saunders believed herself to be a member of the most distinguished

American family in existence, and her place to be undisputed as queen

of the most exclusive little social circle in the world. She knew

enough of the social sets of London and Washington and New York society

to allude to them casually and intimately, and she told Susan that no

other city could boast of more charming persons than those who composed

her own particular set in San Francisco. Ella never spoke of "society"

without intense gravity; nothing in life interested her so much as the

question of belonging or not belonging to it. To her personally, of

course, it meant nothing; she had been born inside the charmed ring,

and would die there; but the status of other persons filled her with

concern. She was very angry when her mother or Emily showed any

wavering in this all-important matter.

"Well, what did you have to SEE her for, Mama?" Ella would irritably

demand, when her autocratic "Who'd you see to-day? What'd you do?" had

drawn from her mother the name of some caller.

"Why, dearie, I happened to be right there. I was just crossing the

porch when they drove up!" Mrs. Saunders would timidly submit.

"Oh, Lord, Lord, Lord! Mama, you make me crazy!" Ella would drop her

hands, fling her head back, gaze despairingly at her mother. "That was

your chance to snub her, Mama! Why didn't you have Chow Yew say that

you were out?"

"But, dearie, she seemed a real sweet little thing!"

"Sweet little--! You'll have me CRAZY! Sweet little nothing--just

because she married Gordon Jones, and the St. Johns have taken her up,

she thinks she can get into society! And anyway, I wouldn't have given

Rosie St. John the satisfaction for a thousand dollars! Did you ask her

to your bridge lunch?"

"Ella, dear, it is MY lunch," her mother might remind her, with dignity.

"Mama, did you ask that woman here to play cards?"

"Well, dearie, she happened to say--"

"Oh, happened to say--!" A sudden calm would fall upon Miss Ella, the

calm of desperate decision. The subject would be dropped for the time,

but she would bring a written note to the lunch table.

"Listen to this, Mama; I can change it if you don't like it," Ella

would begin, kindly, and proceed to read it.

HIGH GARDENS. MY DEAR MRS. JONES:

Mother has asked me to write you that her little bridge lunch

for Friday, the third, must be given up because of the dangerous

illness of a close personal friend. She hopes that it is only a

pleasure deferred, and will write you herself when less anxious

and depressed. Cordially yours,

ELLA CORNWALLIS SAUNDERS.

"But, Ella, dear," the mother would protest, "there are others coming--"

"Leave the others to me! I'll telephone and make it the day before."

Ella would seal and dispatch the note, and be inclined to feel

generously tender and considerate of her mother for the rest of the day.

Ella was at home for a few moments, almost every day; but she did not

dine at home more than once or twice in a fortnight. But she was always

there for the family's occasional formal dinner party in which events

Susan refused very sensibly to take part. She and Miss Baker dined

early and most harmoniously in the breakfast-room, and were free to

make themselves useful to the ladies of the house afterward. Ella would

be magnificent in spangled cloth-of-gold; Emily very piquante in demure

and drooping white, embroidered exquisitely with tiny French blossoms

in color; Mrs. Saunders rustling in black lace and lavender silk, as

the three went downstairs at eight o'clock. Across the wide hall below

would stream the hooded women and the men in great-coats, silk hats in

hand. Ella did not leave the drawing-room to meet them, as on less

formal occasions, but a great chattering and laughing would break out

as they went in.

Susan, sitting back on her knees in the upper hall, to peer through the

railing at the scene below, to Miss Baker's intense amusement, could

admire everything but the men guests. They were either more or less

attractive and married, thought Susan, or very young, very old, or very

uninteresting bachelors. Red-faced, eighteen-year-old boys, laughing

nervously, and stumbling over their pumps, shared the honors with

cackling little fifty-year-old gallants. It could only be said that

they were males, and that Ella would have cheerfully consigned her

mother to bed with a bad headache rather than have had one too few of

them to evenly balance the number of women. The members of the family

knew what patience and effort were required, what writing and

telephoning, before the right number was acquired.

The first personal word that Kenneth Saunders ever spoke to his

sister's companion was when, running downstairs, on the occasion of one

of these dinners, he came upon her, crouched in her outlook, and

thoroughly enjoying herself.

"Good God!" said Kenneth, recoiling.

"Sh-sh--it's only me--I'm watching 'em!" Susan whispered, even laying

her hand upon the immaculate young gentleman's arm in her anxiety to

quiet him.

"Why, Lord; why doesn't Ella count you in on these things?" he

demanded, gruffly. "Next time I'll tell her--"

"If you do, I'll never speak to you again!" Susan threatened, her merry

face close to his in the dark. "I wouldn't be down there for a farm!"

"What do you do, just watch 'em?" Kenneth asked sociably, hanging over

the railing beside her.

"It's lots of fun!" Susan said, in a whisper. "Who's that?"

"That's that Bacon girl--isn't she the limit!" Kenneth whispered back.

"Lord," he added regretfully, "I'd much rather stay up here than go

down! What Ella wants to round up a gang like this for--"

And, sadly speculating, the son of the house ran downstairs, and Susan,

congratulating herself, returned to her watching.

Indeed, after a month or two in her new position, she thought an

evening to herself a luxury to be enormously enjoyed. It was on such an

occasion that Susan got the full benefit of the bathroom, the

luxuriously lighted and appointed dressing-table, the porch with its

view of a dozen gardens drenched in heavenly moonlight. At other times

Emily's conversation distracted her and interrupted her at her toilet.

Emily gave her no instant alone.

Emily came up very late after the dinners to yawn and gossip with Susan

while Gerda, her mother's staid middle-aged maid, drew off her slippers

and stockings, and reverently lifted the dainty gown safely to its

closet. Susan always got up, rolled herself in a wrap, and listened to

the account of the dinner; Emily was rather critical of the women, but

viewed the men more romantically. She repeated their compliments,

exulting that they had been paid her "under Ella's very nose," or while

"Mama was staring right at us." It pleased Emily to imagine a great

many love-affairs for herself, and to feel that they must all be made

as mysterious and kept as secret as possible.

It was the old story, thought Susan, listening sympathetically, and in

utter disbelief, to these recitals. Mary Lou and Georgie were not alone

in claiming vague and mythical love-affairs; Emily even carried them to

the point of indicating old bundles of letters in her desk as "from Bob

Brock--tell you all about that some time!" or alluding to some youth

who had gone away, left that part of the country entirely for her sake,

some years ago. And even Georgie would not have taken as seriously as

Emily did the least accidental exchange of courtesies with the eligible

male. If the two girls, wasting a morning in the shops in town,

happened to meet some hurrying young man in the street, the color

rushed into Emily's face, and she alluded to the incident a dozen times

during the course of the day. Like most girls, she had a special manner

for men, a rather audacious and attractive manner, Susan thought. The

conversation was never anything but gay and frivolous and casual. It

always pleased Emily when such a meeting occurred.

"Did you notice that Peyton Hamilton leaned over and said something to

me very quickly, in a low voice, this morning?" Emily would ask, later,

suddenly looking mischievous and penitent at once.

"Oh, ho! That's what you do when I'm not noticing!" Susan would upbraid

her.

"He asked me if he could call," Emily would say, yawning, "but I told

him I didn't like him well enough for that!"

Susan was astonished to find herself generally accepted because of her

association with Emily Saunders. She had always appreciated the

difficulty of entering the inner circle of society with insufficient

credentials. Now she learned how simple the whole thing was when the

right person or persons assumed the responsibility. Girls whom years

ago she had rather fancied to be "snobs" and "stuck-up" proved very

gracious, very informal and jolly, at closer view; even the most

prominent matrons began to call her "child" and "you little Susan

Brown, you!" and show her small kindnesses.

Susan took them at exactly their own valuation, revered those women

who, like Ella, were supreme; watched curiously others a little less

sure of their standing; and pitied and smiled at the struggles of the

third group, who took rebuffs and humiliations smilingly, and fell only

to rise and climb again. Susan knew that the Thayers, the Chickerings

and Chaunceys and Coughs, the Saunders and the St. Johns, and Dolly

Ripley, the great heiress, were really secure, nothing could shake them

from their proud eminence. It gave her a little satisfaction to put the

Baxters and Peter Coleman decidedly a step below; even lovely Isabel

Wallace and the Carters and the Geralds, while ornamenting the very

nicest set, were not quite the social authorities that the first-named

families were. And several lower grades passed before one came to

Connie Fox and her type, poor, pushing, ambitious, watching every

chance to score even the tiniest progress toward the goal of social

recognition. Connie Fox and her mother were a curious study to Susan,

who, far more secure for the time being than they were, watched them

with deep interest. The husband and father was an insurance broker,

whose very modest income might have comfortably supported a quiet

country home, and one maid, and eventually have been stretched to

afford the daughter and only child a college education or a trousseau

as circumstances decreed. As it was, a little house on Broadway was

maintained with every appearance of luxury, a capped-and-aproned maid

backed before guests through the tiny hall; Connie's vivacity covered

the long wait for the luncheons that an irate Chinese cook, whose wages

were perpetually in arrears, served when it pleased him to do so. Mrs.

Fox bought prizes for Connie's gay little card-parties with the rent

money, and retired with a headache immediately after tearfully

informing the harassed breadwinner of the fact. She ironed Connie's

gowns, bullied her little dressmaker, cried and made empty promises to

her milliner, cut her old friends, telephoned her husband at six

o'clock that, as "the girls" had not gone yet, perhaps he had better

have a bite of dinner downtown. She gushed and beamed on Connie's

friends, cultivated those she could reach assiduously, and never

dreamed that a great many people were watching her with amusement when

she worked her way about a room to squeeze herself in next to some

social potentate.

She had her reward when the mail brought Constance the coveted

dance-cards; when she saw her name in the society columns of the

newspapers, and was able to announce carelessly that that lucky girlie

of hers was really going to Honolulu with the Cyrus Holmes. Dolly

Ripley, the heiress, had taken a sudden fancy to Connie, some two years

before Susan met her, and this alone was enough to reward Mrs. Fox for

all the privations, snubs and humiliations she had suffered since the

years when she curled Connie's straight hair on a stick, nearly blinded

herself tucking and embroidering her little dresses, and finished up

the week's ironing herself so that her one maid could escort Connie to

an exclusive little dancing-class.

Susan saw Connie now and then, and met the mother and daughter on a

certain autumn Sunday when Ella had chaperoned the two younger girls to

a luncheon at the Burlingame club-house. They had spent the night

before with a friend of Ella's, whose lovely country home was but a few

minutes' walk from the club, and Susan was elated with the glorious

conviction that she had added to the gaiety of the party, and that

through her even Emily was having a really enjoyable time. She met a

great many distinguished persons to-day, the golf and polo players, the

great Eastern actress who was the center of a group of adoring males,

and was being entertained by the oldest and most capable of dowagers,

and Dolly Ripley, a lean, eager, round-shouldered, rowdyish little

person, talking as a professional breeder might talk of her dogs and

horses, and shadowed by Connie Fox. Susan was so filled with the

excitement of the occasion, the beauty of the day, the delightful club

and its delightful guests, that she was able to speak to Miss Dolly

Ripley quite as if she also had inherited some ten millions of dollars,

and owned the most expensive, if not the handsomest, home in the state.

"That was so like dear Dolly!" said Mrs. Fox later, coming up behind

Susan on the porch, and slipping an arm girlishly about her waist.

"What was?" asked Susan, after greetings.

"Why, to ask what your first name was, and say that as she hated the

name of Brown, she was going to call you Susan!" said Mrs. Fox sweetly.

"Don't you find her very dear and simple?"

"Why, I just met her--" Susan said, disliking the arm about her waist,

and finding Mrs. Fox's interest in her opinion of Dolly Ripley quite

transparent.

"Ah, I know her so well!" Mrs. Fox added, with a happy sigh. "Always

bright and interested when she meets people. But I scold her--yes, I

do!--for giving people a false impression. I say, 'Dolly,'--I've known

her so long, you know!--'Dolly, dear, people might easily think you

meant some of these impulsive things you say, dear, whereas your

friends, who know you really well, know that it's just your little

manner, and that you'll have forgotten all about it to-morrow!' I don't

mean YOU, Miss Brown," Mrs. Fox interrupted herself to say hastily.

"Far from it!----Now, my dear, tell me that you know I didn't mean you!"

"I understand perfectly," Susan said graciously. And she knew that at

last she really did. Mrs. Fox was fluttering like some poor bird that

sees danger near its young. She couldn't have anyone else, especially

this insignificant little Miss Brown, who seemed to be making rather an

impression everywhere, jeopardize Connie's intimacy with Dolly Ripley,

without using such poor and obvious little weapons as lay at her

command to prevent it.

Standing on the porch of the Burlingame Club, and staring out across

the gracious slopes of the landscape, Susan had an exhilarated sense of

being among the players of this fascinating game at last. She must play

it alone, to be sure, but far better alone than assisted as Connie Fox

was assisted. It was an immense advantage to be expected to accompany

Emily everywhere; it made a snub practically impossible, while

heightening the compliment when she was asked anywhere without Emily.

Susan was always willing to entertain a difficult guest, to play cards

or not to play with apparently equal enjoyment--more desirable than

either, she was "fun," and the more she was laughed at, the funnier she

grew.

"And you'll be there with Emily, of course, Miss Brown," said the

different hostess graciously. "Emily, you're going to bring Susan

Brown, you know!--I'm telephoning, Miss Brown, because I'm afraid my

note didn't make it clear that we want you, too!"

Emily's well-known eccentricity did not make Susan the less popular;

even though she was personally involved in it.

"Oh, I wrote you a note for Emily this morning, Mrs. Willis," Susan

would say, at the club, "she's feeling wretchedly to-day, and she wants

to be excused from your luncheon to-morrow!"

"Oh?" The matron addressed would eye the messenger with kindly

sharpness. "What's the matter--very sick?"

"We-ell, not dying!" A dimple would betray the companion's demureness.

"Not dying? No, I suppose not! Well, you tell Emily that she's a silly,

selfish little cat, or words to that effect!"

"I'll choose words to that effect," Susan would assure the speaker,

smilingly.

"You couldn't come, anyway, I suppose?"

"Oh, no, Mrs. Willis! Thank you so much!"

"No, of course not." The matron would bite her lips in momentary

irritation, and, when they parted, the cause of that pretty,

appreciative, amusing little companion of Emily Saunders would be

appreciably strengthened.

One winter morning Emily tossed a square, large envelope across the

breakfast table toward her companion.

"Sue, that looks like a Browning invitation! What do you bet that he's

sent you a card for the dances!"

"He couldn't!" gasped Susan, snatching it up, while her eyes danced,

and the radiant color flooded her face. Her hand actually shook when

she tore the envelope open, and as the engraved card made its

appearance, Susan's expression might have been that of Cinderella

eyeing her coach-and-four.

For Browning--founder of the cotillion club, and still manager of the

four or five winter dances--was the one unquestioned, irrefutable,

omnipotent social authority of San Francisco. To go to the "Brownings"

was to have arrived socially; no other distinction was equivalent,

because there was absolutely no other standard of judgment. Very high

up, indeed, in the social scale must be the woman who could resist the

temptation to stick her card to the Brownings in her mirror frame,

where the eyes of her women friends must inevitably fall upon it, and

yearly hundreds of matrons tossed through sleepless nights, all through

the late summer and the fall, hoping against hope, despairing, hoping

again, that the magic card might really be delivered some day in early

December, and her debutante daughter's social position be placed beyond

criticism once more. Only perhaps one hundred persons out of

"Brownie's" four hundred guests could be sure of the privilege. The

others must suffer and wait.

Browning himself, a harassed, overworked, kindly gentleman, whose

management of the big dances brought him nothing but responsibility and

annoyance, threatened yearly to resign from his post, and yearly was

dragged back into the work, fussing for hours with his secretary over

the list, before he could personally give it to the hungrily waiting

reporters with the weary statement that it was absolutely correct, that

no more names were to be added this year, that he did not propose to

defend, through the columns of the press, his omission of certain names

and his acceptance of others, and that, finally, he was off for a

week's vacation in the southern part of the state, and thanked them all

for their kindly interest in himself and his efforts for San Francisco

society.

It was the next morning's paper that was so anxiously awaited, and so

eagerly perused in hundreds of luxurious boudoirs--exulted over, or

wept over and reviled,--but read by nearly every woman in the city.

And now he had sent Susan a late card, and Susan knew why. She had met

the great man at the Hotel Rafael a few days before, at tea-time, and

he had asked Susan most affectionately of her aunt, Mrs. Lancaster, and

recalled, with a little emotion, the dances of two generations before,

when he was a small boy, and the lovely Georgianna Ralston was a beauty

and a belle. Susan could have kissed the magic bit of pasteboard!

But she knew too well just what Emily wanted to think of Browning's

courtesy, to mention his old admiration for her aunt. And Emily

immediately justified her diplomatic silence by saying:

"Isn't that AWFULLY decent of Brownie! He did that just for Ella and

me--that's like him! He'll do anything for some people!"

"Well, of course I can't go," Susan said briskly. "But I do call it

awfully decent! And no little remarks about sending a check, either,

and no chaperone's card! The old duck! However, I haven't a gown, and I

haven't a beau, and you don't go, and so I'll write a tearful regret. I

hope it won't be the cause of his giving the whole thing up. I hate to

discourage the dear boy!"

Emily laughed approvingly.

"No, but honestly, Sue," she said, in eager assent, "don't you know how

people would misunderstand--you know how people are! You and I know

that you don't care a whoop about society, and that you'd be the last

person in the world to use your position here--but you know what other

people might say! And Brownie hates talk--"

Susan had to swallow hard, and remain smiling. It was part of the price

that she paid for being here in this beautiful environment, for being,

in every material sense, a member of one of the state's richest

families. She could not say, as she longed to say, "Oh, Emily, don't

talk ROT! You know that before your own grandfather made his money as a

common miner, and when Isabel Wallace's grandfather was making shoes,

mine was a rich planter in Virginia!" But she knew that she could

safely have treated Emily's own mother with rudeness, she could have

hopelessly mixed up the letters she wrote for Ella, she could have set

the house on fire or appropriated to her own use the large sums of

money she occasionally was entrusted by the family to draw for one

purpose or another from the bank, and been quickly forgiven, if

forgivness was a convenience to the Saunders family at the moment. But

to fail to realize that between the daughter of the house of Saunders

and the daughter of the house of Brown an unspanned social chasm must

forever stretch would have been, indeed, the unforgivable offense.

It was all very different from Susan's old ideals of a paid companion's

duties. She had drawn these ideals from the English novels she consumed

with much enjoyment in early youth--from "Queenie's Whim" and "Uncle

Max" and the novels of Charlotte Yonge. She had imagined herself,

before her arrival at "High Gardens," as playing piano duets with

Emily, reading French for an hour, German for an hour, gardening,

tramping, driving, perhaps making a call on some sick old woman with

soup and jelly in her basket, or carrying armfuls of blossoms to the

church for decoration. If one of Emily's sick headaches came on, it

would be Susan's duty to care for her tenderly, and to read to her in a

clear, low, restful voice when she was recovering; to write her notes,

to keep her vases filled with flowers, to "preside" at the tea-table,

efficient, unobtrusive, and indispensable. She would make herself

useful to Ella, too; arrange her collections of coins, carry her

telephone messages, write her notes. She would accompany the little old

mother on her round through the greenhouses, read to her and be ready

to fly for her book or her shawl. And if Susan's visionary activities

also embraced a little missionary work in the direction of the son of

the house, it was of a very sisterly and blameless nature. Surely the

most demure of companions, reading to Mrs. Saunders in the library,

might notice an attentive listener lounging in a dark corner, or might

color shyly when Ken's sisters commented on the fact that he seemed to

be at home a good deal these days.

It was a little disillusioning to discover, as during her first weeks

in the new work she did discover, that almost no duties whatever would

be required of her. It seemed to make more irksome the indefinite thing

that was required of her; her constant interested participation in just

whatever happened to interest Emily at the moment. Susan loved tennis

and driving, loved shopping and lunching in town, loved to stroll over

to the hotel for tea in the pleasant afternoons, or was satisfied to

lie down and read for an hour or two.

But it was very trying to a person of her definite impulsive briskness

never to know, from one hour or one day to the next, just what

occupation was in prospect. Emily would order the carriage for four

o'clock, only to decide, when it came around, that she would rather

drag the collies out into the side-garden, to waste three dozen camera

plates and three hours in trying to get good pictures of them.

Sometimes Emily herself posed before the camera, and Susan took picture

after picture of her.

"Sue, don't you think it would be fun to try some of me in my Mandarin

coat? Come up while I get into it. Oh, and go get Chow Yew to get that

Chinese violin he plays, and I'll hold it! We'll take 'em in the

Japanese garden!" Emily would be quite fired with enthusiasm, but

before the girls were upstairs she might change in favor of her riding

habit and silk hat, and Susan would telephone the stable that Miss

Emily's riding horse was wanted in the side-garden. "You're a darling!"

she would say to Susan, after an exhausting hour or two. "Now, next

time I'll take you!"

But Susan's pictures never were taken. Emily's interest rarely touched

twice in the same place.

"Em, it's twenty minutes past four! Aren't we going to tea with Isabel

Wallace?" Susan would ask, coming in to find Emily comfortably

stretched out with a book.

"Oh, Lord, so we were! Well, let's not!" Emily would yawn.

"But, Em, they expect us!"

"Well, go telephone, Sue, there's a dear! And tell them I've got a

terrible headache. And you and I'll have tea up here. Tell Carrie I

want to see her about it; I'm hungry; I want to order it specially."

Sometimes, when the girls came downstairs, dressed for some outing, it

was Miss Ella who upset their plans. Approving of her little sister's

appearance, she would lure Emily off for a round of formal calls.

"Be decent now, Baby! You'll never have a good time, if you don't go

and do the correct thing now and then. Come on. I'm going to town on

the two, and we can get a carriage right at the ferry--"

But Susan rarely managed to save the afternoon. Going noiselessly

upstairs, she was almost always captured by the lonely old mistress of

the house.

"Girls gone?" Mrs. Saunders would pipe, in her cracked little voice,

from the doorway of her rooms. "Don't the house seem still? Come in,

Susan, you and I'll console each other over a cup of tea."

Susan, smilingly following her, would be at a loss to account for her

own distaste and disappointment. But she was so tired of people! She

wanted so desperately to be alone!

The precious chance would drift by, a rich tea would presently be

served; the little over-dressed, over-fed old lady was really very

lonely; she went to a luncheon or card-party not oftener than two or

three times a month, and she loved company. There was almost no close

human need or interest in her life; she was as far from her children as

was any other old lady of their acquaintance.

Susan knew that she had been very proud of her sons and daughters, as a

happy young mother. The girl was continually discovering, among old

Mrs. Saunders' treasures, large pictures of Ella, at five, at seven, at

nine, with straight long bangs and rosetted hats that tied under her

chin, and French dresses tied with sashes about her knees, and pictures

of Kenneth leaning against stone benches, or sitting in swings, a thin

and sickly-looking little boy, in a velvet suit and ribboned straw hat.

There were pictures of the dead children, too, and a picture of Emily,

at three months, sitting in an immense shell, and clad only in the

folds of her own fat little person. On the backs of these pictures,

Mrs. Saunders had written "Kennie, six years old," and the date, or

"Totty, aged nine"--she never tired of looking at them now, and of

telling Susan that the buttons on Ella's dress had been of sterling

silver, "made right from Papa's mine," and that the little ship Kenneth

held had cost twenty-five dollars. All of her conversation was

boastful, in an inoffensive, faded sort of way. She told Susan about

her wedding, about her gown and her mother's gown, and the cost of her

music, and the number of the musicians.

Mrs. Saunders, Susan used to think, letting her thoughts wander as the

old lady rambled on, was an unfortunately misplaced person. She had

none of the qualities of the great lady, nothing spiritual or mental

with which to fend off the vacuity of old age. As a girl, a bride, a

young matron, she had not shown her lack so pitiably. But now, at

sixty-five, Mrs. Saunders had no character, no tastes, no opinions

worth considering. She liked to read the paper, she liked her flowers,

although she took none of the actual care of them, and she liked to

listen to music; there was a mechanical piano in her room, and Susan

often heard the music downstairs at night, and pictured the old lady,

reading in bed, calling to Miss Baker when a record approached its

finish, and listening contentedly to selections from "Faust" and

"Ernani," and the "Chanson des Alpes." Mrs. Saunders would have been

far happier as a member of the fairly well-to-do middle class. She

would have loved to shop with married daughters, sharply interrogating

clerks as to the durability of shoes, and the weight of little

underflannels; she would have been a good angel in the nurseries, as an

unfailing authority when the new baby came, or hushing the less recent

babies to sleep in tender old arms. She would have been a judge of hot

jellies, a critic of pastry. But bound in this little aimless groove of

dressmakers' calls, and card-parties, she was quite out of her natural

element. It was not astonishing that, like Emily, she occasionally

enjoyed an illness, and dispensed with the useless obligation of

getting up and dressing herself at all!

Invitations, they were really commands, to the Browning dances were

received early in December; Susan, dating her graceful little note of

regret, was really shocked to notice the swift flight of the months.

December already! And she had seemed to leave Hunter, Baxter & Hunter

only last week. Susan fell into a reverie over her writing, her eyes

roving absently over the stretch of wooded hills below her window.

December--! Nearly a year since Peter Coleman had sent her a circle of

pearls, and she had precipitated the events that had ended their

friendship. It was a sore spot still, the memory; but Susan, more sore

at herself for letting him mislead her than with him, burned to

reestablish herself in his eyes as a woman of dignity and reserve,

rather than to take revenge upon him for what was, she knew now, as

much a part of him as his laughing eyes and his indomitable buoyancy.

The room in which she was writing was warm. Furnace heat is not common

in California, but, with a thousand other conveniences, the Saunders

home had a furnace. There were winter roses, somewhere near her, making

the air sweet; the sunlight slanted in brightly across the wide couch

where Emily was lying, teasing Susan between casual glances at her

magazine. A particularly gay week had left both girls feeling decidedly

unwell. Emily complained of headache and neuralgia; Susan had

breakfasted on hot soda and water, her eyes felt heavy, her skin hot

and dry and prickly.

"We all eat too much in this house!" she said aloud, cheerfully. "And

we don't exercise enough!" Emily did not answer, merely smiled, as at a

joke. The subject of diet was not popular with either of the Misses

Saunders. Emily never admitted that her physical miseries had anything

to do with her stomach; and Ella, whose bedroom scales exasperated her

afresh every time she got on them, while making dolorous allusions to

her own size whenever it pleased her to do so, never allowed anyone

else the privilege. But even with her healthy appetite, and splendid

constitution, Susan was unable to eat as both the sisters did. Every

other day she resolved sternly to diet, and frequently at night she

could not sleep for indigestion; but the Saunders home was no

atmosphere for Spartan resolutions, and every meal-time saw Susan's

courage defeated afresh. She could have remained away from the table

with far less effort than was required, when a delicious dish was

placed before her, to send it away untouched. There were four regular

meals daily in the Saunders home; the girls usually added a fifth when

they went down to the pantries to forage before going to bed; and

tempting little dishes of candy and candied fruits were set

unobtrusively on card-tables, on desks, on the piano where the girls

were amusing themselves with the songs of the day.

It was a comfortable, care-free life they led, irresponsible beyond any

of Susan's wildest dreams. She and Emily lounged about their bright,

warm apartments, these winter mornings, until nine o'clock, lingered

over their breakfast--talking, talking and talking, until the

dining-room clock struck a silvery, sweet eleven; and perhaps drifted

into Miss Ella's room for more talk, or amused themselves with Chow

Yew's pidgin English, while he filled vases in one of the pantries. At

twelve o'clock they went up to dress for the one o'clock luncheon, an

elaborate meal at which Mrs. Saunders plaintively commented on the

sauce Bechamel, Ella reviled the cook, and Kenneth, if he was present,

drank a great deal of some charged water from a siphon, or perhaps made

Lizzie or Carrie nearly leap out of their skins by a sudden, terrifying

inquiry why Miss Brown hadn't been served to salad before he was, or

perhaps growled at Emily a question as to what the girls had been

talking about all night long.

After luncheon, if Kenneth did not want the new motor-car, which was

supposed to be his particular affectation, the girls used it, giggling

in the tonneau at the immobility of Flornoy, the French chauffeur;

otherwise they drove behind the bays, and stopped at some lovely home,

standing back from the road behind a sweep of drive, and an avenue of

shady trees, for tea. Susan could take her part in the tea-time gossip

now, could add her surmises and comment to the general gossip, and knew

what the society weeklies meant when they used initials, or alluded to

a "certain prominent debutante recently returned from an Eastern

school."

As the season ripened, she and Emily went to four or five luncheons

every week, feminine affairs, with cards or matinee to follow. Dinner

invitations were more rare; there were men at the dinners, and the risk

of boring a partner with Emily's uninteresting little personality was

too great to be often taken. Her poor health served both herself and

her friends as an excuse. Ella went everywhere, even to the debutante's

affairs; but Emily was too entirely self-centered to be popular.

She and Susan were a great deal alone. They chattered and laughed

together through shopping trips, luncheons at the clubs, matinees, and

trips home on the boat. They bought prizes for Ella's card-parties, or

engagement cups and wedding-presents for those fortunate girls who

claimed the center of the social stage now and then with the

announcement of their personal plans. They bought an endless variety of

pretty things for Emily, who prided herself on the fact that she could

not bear to have near her anything old or worn or ugly. A thousand

little reminders came to Emily wherever she went of things without

which she could not exist.

"What a darling chain that woman's wearing; let's go straight up to

Shreve's and look at chains," said Emily, on the boat; or "White-bait!

Here it is on this menu. I hadn't thought of it for months! Do remind

Mrs. Pullet to get some!" or "Can't you remember what it was Isabel

said that she was going to get? Don't you remember I said I needed it,

too?"

If Susan had purchases of her own to make, Emily could barely wait with

patience until they were completed, before adding:

"I think I'll have a pair of slippers, too. Something a little nicer

than that, please"; or "That's going to make up into a dear wrapper for

you, Sue," she would enthusiastically declare, "I ought to have another

wrapper, oughtn't I? Let's go up to Chinatown, and see some of the big

wadded ones at Sing Fat's. I really need one!"

Just before Christmas, Emily went to the southern part of the state

with a visiting cousin from the East, and Susan gladly seized the

opportunity for a little visit at home. She found herself strangely

stirred when she went in, from the bright winter sunshine, to the

dingy, odorous old house, encountering the atmosphere familiar to her

from babyhood, and the unaltered warm embraces of Mary Lou and her

aunt. Before she had hung up her hat and coat, she was swept again into

the old ways, listening, while she changed her dress, to Mary Lou's

patient complaints and wistful questions, slipping out to the bakery

just before dinner to bring home a great paper-bag of hot rolls, and

ending the evening, after a little shopping expedition to Fillmore

Street, with solitaire at the dining-room table. The shabbiness and

disorder and a sort of material sordidness were more marked than ever,

but Susan was keenly conscious of some subtle, touching charm,

unnoticed heretofore, that seemed to flavor the old environment

to-night. They were very pure and loving and loyal, her aunt and

cousins, very practically considerate and tender toward each other,

despite the flimsy fabric of their absurd dreams; very good, in the

old-fashioned sense of the term, if not very successful or very clever.

They made much of her coming, rejoiced over her and kissed her as if

she never had even in thought neglected them, and exulted innocently in

the marvelous delights of her new life. Georgie was driven over from

the Mission by her husband, the next day, in Susan's honor, and carried

the fat, loppy baby in for so brief a visit that it was felt hardly

worth while to unwrap and wrap up again little Myra Estelle. Mrs.

Lancaster had previously, with a burst of tears, informed Susan that

Georgie was looking very badly, and that, nursing that heavy child, she

should have been spared more than she was by the doctor's mother and

the old servant. But Susan, although finding the young mother pale and

rather excited, thought that Georgie looked well, and admired with the

others her heavy, handsome new suit and the over-trimmed hat that quite

eclipsed her small face. The baby was unmanageable, and roared

throughout the visit, to Georgie's distress.

"She never cries this way at home!" protested young Mrs. O'Connor.

"Give her some ninny," Mrs. Lancaster suggested, eagerly, but Georgie,

glancing at the street where Joe was holding the restless black horse

in check, said nervously that Joe didn't like it until the right time.

She presently went out to hand Myra to Susan while she climbed into

place, and was followed by a scream from Mrs. Lancaster, who remarked

later that seeing the black horse start just as Susan handed the child

up, she had expected to see them all dashed to pieces.

"Well, Susan, light of my old eyes, had enough of the rotten rich?"

asked William Oliver, coming in for a later dinner, on the first night

of her visit, and jerking her to him for a resounding kiss before she

had any idea of his intention.

"Billy!" Susan said, mildly scandalized, her eyes on her aunt.

"Well, well, what's all this!" Mrs. Lancaster remarked, without alarm.

William, shaking out his napkin, drawing his chair up to the table, and

falling upon his dinner with vigor, demanded:

"Come on, now! Tell us all, all!"

But Susan, who had been chattering fast enough from the moment of her

arrival, could not seem to get started again. It was indeed a little

difficult to continue an enthusiastic conversation, unaffected by his

running fire of comment. For in these days he was drifting rapidly

toward a sort of altruistic socialism, and so listened to her recital

with sardonic smiles, snorts of scorn, and caustic annotations.

"The Carters--ha! That whole bunch ought to be hanged," Billy remarked.

"All their money comes from the rents of bad houses, and--let me tell

you something, when there was a movement made to buy up that Jackson

Street block, and turn it into a park, it was old Carter, yes, and his

wife, too, who refused to put a price on their property!"

"Oh, Billy, you don't KNOW that!"

"I don't? All right, maybe I don't," Mr. Oliver returned growlingly to

his meal, only to break out a moment later, "The Kirkwoods! Yes; that's

a rare old bunch! They're still holding the city to the franchise they

swindled the Government out of, right after the Civil War! Every time

you pay taxes--"

"I don't pay taxes!" Susan interrupted frivolously, and resumed her

glowing account. Billy made no further contribution to the conversation

until he asked some moments later, "Does old Brock ever tell you about

his factories, while he's taking you around his orchid-house? There's a

man a week killed there, and the foremen tell the girls when they hire

them that they aren't expected to take care of themselves on the wages

they get!"

But the night before her return to San Rafael, Mr. Oliver, in his

nicest mood, took Susan to the Orpheum, and they had fried oysters and

coffee in a little Fillmore Street restaurant afterward, Billy

admitting with graceful frankness that funds were rather low, and Susan

really eager for the old experience and the old sensations. Susan liked

the brotherly, clumsy way in which he tried to ascertain, as they sat

loitering and talking over the little meal, just how much of her

thoughts still went to Peter Coleman, and laughed outright, as soon as

she detected his purpose, as only an absolutely heart-free girl could

laugh, and laid her hand over his for a little appreciative squeeze

before they dismissed the subject. After that he told her of some of

his own troubles, the great burden of the laboring classes that he felt

rested on his particular back, and his voice rose and he pounded the

table as he talked of the other countries of the world, where even

greater outrages, or where experimental solutions were in existence.

Susan brought the conversation to Josephine Carroll, and watched his

whole face grow tender, and heard his voice soften, as they spoke of

her.

"No; but is it really and truly serious this time, Bill?" she asked,

with that little thrill of pain that all good sisters know when the

news comes.

"Serious? GOSH!" said the lover, simply.

"Engaged?"

"No-o. I couldn't very well. I'm in so deep at the works that I may get

fired any minute. More than that, the boys generally want me to act as

spokesman, and so I'm a sort of marked card, and I mightn't get in

anywhere else, very easily. And I couldn't ask Jo to go with me to some

Eastern factory or foundry town, without being pretty sure of a job.

No; things are just drifting."

"Well, but Bill," Susan said anxiously, "somebody else will step in if

you don't! Jo's such a beauty--"

He turned to her almost with a snarl.

"Well, what do you want me to do? Steal?" he asked angrily. And then

softening suddenly he added: "She's young,--the little queen of queens!"

"And yet you say you don't want money," Susan said, drily, with a shrug

of her shoulders.

The next day she went back to Emily, and again the lazy, comfortable

days began to slip by, one just like the other. At Christmas-time Susan

was deluged with gifts, the holidays were an endless chain of good

times, the house sweet with violets, and always full of guests and

callers; girls in furs who munched candy as they chattered, and young

men who laughed and shouted around the punch bowl. Susan and Emily were

caught in a gay current that streamed to the club, to talk and drink

eggnog before blazing logs, and streamed to one handsome home after

another, to talk and drink eggnog before other fires, and to be shown

and admire beautiful and expensive presents. They bundled in and out of

carriages and motors, laughing as they crowded in, and sitting on each

other's laps, and carrying a chorus of chatter and laughter everywhere.

Susan would find herself, the inevitable glass in hand, talking hard to

some little silk-clad old lady in some softly lighted lovely

drawing-room, to be whisked away to some other drawing-room, and to

another fireside, where perhaps there was a stocky, bashful girl of

fourteen to amuse, or somebody's grandfather to interest and smile upon.

Everywhere were holly wreaths and lights, soft carpets, fires and rich

gowns, and everywhere the same display of gold picture frames and

silver plates, rock crystal bowls, rugs and cameras and mahogany desks

and tables, furs and jeweled chains and rings. Everywhere were candies

from all over the world, and fruitcake from London, and marrons and

sticky candied fruit, and everywhere unobtrusive maids were silently

offering trays covered with small glasses.

Susan was frankly sick when the new year began, and Emily had several

heart and nerve attacks, and was very difficult to amuse. But both

girls agreed that the holidays had been the "time of their lives."

It was felt by the Saunders family that Susan had shown a very becoming

spirit in the matter of the Browning dances. Ella, who had at first

slightly resented the fact that "Brownie" had chosen to honor Emily's

paid companion in so signal a manner, had gradually shifted to the

opinion that, in doing so, he had no more than confirmed the family's

opinion of Susan Brown, after all, and shown a very decent

discrimination.

"No EARTHLY reason why you shouldn't have accepted!" said Ella.

"Oh, Duchess," said Susan, who sometimes pleased her with this name,

"fancy the talk!"

"Well," drawled Ella, resuming her perusal of a scandalous weekly, "I

don't know that I'm afraid of talk, myself!"

"At the same time, El," Emily contributed, eagerly, "you know what a

fuss they made when Vera Brock brought that Miss De Foe, of New York!"

Ella gave her little sister a very keen look,

"Vera Brock?" she said, dreamily, with politely elevated brows.

"Well, of course, I don't take the Brocks seriously--" Emily began,

reddening.

"Well, I should hope you wouldn't, Baby!" answered the older sister,

promptly and forcibly. "Don't make an UTTER fool of yourself!"

Emily retired into an enraged silence, and a day or two later, Ella, on

a Sunday morning late in February, announced that she was going to

chaperone both the girls to the Browning dance on the following Friday

night.

Susan was thrown into a most delightful flutter, longing desperately to

go, but chilled with nervousness whenever she seriously thought of it.

She lay awake every night anxiously computing the number of her

possible partners, and came down to breakfast every morning cold with

the resolution that she would make a great mistake in exposing herself

to possible snubbing and neglect. She thought of nothing but the

Browning, listened eagerly to what the other girls said of it, her

heart sinking when Louise Chickering observed that there never were men

enough at the Brownings, and rising again when Alice Chauncey hardily

observed that, if a girl was a good dancer, that was all that mattered,

she couldn't help having a good time! Susan knew she danced well--

However, Emily succumbed on Thursday to a heart attack. The whole

household went through its usual excitement, the doctor came, the nurse

was hurriedly summoned, Susan removed all the smaller articles from

Emily's room, and replaced the bed's flowery cover with a sheet, the

invalid liking the hospital aspect. Susan was not very much amazed at

the suddenness of this affliction; Emily had been notably lacking in

enthusiasm about the dance, and on Wednesday afternoon, Ella having

issued the casual command, "See if you can't get a man or two to dine

with us at the hotel before the dance, Emily; then you girls will be

sure of some partners, anyway!" Emily had spent a discouraging hour at

the telephone.

"Hello, George!" Susan had heard her say gaily. "This is Emily

Saunders. George, I rang up because--you know the Browning is Friday

night, and Ella's giving me a little dinner at the Palace before

it--and I wondered--we're just getting it up hurriedly--" An interval

of silence on Emily's part would follow, then she would resume,

eagerly, "Oh, certainly! I'm sorry, but of course I understand. Yes,

indeed; I'll see you Friday night--" and the conversation would be

ended.

And, after a moment of silence, she would call another number, and go

through the little conversation again. Susan, filled with apprehensions

regarding her own partners, could not blame Emily for the heart attack,

and felt a little vague relief on her own account. Better sure at home

than sorry in the dreadful brilliance of a Browning ball!

"I'm afraid this means no dance!" murmured Emily, apologetically.

"As if I cared, Emmy Lou!" Susan reassured her cheerfully.

"Well, I don't think you would have had a good time, Sue!" Emily said,

and the topic of the dance was presumably exhausted.

But when Ella got home, the next morning, she reopened the question

with some heat. Emily could do exactly as Emily pleased, declared Ella,

but Susan Brown should and would come to the last Browning.

"Oh, please, Duchess--!" Susan besought her.

"Very well, Sue, if you don't, I'll make that kid so sorry she ever--"

"Oh, please!--And beside--" said Susan, "I haven't anything to wear! So

that DOES settle it!"

"What were you going to wear?" demanded Ella, scowling.

"Em said she'd lend me her white lace."

"Well, that's all right! Gerda'll fix it for you--"

"But Emily sent it back to Madame Leonard yesterday afternoon. She

wanted the sash changed," Susan hastily explained.

"Well, she's got other gowns," Ella said, with a dangerous glint in her

eyes. "What about that thing with the Persian embroidery? What about

the net one she wore to Isabel's?"

"The net one's really gone to pieces, Duchess. It was a flimsy sort of

thing, anyway. And the Persian one she's only had on twice. When we

were talking about it Monday she said she'd rather I didn't--"

"Oh, she did? D'ye hear that, Mama?" Ella asked, holding herself in

check. "And what about the chiffon?"

"Well, Ella, she telephoned Madame this morning not to hurry with that,

because she wasn't going to the dance."

"Was she going to wear it?"

"Well, no. But she telephoned Madame just the same--I don't know why

she did," Susan smiled. "But what's the difference?" she ended

cheerfully.

"Quite a Flora McFlimsey!" said Mrs. Saunders, with her nervous, shrill

little laugh, adding eagerly to the now thoroughly aroused Ella. "You

know Baby doesn't really go about much, Totty; she hasn't as many gowns

as you, dear!"

"Now, look here, Mama," Ella said, levelly, "if we can manage to get

Susan something to wear, well and good; but--if that rotten, selfish,

nasty kid has really spoiled this whole thing, she'll be sorry! That's

all. I'd try to get a dress in town, if it wasn't so late! As it is

I'll telephone Madame about the Persian--"

"Oh, honestly, I couldn't! If Emily didn't want me to!" Susan began,

scarlet-cheeked.

"I think you're all in a conspiracy to drive me crazy!" Ella said

angrily. "Emily shall ask you just as nicely as she knows how, to

wear--"

"Totty, she's SICK!" pleaded Emily's mother.

"Sick! She's chock-full of poison because she never knows when to stop

eating," said Kenneth, with fraternal gallantry. He returned to his own

thoughts, presently adding, "Why don't you borrow a dress from Isabel?"

"Isabel?" Ella considered it, brightened. "Isabel Wallace," she said,

in sudden approval. "That's exactly what I'll do!" And she swept

magnificently to the little telephone niche near the dining-room door.

"Isabel," said she, a moment later, "this is Mike--"

So Susan went to the dance. Miss Isabel Wallace sent over a great box

of gowns from which she might choose the most effective, and Emily,

with a sort of timid sullenness, urged her to go. Ella and her charge

went into town in the afternoon, and loitered into the club for tea.

Susan, whose color was already burning high, and whose eyes were

dancing, fretted inwardly at Ella's leisurely enjoyment of a second and

a third sup. It was nearly six o'clock, it was after six! Ella seemed

willing to delay indefinitely, waiting on the stairs of the club for a

long chat with a passing woman, and lingering with various friends in

the foyer of the great hotel.

But finally they were in the big bedrooms, with Clemence, Ella's maid,

in eager and interested attendance. Clemence had laid Susan's delicious

frills and laces out upon the bed; Susan's little wrapper was waiting

her; there was nothing to do now but plunge into the joy of dressing. A

large, placid person known to Susan vaguely as the Mrs. Keith, who had

been twice divorced, had the room next to Ella, and pretty Mary

Peacock, her daughter, shared Susan's room. The older ladies, assuming

loose wrappers, sat gossiping over cocktails and smoking cigarettes,

and Mary and Susan seized the opportunity to monopolize Clemence.

Clemence arranged Susan's hair, pulling, twisting, flinging hot masses

over the girl's face, inserting pins firmly, loosening strands with her

hard little French fingers. Susan had only occasional blinded glimpses

of her face, one temple bare and bald, the other eclipsed like a

gipsy's.

"Look here, Clemence, if I don't like it, out it comes!" she said.

"Mais, certainement, ca va sans dire!" Clemence agreed serenely. Mary

Peacock, full of amused interest, watched as she rubbed her face and

throat with cold cream.

"I wish I had your neck and shoulders, Miss Brown," said Miss Peacock.

"I get so sick of high-necked gowns that I'd almost rather stay home!"

"Why, you're fatter than I am!" Susan exclaimed. "You've got lovely

shoulders!"

"Yes, darling!" Mary said, gushingly. "And I've got the sort of blood

that breaks out, in a hot room," she added after a moment, "don't look

so scared, it's nothing serious! But I daren't ever take the risk of

wearing a low gown!"

"But how did you get it?" ejaculated Susan. "Are you taking something

for it?"

"No, love," Mary continued, in the same, amused, ironic strain,

"because I've been traveling about, half my life, to get it cured,

Germany and France, everywhere! And there ain't no such animal! Isn't

it lovely?"

"But how did you get it?" Susan innocently persisted. Mary gave her a

look half exasperated and half warning; but, when Clemence had stepped

into the next room for a moment, she said:

"Don't be an utter fool! Where do you THINK I got it?

"The worst of it is," she went on pleasantly, as Clemence came back,

"that my father's married again, you know, to the sweetest little thing

you ever saw. An only girl, with four or five big brothers, and her

father a minister! Well--"

"Voici!" exclaimed the maid. And Susan faced herself in the mirror, and

could not resist a shamed, admiring smile. But if the smooth rolls and

the cunning sweeps and twists of bright hair made her prettier than

usual, Susan was hardly recognizable when the maid touched lips and

cheeks with color and eyebrows with her clever pencil. She had thought

her eyes bright before; now they had a starry glitter that even their

owner thought effective; her cheeks glowed softly--

"Here, stop flirting with yourself, and put on your gown, it's after

eight!" Mary said, and Clemence slipped the fragrant beauty of silk and

lace over Susan's head, and knelt down to hook it, and pushed it down

over the hips, and tied the little cord that held the low bodice so

charmingly in place. Clemence said nothing when she had finished, nor

did Mary, nor did Ella when they presently joined Ella to go

downstairs, but Susan was satisfied. It is an unfortunate girl indeed

who does not think herself a beauty for one night at least in her life;

Susan thought herself beautiful tonight.

They joined the men in the Lounge, and Susan had to go out to dinner,

if not quite "on a man's arm," as in her old favorite books, at least

with her own partner, feeling very awkward, and conscious of shoulders

and hips as she did so. But she presently felt the influence of the

lights and music, and of the heating food and wine, and talked and

laughed quite at her ease, feeling delightfully like a great lady and a

great beauty. Her dinner partner presently asked her for the "second"

and the supper dance, and Susan, hoping that she concealed indecent

rapture, gladly consented. By just so much was she relieved of the

evening's awful responsibility. She did not particularly admire this

nice, fat young man, but to be saved from visible unpopularity, she

would gladly have danced with the waiter.

It was nearer eleven than ten o'clock when they sauntered through

various wide hallways to the palm-decorated flight of stairs that led

down to the ballroom. Susan gave one dismayed glance at the brilliant

sweep of floor as they descended.

"They're dancing!" she ejaculated,--late, and a stranger, what chance

had she!

"Gosh, you're crazy about it, aren't you?" grinned her partner, Mr.

Teddy Carpenter. "Don't you care, they've just begun. Want to finish

this with me?"

But Susan was greeting the host, who stood at the foot of the stairs, a

fat, good-natured little man, beaming at everyone out of small

twinkling blue eyes, and shaking hands with the debutantes while he

spoke to their mothers over their shoulders.

"Hello, Brownie!" Ella said, affectionately. "Where's everybody?"

Mr. Browning flung his fat little arms in the air.

"I don't know," he said, in humorous distress. "The girls appear to be

holding a meeting over there in the dressing-room, and the men are in

the smoker! I'm going to round 'em up! How do you do, Miss Brown? Gad,

you look so like your aunt,--and she WAS a beauty, Ella!--that I could

kiss you for it, as I did her once!"

"My aunt has black hair and brown eyes, Miss Ella, and weighs one

hundred and ninety pounds!" twinkled Susan.

"Kiss her again for that, Brownie, and introduce me," said a tall,

young man at the host's side easily. "I'm going to have this, aren't I,

Miss Brown? Come on, they're just beginning--"

Off went Susan, swept deliciously into the tide of enchanting music and

motion. She wasn't expected to talk, she had no time to worry, she

could dance well, and she did.

Kenneth Saunders came up in the pause before the dance was encored, and

asked for the "next but one,"--there were no cards at the Brownings;

all over the hall girls were nodding over their partners' shoulders, in

answer to questions, "Next, Louise?" "Next waltz--one after that,

then?" "I'm next, remember!"

Kenneth brought a bashful blonde youth with him, who instantly claimed

the next dance. He did not speak to Susan again until it was over,

when, remarking simply, "God, that was life!" he asked for the third

ensuing, and surrendered Susan to some dark youth unknown, who said,

"Ours? Now, don't say no, for there's suicide in my blood, girl, and

I'm a man of few words!"

"I am honestly all mixed up!" Susan laughed. "I think this is

promised--"

It didn't appear to matter. The dark young man took the next two, and

Susan found herself in the enchanting position of a person reproached

by disappointed partners. Perhaps there were disappointed and unpopular

girls at the dance, perhaps there was heart-burning and disappointment

and jealousy; she saw none of it. She was passed from hand to hand,

complimented, flirted with, led into the little curtained niches where

she could be told with proper gravity of the feelings her wit and

beauty awakened in various masculine hearts. By twelve o'clock Susan

wished that the ball would last a week, she was borne along like a

feather on its glittering and golden surface.

Ella was by this time passionately playing the new and fascinating game

of bridge whist, in a nearby room, but Browning was still busy, and

presently he came across the floor to Susan, and asked her for a

dance--an honor for which she was entirely unprepared, for he seldom

danced, and one that she was quick enough to accept at once.

"Perhaps you've promised the next?" said Browning.

"If I have," said the confident Susan, "I hereby call it off."

"Well," he said smilingly, pleased. And although he did not finish the

dance, and they presently sat down together, she knew that it had been

the evening's most important event.

"There's a man coming over from the club, later," said Mr. Browning,

"he's a wonderful fellow! Writer, and a sort of cousin of Ella Saunders

by the way, or else his wife is. He's just on from New York, and for a

sort of rest, and he may go on to Japan for his next novel. Very

remarkable fellow!"

"A writer?" Susan looked interested.

"Yes, you know him, of course. Bocqueraz--that's who it is!"

"Not Stephen Graham Bocqueraz!" ejaculated Susan, round-eyed.

"Yes--yes!" Mr. Browning liked her enthusiasm.

"But is he here?" Susan asked, almost reverently. "Why, I'm perfectly

crazy about his books!" she confided. "Why--why--he's about the biggest

there IS!"

"Yes, he writes good stuff," the man agreed. "Well, now, don't you miss

meeting him! He'll be here directly," his eyes roved to the stairway, a

few feet from where they were sitting. "Here he is now!" said he. "Come

now, Miss Brown---"

"Oh, honestly! I'm scared--I don't know what to say!" Susan said in a

panic. But Browning's fat little hand was firmly gripped over hers and

she went with him to meet the two or three men who were chatting

together as they came slowly, composedly, into the ball-room.

CHAPTER III

From among them she could instantly pick the writer, even though all

three were strangers, and although, from the pictures she had seen of

him, she had always fancied that Stephen Bocqueraz was a large,

athletic type of man, instead of the erect and square-built gentleman

who walked between the other two taller men. He was below the average

height, certainly, dark, clean-shaven, bright-eyed, with a thin-lipped,

wide, and most expressive mouth, and sleek hair so black as to make his

evening dress seem another color. He was dressed with exquisite

precision, and with one hand he constantly adjusted and played with the

round black-rimmed glasses that hung by a silk ribbon about his neck.

Susan knew him, at this time, to be about forty-five, perhaps a little

less. If her very first impression was that he was both affected and

well aware of his attractiveness, her second conceded that here was a

man who could make any affectation charming, and not the less

attractive because he knew his value.

"And what do I do, Mr. Br-r-rowning," asked Mr. Bocqueraz with pleasant

precision, "when I wish to monopolize the company of a very charming

young lady, at a dance, and yet, not dancing, cannot ask her to be my

partner?"

"The next is the supper dance," suggested Susan, dimpling, "if it isn't

too bold to mention it!"

He flashed her an appreciative look, the first they had really

exchanged.

"Supper it is," he said gravely, offering her his arm. But Browning

delayed him for a few introductions first; and Susan stood watching

him, and thinking him very distinguished, and that to study a really

great man, so pleasantly at her ease, was very thrilling. Presently he

turned to her again, and they went in to supper; to Susan it was all

like an exciting dream. They chose a little table in the shallow angle

of a closed doorway, and watched the confusion all about them; and

Susan, warmed by the appreciative eyes so near her, found herself

talking quite naturally, and more than once was rewarded by the

writer's unexpected laughter. She asked him if Mrs. Bocqueraz and his

daughter were with him, and he said no, not on this particular trip.

"Julie and her mother are in Europe," he said, with just a suggestion

of his Spanish grandfather in his clean-clipped speech. "Julie left

Miss Bence's School at seventeen, had a coming-out party in our city

house the following winter. Now it seems Europe is the thing. Mrs.

Bocqueraz likes to do things systematically, and she told me, before

Julie was out of the nursery, that she thought it was very nice for a

girl to marry in her second winter in society, after a European trip. I

have no doubt my daughter will announce her engagement upon her return."

"To whom?" said Susan, laughing at his precise, re-signed tone.

"That I don't know," said Stephen Bocqueraz, with a twinkle in his eye,

"nor does Julie, I fancy. But undoubtedly her mother does!"

"Here is somebody coming over for a dance, I suppose!" he said after a

few moments, and Susan was flattered by the little hint of regret in

his tone. But the newcomer was Peter Coleman, and the emotion of

meeting him drove every other thought out of her head. She did not

rise, as she gave him her hand; the color flooded her face.

"Susan, you little turkey-buzzard--" It was the old Peter!--"where've

you been all evening? The next for me!"

"Mr. Bocqueraz, Mr. Coleman," Susan said, with composure, "Peter, Mr.

Stephen Graham Bocqueraz."

Even to Peter the name meant something.

"Why, Susan, you little grab-all!" he accused her vivaciously. "How

dare you monopolize a man like Mr. Bocqueraz for the whole supper

dance! I'll bet some of those women are ready to tear your eyes out!"

"I've been doing the monopolizing," Mr. Bocqueraz said, turning a

rather serious look from Peter, to smile with sudden brightness at

Susan. "When I find a young woman at whose christening ALL the fairies

came to dance," he added, "I always do all the monopolizing I can!

However, if you have a prior claim--"

"But he hasn't!" Susan said, smilingly. "I'm engaged ten deep," she

added pleasantly to Peter. "Honestly, I haven't half a dance left! I

stole this."

"Why, I won't stand for it," Peter said, turning red.

"Come, it seems to me Mr. Coleman deserves something!" Stephen

Bocqueraz smiled. And indeed Peter looked bigger and happier and

handsomer than ever.

"Not from me," Susan persisted, quietly pleasant. Peter stood for a

moment or two, not quite ready to laugh, not willing to go away. Susan

busied herself with her salad, stared dreamily across the room. And

presently he departed after exchanging a few commonplaces with

Bocqueraz.

"And what's the significance of all that?" asked the author when they

were alone again.

Susan had been wishing to make some sort of definite impression upon

Mr. Stephen Graham Bocqueraz; wishing to remain in his mind as

separated from the other women he had met to-night. Suddenly she saw

this as her chance, and she took him somewhat into her confidence. She

told him of her old office position, and of her aunt, and of Peter, and

that she was now Emily Saunders' paid companion, and here only as a

sort of Cinderella.

Never did any girl, flushing, dimpling, shrugging her shoulders over

such a recital, have a more appreciative listener. Stephen Bocqueraz's

sympathetic look met hers whenever she looked up; he nodded, agreed,

frowned thoughtfully or laughed outright. They sat through the next

dance, and through half the next, hidden in one of the many diminutive

"parlors" that surrounded the ball-room, and when Susan was surrendered

to an outraged partner she felt that she and the great man were fairly

started toward a real friendship, and that these attractive boys she

was dancing with were really very young, after all.

"Remember Stephen Bocqueraz that Brownie introduced to you just before

supper?" asked Ella, as they went home, yawning, sleepy and headachy,

the next day. Ella had been playing cards through the supper hour.

"Perfectly!" Susan answered, flushing and smiling.

"You must have made a hit," Ella remarked, "because--I'm giving him a

big dinner on Tuesday, at the Palace--and when I talked to him he asked

if you would be there. Well, I'm glad you had a nice time, kiddy, and

we'll do it again!"

Susan had thanked her gratefully more than once, but she thanked her

again now. She felt that she truly loved Ella, so big and good natured

and kind.

Emily was a little bit cold when Susan told her about the ball, and the

companion promptly suppressed the details of her own successes, and

confined her recollections to the girls who had asked for Emily, and to

generalities. Susan put her wilting orchids in water, and went dreamily

through the next two or three days, recovering from the pleasure and

excitement. It was almost a week before Emily was quite herself again;

then, when Isabel Wallace came running in to Emily's sick-room to beg

Susan to fill a place at their dinner-table at a few hours' notice,

Susan's firm refusal quite won Emily's friendship back.

"Isabel's a dear," said Emily, contentedly settling down with the

Indian bead-work in which she and Susan had had several lessons, and

with which they filled some spare time, "but she's not a leader. I took

you up, so now Isabel does! I knew--I felt sure that, if Ella let you

borrow that dress, Isabel would begin to patronize you!"

It was just one of Emily's nasty speeches, and Emily really wasn't

well, so Susan reminded herself, when the hot, angry color burned in

her face, and an angry answer came to her mind. What hurt most was that

it was partly true; Emily HAD taken her up, and, when she ceased to be

all that Emily required of sympathy and flattery and interest, Emily

would find someone else to fill Miss Brown's place. Without Emily she

was nobody, and it did not console Susan to reflect that, had Emily's

fortune been hers and Emily in her position, the circumstances would be

exactly reversed. Just the accident of having money would have made

Miss Brown the flattered and admired, the safe and secure one; just the

not having it would have pushed Emily further even than Susan was from

the world of leisure and beauty and luxury.

"This world IS money!" thought Susan, when she saw the head-waiter come

forward so smilingly to meet Ella and herself at the Palm Garden; when

Leonard put off a dozen meekly enduring women to finish Miss Emily

Saunders' gown on time; when the very sexton at church came hurrying to

escort Mrs. Saunders and herself through the disappointed crowds in the

aisles, and establish them in, and lock them in, the big empty pew. The

newspapers gave half a column of blame to the little girl who tried to

steal a two-dollar scarf from the Emporium, but there was nothing but

admiration for Ella on the day when she and a twenty-year-old boy, for

a wager, led a woolly white toy lamb, a lamb costing twenty-five

dollars, through the streets, from the club to the Palace Hotel. The

papers were only deeply interested and amused when Miss Elsa Chisholm

gave a dinner to six favorite riding-horses, who were entertained in

the family dining-room after a layer of tan-bark had been laid on the

floor, and fed by their owners from specially designed leather bags and

boxes; and they merely reported the fact that Miss Dolly Ripley had

found so unusual an intelligence in her gardener that she had deeded to

him her grandfather's eighty-thousand-dollar library. "He really has

ever so much better brains than I have, don't you know?" said Miss

Ripley to the press.

In return for the newspapers' indulgent attitude, however, they were

shown no clemency by the Saunders and the people of their set. On a

certain glorious, golden afternoon in May, Susan, twisting a card that

bore the name of Miss Margaret Summers, representing the CHRONICLE,

went down to see the reporter. The Saunders family hated newspaper

notoriety, but it was a favorite saying that since the newspapers would

print things anyway, they might as well get them straight, and Susan

often sent dinner or luncheon lists to the three morning papers.

However, the young woman who rose when Susan went into the drawing-room

was not in search of news. Her young, pretty face was full of distress.

"Miss Saunders?" asked she.

"I'm Miss Brown," Susan said. "Miss Saunders is giving a card-party and

I am to act for her."

Miss Summers, beginning her story, also began to cry. She was the

society editor, she explained, and two weeks before she had described

in her column a luncheon given by Miss Emily Saunders. Among the list

of guests she had mentioned Miss Carolyn Seymour.

"Not Carolyn Seymour!" said Susan, shocked. "Why, she never is here!

The Seymours---" she shook her head. "I know people do accept them,"

said Susan, "but the Saunders don't even know them! They're not in the

best set, you know, they're really hardly in society at all!"

"I know NOW," Miss Summers said miserably. "But all the other

girls--this year's debutantes--were there, and I had to guess at most

of the names, and I chanced it! Fool that I was!" she interrupted

herself bitterly. "Well, the next day, while I was in the office, my

telephone rang. It was Thursday, and I had my Sunday page to do, and I

was just RUSHING, and I had a bad cold,--I've got it yet. So I just

said, 'What is it?' rather sharply, you know, and a voice said, in a

businesslike sort of way, 'How did you happen to put Miss Carolyn

Seymour's name on Miss Emily Saunders' lunch list?' I never dreamed

that it was Miss Saunders; how should I? She didn't say 'I' or 'me' or

anything--just that. So I said, 'Well, is it a matter of international

importance?'"

"Ouch!" said Susan, wincing, and shaking a doubtful head.

"I know, it was awful!" the other girl agreed eagerly. "But--" her

anxious eyes searched Susan's face. "Well; so the next day Mr. Brice

called me into the office, and showed me a letter from Miss Ella

Saunders, saying--" and Miss Summers began to cry again. "And I can't

tell Mamma!" she sobbed. "My brother's been so ill, and I was so proud

of my position!"

"Do you mean they--FIRED you?" Susan asked, all sympathy.

"He said he'd have to!" gulped Miss Summers, with a long sniff. "He

said that Saunders and Babcock advertise so much with them, and that,

if she wasn't appeased somehow--"

"Well, now, I'll tell you," said Susan, ringing for tea, "I'll wait

until Miss Saunders is in a good mood, and then I'll do the very best I

can for you. You know, a thing like that seems small, but it's just the

sort of thing that is REALLY important," she pursued, consolingly. She

had quite cheered her caller before the tea-cups were emptied, but she

was anything but hopeful of her mission herself.

And Ella justified her misgivings when the topic was tactfully opened

the next day.

"I'm sorry for the little thing," said Ella, briskly, "but she

certainly oughtn't to have that position if she doesn't know better

than that! Carolyn Seymour in this house--I never heard of such a

thing! I was denying it all the next day at the club and it's extremely

unpleasant. Besides," added Ella, reddening, "she was extremely

impertinent about it when I telephoned---"

"Duchess, she didn't dream it was you! She only said that she didn't

know it was so important---" Susan pleaded.

"Well," interrupted Miss Saunders, in a satisfied and final tone, "next

time perhaps she WILL know who it is, and whether it is important or

not! Sue, while you're there at the desk," she added, "will you write

to Mrs. Bergess, Mrs. Gerald Florence Bergess, and tell her that I

looked at the frames at Gump's for her prizes, and they're lovely, from

fourteen up, and that I had him put three or four aside---"

After the dance Peter began to call rather frequently at "High

Gardens," a compliment which Emily took entirely to herself, and to

escort the girls about on their afternoon calls, or keep them and Ella,

and the old mistress of the house as well, laughing throughout the late

and formal dinner. Susan's reserve and her resolutions melted before

the old charm; she had nothing to gain by snubbing him; it was much

pleasanter to let by-gones be by-gones, and enjoy the moment. Peter had

every advantage; if she refused him her friendship a hundred other

girls were only too eager to fill her place, so she was gay and

companionable with him once more, and extracted a little fresh flavor

from the friendship in Emily's unconsciousness of the constant

interchange of looks and inflections that went on between Susan and

Peter over her head. Susan sometimes thought of Mrs. Carroll's old

comment on the popularity of the absorbed and busy girl when she

realized that Peter was trying in vain to find time for a personal word

with her, or was resenting her interest in some other caller, while she

left Emily to him. She was nearer to Peter than ever, a thousand times

more sure of herself, and, if she would still have married him, she was

far less fond of him than she had been years ago.

Susan asked him some questions, during one idle tea-time, of Hunter,

Baxter & Hunter. His uncle had withdrawn from the firm now, he told

her, adding with characteristic frankness that in his opinion "the old

guy got badly stung." The Baxter home had been sold to a club; the old

people had found the great house too big for them and were established

now in one of the very smartest of the new apartment houses that were

beginning to be built in San Francisco. Susan called, with Emily, upon

Mrs. Baxter, and somehow found the old lady's personality as curiously

shrunk, in some intangible way, as was her domestic domain in

actuality. Mrs. Baxter, cackling emphatically and disapprovingly of the

world in general, fussily accompanying them to the elevator, was merely

a rather tiresome and pitiful old woman, very different from the

delicate little grande dame of Susan's recollection. Ella reported the

Baxter fortune as sadly diminished, but there were still maids and the

faithful Emma; there were still the little closed carriage and the

semi-annual trip to Coronado. Nor did Peter appear to have suffered

financially in any way; although Mrs. Baxter had somewhat fretfully

confided to the girls that his uncle had suggested that it was time

that Peter stood upon his own feet; and that Peter accordingly had

entered into business relations with a certain very wealthy firm of

grain brokers. Susan could not imagine Peter as actively involved in

any very lucrative deals, but Peter spent a great deal of money, never

denied himself anything, and took frequent and delightful vacations.

He took Emily and Susan to polo and tennis games, and, when the season

at the hotel opened, they went regularly to the dances. In July Peter

went to Tahoe, where Mrs. Saunders planned to take the younger girls

later for at least a few weeks' stay. Ella chaperoned them to

Burlingame for a week of theatricals; all three staying with Ella's

friend, Mrs. Keith, whose daughter, Mary Peacock, had also Dolly Ripley

and lovely Isabel Wallace for her guests. Little Constance Fox,

visiting some other friends nearby, was in constant attendance upon

Miss Ripley, and Susan thought the relationship between them an

extraordinary study; Miss Ripley bored, rude, casual, and Constance

increasingly attentive, eager, admiring.

"When are you going to come and spend a week with me?" drawled Miss

Ripley to Susan.

"You'll have the loveliest time of your life!" Connie added,

brilliantly. "Be sure you ask me for that week, Dolly!"

"We'll write you about it," Miss Ripley said lazily, and Constance,

putting the best face she could upon the little slight, slapped her

hand playfully, and said:

"Oh, aren't you mean!"

"Dolly takes it so for granted that I'm welcome at her house at ANY

time," said Constance to Susan, later, "that she forgets how rude a

thing like that can sound!" She had followed Susan into her own room,

and now stood by the window, looking down a sun-steeped vista of lovely

roads and trees and gardens with a discontented face. Susan, changing

her dress for an afternoon on the tennis-courts, merely nodded

sympathetically.

"Lord, I would like to go this afternoon!" added Constance, presently.

"Aren't you going over for the tennis?" Susan asked in amazement. For

the semi-finals of the tournament were to be played on this glorious

afternoon, and there would be a brilliant crowd on the courts and tea

at the club to follow.

"No; I can't!" Miss Fox said briefly. "Tell everyone that I'm lying

down with a terrible headache, won't you?"

"But why?" asked Susan. For the headache was obviously a fiction.

"You know that mustard-colored linen with the black embroidery that

Dolly's worn once or twice, don't you?" asked Connie, with apparent

irrelevancy.

Susan nodded, utterly at a loss.

"Well, she gave it to me to-day, and the hat and the parasol," said

Constance, with a sort of resigned bitterness. "She said she had got

the outfit at Osbourne's, last month, and she thought it would look

stunning on me, and wouldn't I like to wear it to the club this

afternoon?"

"Well--?" Susan said, as the other paused. "Why not?"

"Oh, why not!" echoed Connie, with mild exasperation. "Don't be a

damned fool!"

"Oh, I see!" Susan said, enlightened. "Everybody knows it's Miss

Ripley's, of course! She probably didn't think of that!"

"She probably did!" responded Connie, with a rather dry laugh.

"However, the fact remains that she'll take it out of me if I go and

don't wear it, and Mamma never will forgive me if I do! So, I came in

to borrow a book. Of course, Susan, I've taken things from Dolly Ripley

before, and I probably will again," she added, with the nearest

approach to a sensible manner that Susan had ever seen in her, "but

this is going a little TOO far!"

And, borrowing a book, she departed, leaving Susan to finish her

dressing in a very sober frame of mind. She wondered if her

relationship toward Emily could possibly impress any outsider as

Connie's attitude toward Dolly Ripley impressed her.

With Isabel Wallace she began, during this visit, the intimate and

delightful friendship for which they two had been ready for a long

time. Isabel was two years older than Susan, a beautiful, grave-eyed

brunette, gracious in manner, sweet of voice, the finest type that her

class and environment can produce. Isabel was well read, musical,

traveled; she spoke two or three languages besides her mother tongue.

She had been adored all her life by three younger brothers, by her

charming and simple, half-invalid mother, and her big, clever father,

and now, all the girls were beginning to suspect, was also adored by

the very delightful Eastern man who was at present Mrs. Butler Holmes'

guest in Burlingame, and upon whom all of them had been wasting their

prettiest smiles. John Furlong was college-bred, young, handsome, of a

rich Eastern family, in every way a suitable husband for the beautiful

woman with whom he was so visibly falling in love.

Susan watched the little affair with a heartache, not all unworthy. She

didn't quite want to be Isabel, or want a lover quite like John. But

she did long for something beautiful and desirable all her own; it was

hard to be always the outsider, always alone. When she thought of

Isabel's father and mother, their joy in her joy, her own pleasure in

pleasing them, a thrill of pain shook her. If Isabel was all grateful,

all radiant, all generous, she, Susan, could have been graceful and

radiant and generous too! She lay awake in the soft summer nights,

thinking of what John would say to Isabel, and what Isabel, so lovely

and so happy, would reply.

"Sue, you will know how wonderful it is when it comes to you!" Isabel

said, on the last night of their Burlingame visit, when she gave Susan

a shy hint that it was "all RIGHT," if a profound secret still.

The girls did not stay for the theatricals, after all. Emily was deeply

disgusted at being excluded from some of the ensembles in which she had

hoped to take part and, on the very eve of the festivities, she became

alarmingly ill, threw Mrs. Keith's household into utter consternation

and confusion, and was escorted home immediately by Susan and a trained

nurse.

Back at "High Gardens," they settled down contentedly enough to the

familiar routine. Emily spent two-thirds of the time in bed, but Susan,

fired by Isabel Wallace's example, took regular exercises now, airing

the dogs or finding commissions to execute for Emily or Mrs. Saunders,

made radical changes in her diet, and attempted, with only partial

success, to confine her reading to improving books. A relative had sent

Emily the first of the new jig-saw puzzles from New York, and Emily had

immediately wired for more. She and Susan spent hours over them; they

became in fact an obsession, and Susan began to see jig-saw divisions:

in everything her eye rested on; the lawn, the clouds, or the

drawing-room walls.

Sometimes Kenneth joined them, and Susan knew that it was on her

account. She was very demure with him; her conversation for Emily, her

eyes all sisterly unembarrassment when they met his. Mrs. Saunders was

not well, and kept to her room, so that more than once Susan dined

alone with the man of the house. When this happened Kenneth would bring

his chair down from the head of the table and set it next to hers. He

called her "Tweeny" for some favorite character in a play, brought her

some books she had questioned him about, asked her casually, on the

days she went to town for Emily, at what time she would come back, and

joined her on the train.

Susan had thought of him as a husband, as she thought of every

unattached man, the instant she met him. But the glamour of those early

views of Kenneth Saunders had been somewhat dimmed, and since her

arrival at "High Gardens" she had tried rather more not to displease

this easily annoyed member of the family, than to make a definite

pleasant impression upon him. Now, however, she began seriously to

consider him. And it took her a few brief moments only to decide that,

if he should ask her, she would be mad to refuse to become his wife. He

was probably as fine a match as offered itself at the time in all San

Francisco's social set, good-looking, of a suitable age, a gentleman,

and very rich. He was so rich and of so socially prominent a family

that his wife need never trouble herself with the faintest thought of

her own standing; it would be an established fact, supreme and

irrefutable. Beside him Peter Coleman was a poor man, and even Isabel's

John paled socially and financially. Kenneth Saunders would be a

brilliant "catch" for any girl; for little Susan Brown--it would be a

veritable triumph!

Susan's heart warmed as she thought of the details. There would be a

dignified announcement from Mrs. Saunders. Then,--Babel! Telephoning,

notes, telegrams! Ella would of course do the correct thing; there

would be a series of receptions and dinners; there would be formal

affairs on all sides. The newspapers would seize upon it; the family

jewels would be reset; the long-stored silver resurrected. There would

be engagement cups and wedding-presents, and a trip East, and the

instant election of young Mrs. Saunders to the Town and Country Club.