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Saturday's Child

by Kathleen Thompson Norris · English · Gutenberg #4687 · 963,573 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: Saturday's Child

Author: Kathleen Thompson Norris


        
Release date: November 1, 2003 [eBook #4687]
                Most recently updated: May 20, 2013

Language: English

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Credits: Produced by Charles Franks and the Online Distributed
        Proofreading Team. HTML version by Al Haines.


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK SATURDAY'S CHILD ***




Produced by Charles Franks and the Online Distributed
Proofreading Team. HTML version by Al Haines.












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

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