"You were a sweet to think of it," Emily said, gratefully, from the downy wide couch where she was spending the evening.
"Not at all, Kid," Ella answered politely. She yawned, and stared at the alabaster globe of the lamp above Emily"s head. A silence fell. The two sisters never had much to talk about, and Mrs. Saunders, dutifully sitting with the invalid, was heavy from dinner, and nearly asleep.
Ella yawned again.
"Want some chocolates?" she finally asked.
"Oh, thank you, Ella!"
"I"ll send Fannie in with "em!" Miss Ella stood up, bent her head to study at close range an engraving on the wall, loitered off to her own room. She was rarely at home in the evening and did not know quite what to do with herself.
Susan, meanwhile, walked upon air. She tasted complete happiness for almost the first time in her life; awakened in the morning to blissful reality, instead of the old dreary round, and went to sleep at night smiling at her own happy thoughts. It was all like a pleasant dream!
She resigned from her new position at Hunter, Baxter & Hunter"s exactly as she resigned in imagination a hundred times. No more drudgery over bills, no more mornings spent in icy, wet shoes, and afternoons heavy with headache. Susan was almost too excited to thank Mr. Brauer for his compliments and regrets.
Parting with Th.o.r.n.y was harder; Susan and she had been through many a hard hour together, had shared a thousand likes and dislikes, had loved and quarreled and been reconciled.
"You"re doing an awfully foolish thing, Susan. You"ll wish you were back here inside of a month," Th.o.r.n.y prophesied when the last moment came. "Aw, don"t you do it, Susan!" she pleaded, with a little real emotion. "Come on into Main Office, and sit next to me. We"ll have loads of sport."
"Oh, I"ve promised!" Susan held out her hand. "Don"t forget me!" she said, trying to laugh. Miss Thornton"s handsome eyes glistened with tears. With a sudden little impulse they kissed each other for the first time.
Then Susan, a full hour before closing, went down from the lunch-room, and past all the familiar offices; the sadness of change tugging at her heart-strings. She had been here a long time, she had smelled this same odor of scorching rubber, and oils and powders through so many slow afternoons, in gay moods and sad, in moods of rebellion and distaste.
She left a part of her girlhood here. The cashier, to whom she went for her check, was all kindly interest, and the young clerks and salesmen stopped to offer her their good wishes. Susan pa.s.sed the time-clock without punching her number for the first time in three years, and out into the sunny, unfamiliar emptiness of the streets.
At the corner her heart suddenly failed her. She felt as if she could not really go away from these familiar places and people. The warehouses and wholesale houses, the wholesale liquor house with a live eagle magnificently caged in one window, the big stove establishment, with its window full of ranges in shining steel and nickel-plate; these had been her world for so long!
But she kept on her way uptown, and by the time she reached the old library, where Mary Lou, very handsome in her well-brushed suit and dotted veil, with white gloves still odorous of benzine, was waiting, she was almost sure that she was not making a mistake.
Mary Lou was a famous shopper, capable of exhausting any saleswoman for a ten-cent purchase, and proportionately effective when, as to-day, a really considerable sum was to be spent. She regretfully would decline a dozen varieties in handkerchiefs or ribbons, saying with pleasant plaintiveness to the saleswoman: "Perhaps I am hard to please. My mother is an old Southern lady--the Ralstons, you know?--and her linen is, of course, like nothing one can get nowadays! No; I wouldn"t care to show my mother this.
"My cousin, of course, only wants this for a little hack hat," she added to Susan"s modest suggestion of price to the milliner, and in the White House she consented to Susan"s selections with a consoling reminder, "It isn"t as if you didn"t have your lovely French underwear at home, Sue! These will do very nicely for your rough camping trip!"
Compared to Mary Lou, Susan was a very poor shopper. She was always anxious to please the saleswoman, to buy after a certain amount of looking had been done, for no other reason than that she had caused most of the stock to be displayed.
"I like this, Mary Lou," Susan would murmur nervously. And, as the pompadoured saleswoman turned to take down still another heap of petticoats, Susan would repeat noiselessly, with an urgent nod, "This will do!"
"Wait, now, dear," Mary Lou would return, unperturbed, arresting Susan"s hand with a white, well-filled glove. "Wait, dear. If we can"t get it here we can get it somewhere else. Yes, let me see those you have there---"
"Thank you, just the same," Susan always murmured uncomfortably, averting her eyes from the saleswoman, as they went away. But the saleswoman, busily rearranging her stock, rarely responded.
To-day they bought, besides the fascinating white things, some tan shoes, and a rough straw hat covered with roses, and two linen skirts, and three linen blouses, and a little dress of dotted lavender lawn.
Everything was of the simplest, but Susan had never had so many new things in the course of her life before, and was elated beyond words as one purchase was made after another.
She carried home nearly ten dollars, planning to keep it until the first month"s salary should be paid, but Auntie was found, upon their return in the very act of dissuading the dark powers known as the "sewing-machine men" from removing that convenience, and Susan, only too thankful to be in time, gladly let seven dollars fall into the oily palm of the carrier in charge.
"Mary Lou," said she, over her fascinating packages, just before dinner, "here"s a funny thing! If I had gone bad, you know, so that I could keep buying nice, pretty, simple things like this, as fast as I needed them, I"d feel better--I mean truly cleaner and more moral--than when I was good!"
"Susan! Why, SUSAN!" Her cousin turned a shocked face from the window where she was carefully pasting newly-washed handkerchiefs, to dry in the night. "Do you remember who you ARE, dear, and don"t say dreadful things like that!"
In the next few days Susan pressed her one suit, laundered a score of little ruffles and collars, cleaned her gloves, sewed on b.u.t.tons and strings generally, and washed her hair. Late on Sunday came the joyful necessity of packing. Mary Lou folded and refolded patiently, Georgie came in with a little hand-embroidered handkerchief-case for Susan"s bureau, Susan herself rushed about like a mad-woman, doing almost nothing.
"You"ll be back inside the month," said Billy that evening, looking up from Carlyle"s "Revolution," to where Susan and Mary Lou were busy with last st.i.tches, at the other side of the dining-room table. "You can"t live with the rotten rich any more than I could!"
"Billy, you don"t know how awfully conceited you sound when you say a thing like that!"
"Conceited? Oh, all right!" Mr. Oliver accompanied the words with a sound only to be described as a snort, and returned, offended, to his book.
"Conceited, well, maybe I am," he resumed with deadly calm, a moment later. "But there"s no conceit in my saying that people like the Saunders can"t buffalo ME!"
"You may not see it, but there IS!" persisted Susan.
"You give me a pain, Sue! Do you honestly think they are any better than you are?"
"Of course they"re not better," Susan said, heatedly, "if it comes right down to morals and the Commandments! But if I prefer to spend my life among people who have had several generations of culture and refinement and travel and education behind them, it"s my own affair! I like nice people, and rich people ARE more refined than poor, and n.o.body denies it! I may feel sorry for a girl who marries a man on forty a week, and brings up four or five little kids on it, but that doesn"t mean I want to do it myself! And I think a man has his nerve to expect it!"
"I didn"t make you an offer, you know, Susan," said William pleasantly.
"I didn"t mean you!" Susan answered angrily. Then with sudden calm and sweetness, she resumed, busily tearing up and a.s.sorting old letters the while, "But now you"re trying to make me mad, Billy, and you don"t care what you say. The trouble with you," she went on, with sisterly kindness and frankness, "is that you think you are the only person who really ought to get on in the world. You know so much, and study so hard, that you DESERVE to be rich, so that you can pension off every old stupid German laborer at the works who still wants a job when they can get a boy of ten to do his work better than he can! You mope away over there at those cottages, Bill, until you think the only important thing in the world is the price of sausages in proportion to wages. And for all that you pretend to despise people who use decent English, and don"t think a bath-tub is a place to store potatoes; I notice that you are pretty anxious to study languages and hear good music and keep up in your reading, yourself! And if that"s not cultivation---"
"I never said a word about cultivation!" Billy, who had been apparently deep in his book, looked up to snap angrily. Any allusion to his efforts at self-improvement always touched him in a very sensitive place.
"Why, you did TOO! You said---"
"Oh, I did not! If you"re going to talk so much, Sue, you ought to have some faint idea what you"re talking about!"
"Very well," Susan said loftily, "if you can"t address me like a gentleman, we won"t discuss it. I"m not anxious for your opinion, anyway."
A silence. Mr. Oliver read with pa.s.sionate attention. Susan sighed, sorted her letters, sighed again.
"Billy, do you love me?" she asked winningly, after a pause.
Another silence. Mr. Oliver turned a page.
"Are you sure you"ve read every word on that page, Bill,--every little word?"
Silence again.
"You know, you began this, Bill," Susan said presently, with childish sweet reproach. "Don"t say anything, Bill; I can"t ask that! But if you still love me, just smile!"
By some miracle, Billy preserved his scowl.
"Not even a glimmer!" Susan said, despondently. "I"ll tell you, Bill,"
she added, gushingly. "Just turn a page, and I"ll take it for a sign of love!" She clasped her hands, and watched him breathlessly.
Mr. Oliver reached the point where the page must be turned. He moved his eyes stealthily upward.
"Oh, no you don"t! No going back!" exulted Susan. She jumped up, grabbed the book, encircled his head with her arms, kissed her own hand vivaciously and made a mad rush for the stairs. Mr. Oliver caught her half-way up the flight, with more energy than dignity, and got his book back by doubling her little finger over with an increasing pressure until Susan managed to drop the volume to the hall below.
"Bill, you beast! You"ve broken my finger!" Susan, breathless and dishevelled, sat beside him on the narrow stair, and tenderly worked the injured member, "It hurts!"