"We"re ALL great admirers of your books, Mr. Bocqueraz," said she, "but it was Helen, my daughter here!--who was sure she recognized you. We went to your lecture at our club, in Los Angeles---"
Stephen shook hands, smiled and was very gracious, and Susan, shyly smiling, too, felt her heart swell with pride. When they went on together the little episode had subtly changed her att.i.tude toward him; Susan was back for the moment in her old mood, wondering gratefully what the great man saw in HER to attract him!
A familiar chord was touched when an hour later, upon getting out of a carriage at her aunt"s door, she found the right of way disputed by a garbage cart, and Mary Lou, clad in a wrapper, holding the driver in spirited conversation through a crack in the door. Susan promptly settled a small bill, kissed Mary Lou, and went upstairs in harmonious and happy conversation.
"I was just taking a bath!" said Mary Lou, indignantly. Mary Lou never took baths easily, or as a matter of course. She always made an event of them, choosing an inconvenient hour, a.s.sembling soap, clothing and towels with maddening deliberation, running about in slippered feet for a full hour before she locked herself into, and everybody else out of, the bathroom. An hour later she would emerge from the hot and steam-clouded apartment, to spend another hour in her room in leisurely dressing. She was at this latter stage now, and regaled Susan with all the family news, as she ran her hand into stocking after stocking in search of a whole heel, and forced her silver cuff-links into the starched cuffs of her shirtwaist.
Ferd Eastman"s wife had succ.u.mbed, some weeks before, to a second paralytic stroke, and Mary Lou wept unaffectedly at the thought of poor Ferd"s grief. She said she couldn"t help hoping that some sweet and lovely girl,--"Ferd knows so many!" said Lou, sighing,--would fill the empty place. Susan, with an unfavorable recollection of Ferd"s fussy, important manner and red face, said nothing. Georgie, Mary Lou reported, was a very sick woman, in Ma"s and Mary Lou"s opinion. Ma had asked the young O"Connors to her home for Christmas dinner; "perhaps they expected us to ask the old lady," said Mary Lou, resentfully, "anyway, they aren"t coming!" Georgie"s baby, it appeared, was an angel, but Joe disciplined the poor little thing until it would make anyone"s heart sick.
Of Alfie the report was equally discouraging: "Alfie"s wife is perfectly awful," his sister said, "and their friends, Sue,--barbers and butchers! However, Ma"s asked "em here for Christmas dinner, and then you"ll see them!" Virginia was still at the inst.i.tution, but of late some hope of eventual restoration of her sight had been given her.
"It would break your heart to see her in that place, it seems like a poorhouse!" said Mary Lou, with trembling lips, "but Jinny"s an angel.
She gets the children about her, and tells them stories; they say she"s wonderful with them!"
There was really good news of the Lord sisters, Susan was rejoiced to hear. They had finally paid for their lot in Piedmont Hills, and a new trolley-car line, pa.s.sing within one block of it, had trebled its value. This was Lydia"s chance to sell, in Mary Lou"s opinion, but Lydia intended instead to mortgage the now valuable property, and build a little two-family house upon it with the money thus raised. She had pa.s.sed the school-examinations, and had applied for a Berkeley school.
"But better than all," Mary Lou announced, "that great German muscle doctor has been twice to see Mary,--isn"t that amazing? And not a cent charged---"
"Oh, G.o.d bless him!" said Susan, her eyes flashing through sudden mist.
"And will she be cured?"
"Not ever to really be like other people, Sue. But he told her, last time, that by the time that Piedmont garden was ready for her, she"d be ready to go out and sit in it every day! Lydia fainted away when he said it,--yes, indeed she did!"
"Well, that"s the best news I"ve heard for many a day!" Susan rejoiced.
She could not have explained why, but some queer little reasoning quality in her brain made her own happiness seem the surer when she heard of the happiness of other people.
The old odors in the halls, the old curtains and chairs and dishes, the old, old conversation; Mrs. Parker reading a clean, neatly lined, temperate little letter from Loretta, signed "Sister Mary Gregory"; Major Watts anxious to explain to Susan just the method of building an army bridge that he had so successfully introduced during the Civil War,--"S"ee, "Who is this boy, Cutter?" "Why, sir, I don"t know," says Captain Cutter, "but he says his name is Watts!" "Watts?" says the General, "Well," s"ee, "If I had a few more of your kind, Watts, we"d get the Yanks on the run, and we"d keep "em on the run.""
Lydia Lord came down to get Mary"s dinner, and again Susan helped the watery vegetable into a pyramid of saucers, and pa.s.sed the green gla.s.s dish of pickles, and the pink china sugar-bowl. But she was happy to-night, and it seemed good to be home, where she could be her natural self, and put her elbows on the table, and be listened to and laughed at, instead of playing a role.
"Gosh, we need you in this family, Susie!" said William Oliver, won from fatigue and depression to a sudden appreciation of her gaiety.
"Do you, Willie darling?"
"Don"t you call me Willie!" he looked up to say scowlingly.
"Well, don"t you call me Susie, then!" retorted Susan. Mrs. Lancaster patted her hand, and said affectionately, "Don"t it seem good to have the children scolding away at each other again!"
Susan and William had one of their long talks, after dinner, while they cracked and ate pine-nuts, and while Mary Lou, at the other end of the dining-room table, painstakingly wrote a letter to a friend of her girlhood. Billy was frankly afraid that his men were reaching the point when a strike would be the natural step, and as president of their new-formed union, and spokesman for them whenever the powers had to be approached, he was anxious to delay extreme measures as long as he could. Susan was inclined to regard the troubles of the workingman as very largely of his own making. "You"ll simply lose your job," said Susan, "and that"ll be the end of it. If you made friends with the Carpenters, on the other hand, you"d be fixed for life. And the Carpenters are perfectly lovely people. Mrs. Carpenter is on the hospital board, and a great friend of Ella"s. And she says that it"s ridiculous to think of paying those men better wages when their homes are so dirty and shiftless, and they spend their money as they do! You know very well there will always be rich people and poor people, and that if all the money in the world was divided on Monday morning---"
"Don"t get that old chestnut off!" William entreated.
"Well, I don"t care!" Susan said, a little more warmly for the interruption. "Why don"t they keep their houses clean, and bring their kids up decently, instead of giving them dancing lessons and white stockings!"
"Because they"ve had no decent training themselves, Sue---"
"Oh, decent training! What about the schools?"
"Schools don"t teach anything! But if they had fair play, and decent hours, and time to go home and play with the kids, and do a little gardening, they"d learn fast enough!"
"The poor you have always with you," said Mary Lou, reverently. Susan laughed outright, and went around the table to kiss her cousin.
"You"re an old darling, Mary Lou!" said she. Mary Lou accepted the tribute as just.
"No, but I don"t think we ought to forget the IMMENSE good that rich people do, Billy," she said mildly. "Mrs. Holly"s daughters gave a Christmas-tree party for eighty children yesterday, and the Sat.u.r.day Morning Club will have a tree for two hundred on the twenty-eighth!"
"Holly made his money by running about a hundred little druggists out of the business," said Billy, darkly.
"Bought and paid for their businesses, you mean," Susan amended sharply.
"Yes, paid about two years" profits," Billy agreed, "and would have run them out of business if they hadn"t sold. If you call that honest!"
"It"s legally honest," Susan said lazily, shuffling a pack for solitaire. "It"s no worse than a thousand other things that people do!"
"No, I agree with you there!" Billy said heartily, and he smiled as if he had had the best of the argument.
Susan followed her game for awhile in silence. Her thoughts were glad to escape to more absorbing topics, she reviewed the happy afternoon, and thrilled to a hundred little memories. The quiet, stupid evening carried her back, in spirit, to the Susan of a few years ago, the shabby little ill-dressed clerk of Hunter, Baxter & Hunter, who had been such a limited and suppressed little person. The Susan of to-day was an erect, well-corseted, well-manicured woman of the world; a person of noticeable nicety of speech, accustomed to move in the very highest society. No, she could never come back to this, to the old shiftless, penniless ways. Any alternative rather!
"And, besides, I haven"t really done anything yet," Susan said to herself, uneasily, when she was brushing her hair that night, and Mary Lou was congratulating her upon her improved appearance and manner.
On Sat.u.r.day she introduced her delighted aunt and cousin to Mr.
Bocqueraz, who came to take her for a little stroll.
"I"ve always thought you were quite an unusual girl, Sue," said her aunt later in the afternoon, "and I do think it"s a real compliment for a man like that to talk to a girl like you! I shouldn"t know what to say to him, myself, and I was real proud of the way you spoke up; so easy and yet so ladylike!"
Susan gave her aunt only an ecstatic kiss for answer. Bread was needed for dinner, and she flashed out to the bakery for it, and came flying back, the bread, wrapped in paper and tied with pink string, under her arm. She proposed a stroll along Filmore Street to Mary Lou, in the evening, and they wrapped up for their walk under the clear stars.
There was a holiday tang to the very air; even the sound of a premature horn, now and then; the shops were full of shoppers.
Mary Lou had some cards to buy, at five cents apiece, or two for five cents, and they joined the gently pushing groups in the little stationery stores. Insignificant little shoppers were busily making selections from the open trays of cards; school-teachers, stenographers, bookkeepers and clerks kept up a constant little murmur among themselves.
"How much are these? Thank you!" "She says these are five, Lizzie; do you like them better than the little holly books?" "I"ll take these two, please, and will you give me two envelopes?--Wait just a moment, I didn"t see these!" "This one was in the ten-cent box, but it"s marked five, and that lady says that there were some just like it for five. If it"s five, I want it!" "Aren"t these cunnin", Lou?" "Yes, I noticed those, did you see these, darling?" "I want this one--I want these, please,--will you give me this one?"
"Are you going to be open at all to-morrow?" Mary Lou asked, unwilling to be hurried into a rash choice. "Isn"t this little one with a baby"s face sweet?" said a tall, gaunt woman, gently, to Susan.
"Darling!" said Susan.
"But I want it for an unmarried lady, who isn"t very fond of children,"
said the woman delicately. "So perhaps I had better take these two funny little p.u.s.s.ies in a hat!"
They went out into the cold street again, and into a toy-shop where a lamb was to be selected for Georgie"s baby. And here was a roughly dressed young man holding up a three-year-old boy to see the elephants and horses. Little Three, a noisy little fellow, with cold red little hands, and a worn, soiled plush coat, selected a particularly charming s.h.a.ggy horse, and shouted with joy as his father gave it to him.
"Do you like that, son? Well, I guess you"ll have to have it; there"s nothing too good for you!" said the father, and he signaled a saleswoman. The girl looked blankly at the change in her hand.
"That"s two dollars, sir," she said, pleasantly, displaying the tag.
"What?" the man stammered, turning red. "Why--why, sure--that"s right!
But I thought---" he appealed to Susan. "Don"t that look like twenty cents?" he asked.
Mary Lou tugged discreetly at Susan"s arm, but Susan would not desert the baby in the plush coat.
"It IS!" she agreed warmly.