Today"s enough for me."
"And for me, too," protested he. "I hope you"re having as good fun as I am."
"This is the first time I"ve really laughed in nearly a year,"
said she. "You don"t know what it means to be poor and hungry and cold--worst of all, cold."
"You unhappy child," said John tenderly.
But Susan was laughing again, and making jokes about a wonderful German party dress all covered with beads and lace and ruffles and embroidery. When they reached the shoe department, Susan asked John to take Fatty away. He understood that she was ashamed of their patched and holed stockings, and hastened to obey. They were making these their last purchases when the big bell rang for the closing. "I"m glad these poor tired shopgirls and clerks are set free," said John.
It was one of those well-meaning but worthless commonplaces of word-kindness that get for their utterance perhaps exaggerated credit for "good heart." Susan, conscience-stricken, halted.
"And I never once thought of them!" she exclaimed. "It just shows."
"Shows what?"
"Oh, nothing. Come on. I must forget that, for I can"t be happy again till I do. I understand now why the comfortable people can be happy. They keep from knowing or they make themselves forget."
"Why not?" said John. "What"s the use in being miserable about things that can"t be helped?"
"No use at all," replied the girl. She laughed. "I"ve forgotten."
The carriage was so filled with their bundles that they had some difficulty in making room for themselves--finally accomplished it by each girl sitting on her young man"s lap. They drove to a quietly placed, scrupulously clean little hotel overlooking Lincoln Park. "We"re going to take rooms here and dress,"
explained Fatty. "Then we"ll wander out and have some supper."
By this time Susan and Etta had lost all sense of strangeness.
The spirit of adventure was rampant in them as in a dreaming child. And the life they had been living--what they had seen and heard and grown accustomed to--made it easy for them to strike out at once and briskly in the new road, so different from the dreary and cruel path along which they had been plodding. They stood laughing and joking in the parlor while the boys registered; then the four went up to two small but comfortable and fascinatingly clean rooms with a large bathroom between.
"Fatty and I will go down to the bar while you two dress," said John.
"Not on your life!" exclaimed Fatty. "We"ll have the bar brought up to us."
But John, fortified by Susan"s look of grat.i.tude for his tactfulness, whispered to his friend--what Susan could easily guess. And Fatty said, "Oh, I never thought of it. Yes, we"ll give "em a chance. Don"t be long, girls."
"Thank you," said Susan to John.
"That"s all right. Take your time."
Susan locked the hall door behind the two men. She rushed to the bathroom, turned on the hot water. "Oh, Etta!" she cried, tears in her eyes, a hysterical sob in her throat. "A bathtub again!"
Etta too was enthusiastic; but she had not that intense hysterical joy which Susan felt--a joy that can be appreciated only by a person who, clean by instinct and by lifelong habit, has been shut out from thorough cleanliness for long months of dirt and foul odors and cold. It was no easy matter to become clean again after all those months. But there was plenty of soap and brushes and towels, and at last the thing was accomplished.
Then they tore open the bundles and arrayed themselves in the fresh new underclothes, in the simple attractive costumes of jacket, blouse and skirt. Susan had returned to her cla.s.s, and had brought Etta with her.
"What shall we do with these?" asked Etta, pointing disdainfully with the toe of her new boot to the scatter of the garments they had cast off.
Susan looked down at it in horror. She could not believe that _she_ had been wearing such stuff--that it was the clothing of all her a.s.sociates of the past six months--was the kind of attire in which most of her fellow-beings went about the beautiful earth, She shuddered. "Isn"t life dreadful?" she cried. And she kicked together the tattered, patched, stained trash, kicked it on to a large piece of heavy wrapping paper she had spread out upon the floor. Thus, without touching her discarded self, she got it wrapped up and bound with a strong string. She rang for the maid, gave her a quarter and pointed to the bundle. "Please take that and throw it away," she said.
When the maid was gone Etta said: "I"m mighty glad to have it out of the room."
"Out of the room?" cried Susan. "Out of my heart. Out of my life."
They put on their hats, admired themselves in the mirror, and descended--Susan remembering halfway that they had left the lights on and going back to turn them off. The door boy summoned the two young men to the parlor. They entered and exclaimed in real amazement. For they were facing two extremely pretty young women, one dark, the other fair. The two faces were wreathed in pleased and grateful smiles.
"Don"t we look nice?" demanded Etta.
"Nice!" cried Fatty. "We sure did draw a pair of first prizes--didn"t we, Johnny?"
John did not reply. He was gazing at Susan. Etta had young beauty but it was of the commonplace kind. In Susan"s face and carriage there was far more than beauty. "Where _did_ you come from?" said John to her in an undertone. "And _where_ are you going?"
"Out to supper, I hope," laughed she.
"Your eyes change--don"t they? I thought they were violet. Now I see they"re gray--gray as can be."
CHAPTER XXII
AT lunch, well toward the middle of the following afternoon, Fatty--his proper name was August Gulick--said: "John and I don"t start for Ann Arbor until a week from today. That means seven clear days. A lot can be done in that time, with a little intelligent hustling. What do you say, girls? Do you stick to us?"
"As long as you"ll let us," said Etta, who was delighting Gulick with her frank and wondering and grateful appreciation of his munificence. Never before had his own private opinion of himself received such a flatteringly sweeping indors.e.m.e.nt--from anyone who happened to impress him as worth while. In the last phrase lies the explanation of her success through a policy that is always dangerous and usually a failure.
So it was settled that with the quiet little hotel as headquarters the four would spend a week in exploring Cincinnati as a pleasure ground. Gulick knew the town thoroughly. His father was a brewer whose name was on many a huge beer wagon drawn about those streets by showy Clydesdales. Also he had plenty of money; and, while Redmond--for his friend was the son of Redmond, well known as a lawyer-politician in Chicago--had nothing like so much as Gulick, still he had enough to make a pa.s.sable pretense at keeping up his end. For Etta and Susan the city had meant shabby to filthy tenements, toil and weariness and sorrow. There was opened to their ravished young eyes "the city"--what reveals itself to the pleasure-seeker with pocket well filled--what we usually think of when we p.r.o.nounce its name, forgetting what its reality is for all but a favored few of those within its borders. It was a week of music and of laughter--music especially--music whenever they ate or drank, music to dance by, music in the beer gardens where they spent the early evenings, music at the road houses where they arrived in sleighs after the dances to have supper--unless you choose to call it breakfast. You would have said that Susan had slipped out of the tenement life as she had out of its garments, that she had retained not a trace of it even in memory. But--in those days began her habit of never pa.s.sing a beggar without giving something.
Within three or four days this life brought a truly amazing transformation in the two girls. You would not have recognized in them the pale and wan and ragged outcasts of only the Sat.u.r.day night before. "Aren"t you happy?" said Etta to Susan, in one of the few moments they were alone. "But I don"t need to ask. I didn"t know you could be so gay."
"I had forgotten how to laugh," replied Susan.
"I suppose I ought to be ashamed," pursued Etta.
"Why?" inquired Susan.
"Oh, you know why. You know how people"d talk if they knew."
"What people?" said Susan. "Anyone who"s willing to give you anything?"
"No," admitted Etta. "But----" There she halted.
Susan went on: "I don"t propose to be bothered by the other kind. They wouldn"t do anything for me if they could except sneer and condemn."
"Still, you know it isn"t right, what we"re doing."
"I know it isn"t cold--or hunger--or rags and dirt--and bugs,"
replied Susan.
Those few words were enough to conjure even to Etta"s duller fancy the whole picture to its last detail of loathsome squalor.
Into Etta"s face came a dazed expression. "Was that really _us_, Lorna?"
"No," said Susan with a certain fierceness. "It was a dream. But we must take care not to have that dream again."