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, a.s.sociating 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 a.s.sociates 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 a.n.a.lyze it. Her att.i.tude, the att.i.tude of all her s.e.x, was too entirely false to make an honest a.n.a.lysis 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 n.o.body. 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 cla.s.s 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 sc.r.a.ps 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 pa.s.sing 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 Sat.u.r.days, that Th.o.r.n.y's hair was unusually crimped and puffed, and that the Kirks were wearing coquettish black silk ap.r.o.ns, with pink and blue bows. Susan's face began to burn. Her hand un.o.btrusively 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 Th.o.r.n.y'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 circ.u.mspect 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.