"Billy?"

"What is it?" he asked, roused instantly.

"Why, I saw something funny in the London 'News' to-night," Susan began. She repeated the paragraph. Billy speculated upon it interestedly.

"Sure, he's probably gone back to his wife," said Billy. "Circ.u.mstances influence us all, you know."

"Do you mean that you don't think he ever meant to get a divorce?"

"Oh, no, not necessarily! Especially if there was any reason for him to get it. I think that, if it had been possible, he would have gotten it.

If not, he wouldn't have. Selfish, you know, darned selfish!"

Susan pondered in silence.

"I was to blame," she said finally.

"Oh, no, you weren't, not as much as he was--and he knew it!" Billy said.

"All sensation has so entirely died out of the whole thing," Susan said presently, "that it's just like looking at a place where you burned your hand ten years ago, and trying to remember whether the burn hurt worst, or dressing the burn, or curing the burn! I know it was all wrong, but at the time I thought it was only convention I was going against--I didn't realize that one of the advantages of laws is that you can follow them blind, when you've lost all your moorings. You can't follow your instincts, but you can remember your rule. I've thought a lot about Stephen Bocqueraz in the past few years, and I don't believe he meant to do anything terribly wrong and, as things turned out, I think he really did me more good than harm! I'm confident that but for him I would have married Kenneth, and he certainly did teach me a lot about poetry, Billy, about art and music, and more than that, about the SPIRIT of art and music and poetry, the sheer beauty of the world. So I've let all the rest go, like the fever out of a burn, and I believe I could meet him now, and like him almost. Does that seem very strange to you? Have you any feeling of resentment?"

Billy was silent.

"Billy!" Susan said, in quick uneasiness, "ARE you angry?"

After a tense moment the regular sound of deep and placid breathing answered her. Billy lay on his back sound asleep.

Susan stared at him a moment in the dimness. Then the absurdity of the thing struck her, and she began to laugh.

"I wonder if, when we get to another world, EVERYTHING we do here will seem just ridiculous and funny?" speculated Susan.

CHAPTER VIII

For their daughter's first Thanksgiving Day the Olivers invited a dozen friends to their Oakland house for dinner; the first really large gathering of their married lives.

"We have always been too poor, or I haven't been well, or there's been some other good reason for lying low," wrote Mrs. Oliver to Mrs.

Carroll, "but this year the stork is apparently filling previous orders, and our trio is well, and we have been blessed beyond all rhyme and reason, and want to give thanks. Anna and Conrad and the O'Connors have promised, Jinny will be here, and I'm only waiting to hear from you three to write and ask Phil and Mary and Pillsey and the baby. So DO come--for next year Anna says that it's her turn, and by the year after we may be so prosperous that I'll have to keep two maids, and miss half the fun--it will certainly break my heart if I ever have to say, 'We'll have roast turkey, Jane, and mince pies,' instead of making them myself. PLEASE come, we are dying to see the little cousins together, they will be simply heavenly---"

"There's more than wearing your best dress and eating too much turkey to Thanksgiving," said Susan to Billy, when they were extending the dining-table to its largest proportions on the day before Thanksgiving.

"It's just one of those things, like having a baby, that you have to DO to appreciate. It's old-fashioned, and homelike, and friendly. Perhaps I have a commonplace, middle-cla.s.s mind, but I do love all this! I love the idea of everyone arriving, and a big fire down here, and Betts and her young man trying to sneak away to the sun-room, and the boys sitting in Grandma's lap, and being given tastes of white meat and mashed potato at dinnertime. Me to the utterly commonplace, every time!"

"When you are commonplace, Sue," said her husband, coming out from under the table, where hasps had been absorbing his attention, "you'll be ready for the family vault at Holy Cross, and not one instant before!"

"No, but the consolation is," Susan reflected, "that if this is happiness,--if it makes me feel like the Lord Mayor's wife to have three children, a husband whom most people think is either a saint or a fool,--I think he's a little of both, myself!--and a new sun-room built off my dining-room,--why, then there's an unexpected amount of happiness in this world! In me--a plain woman, sir, with my hands still odorous of onion dressing, and a safety-pin from my daughter's bathing-struggle still sticking into my twelve-and-a-half-cent gingham,--in me, I say, you behold a contented human creature, who confidently hopes to live to be ninety-seven!"

"And then we'll have eternity together!" said the dusty Billy, with an arm about her.

"And not a minute too long!" answered his suddenly serious wife.

"You absolutely radiate content, Sue," Anna said to her wistfully, the next day.

Anna had come early to Oakland, to have luncheon and a few hours'

gossip with her hostess before the family's arrival for the six o'clock dinner. The doctor's wife reached the gate in her own handsome little limousine, and Susan had shared her welcome of Anna with enthusiasm for Anna's loose great sealskin coat.

"Take the baby and let me try it on," said Susan. "Woman--it is the most gorgeous thing I ever saw!"

"Conrad says I will need it in the east,--we go after Christmas," Anna said, her face buried against the baby.

Susan, having satisfied herself that what she really wanted, when Billy's ship came in, was a big sealskin coat, had taken her guest upstairs, to share the scuffle that preceded the boys' naps, and hold Josephine while Susan put the big bedroom in order, and laid out the little white suits for the afternoon.

Now the two women were sitting together, Susan in a rocker, with her sleepy little daughter in the curve of her arm, Anna in a deep low chair, with her head thrown back, and her eyes on the baby.

"Radiate happiness?" Susan echoed briskly, "My dear, you make me ashamed. Why, there are whole days when I get really snappy and peevish,--truly I do! running from morning until night. As for getting up in the dead of night, to feed the baby, Billy says I look like desolation--'like something the cat dragged in,' was his latest pretty compliment. But no," Susan interrupted herself honestly, "I won't deny it. I AM happy. I am the happiest woman in the world."

"Yet you always used to begin your castles in Spain with a million dollars," Anna said, half-wistfully, half-curiously. "Everything else being equal, Sue," she pursued, "wouldn't you rather be rich?"

"Everything else never IS equal," Susan answered thoughtfully. "I used to think it was--but it's not! Now, for instance, take the case of Isabel Wallace. Isabel is rich and beautiful, she has a good husband,--to me he's rather tame, but probably she thinks of Billy as a cave-man, so that doesn't count!--she has everything money can buy, she has a gorgeous little boy, older than Mart, and now she has a girl, two or three months old. And she really is a darling, Nance, you never liked her particularly---"

"Well, she was so perfect," pleaded Anna smiling, "so gravely wise and considerate and low-voiced, and light-footed---!"

"Only she's honestly and absolutely all of that!" Susan defended her eagerly, "there's no pose! She really is unspoiled and good--my dear, if the other women in her set were one-tenth as good as Isabel!

However, to go back. She came over here to spend the day with me, just before Jo was born, and we had a wonderful day. Billy and I were taking our dinners at a boarding-house, for a few months, and Big Mary had nothing else to do but look out for the boys in the afternoon. Isabel watched me giving them their baths, and feeding them their lunches, and finally she said, 'I'd like to do that for Alan, but I never do!' 'Why don't you?' I said. Well, she explained that in the first place there was a splendid experienced woman paid twenty-five dollars a week to do it, and that she herself didn't know how to do it half as well. She said that when she went into the nursery there was a general smoothing out of her way before her, one maid handing her the talc.u.m, another running with towels, and Miss Louise, as they call her, pleasantly directing her and amusing Alan. Naturally, she can't drive them all out; she couldn't manage without them! In fact, we came to the conclusion that you have to be all or nothing to a baby. If Isabel made up her mind to put Alan to bed every night say, she'd have to cut out a separate affair every day for it, rush home from cards, or from the links, or from the matinee, or from tea--Jack wouldn't like it, and she says she doubts if it would make much impression on Alan, after all!"

"I'd do it, just the same!" said Anna, "and I wouldn't have the nurse standing around, either--and yet, I suppose that's not very reasonable," she went on, after a moment's thought, "for that's Conrad's free time. We drive nearly every day, and half the time dine somewhere out of town. And his having to operate at night so much makes him want to sleep in the morning, so that we couldn't very well have a baby in the room. I suppose I'd do as the rest do, pay a fine nurse, and grab minutes with the baby whenever I could!"

"You have to be poor to get all the fun out of children," Susan said.

"They're at their very sweetest when they get their clothes off, and run about before their nap, or when they wake up and call you, or when you tell them stories at night."

"But, Sue, a woman like Mrs. Furlong does NOT have to work so hard,"

Anna said decidedly, "you must admit that! Her life is full of ease and beauty and power--doesn't that count? Doesn't that give her a chance for self-development, and a chance to make herself a real companion to her husband?" "Well, the problems of the world aren't answered in books, Nance. It just doesn't seem INTERESTING, or worth while to me!

She could read books, of course, and attend lectures, and study languages. But--did you see the 'Protest' last week?"

"No, I didn't! It comes, and I put it aside to read--"

"Well, it was a corking number. Bill's been a.s.serting for months, you know, that the trouble isn't any more in any special cla.s.s, it's because of misunderstanding everywhere. He made the boys wild by saying that when there are as many people at the bottom of the heap reaching up, as there are people at the top reaching down, there'll be no more trouble between capital and labor! And last week he had statistics, he showed them how many thousands of rich people are trying--in their entirely unintelligent ways!--to reach down, and--my dear, it was really stirring! You know Himself can write when he tries!--and he spoke of the things the laboring cla.s.s doesn't do, of the way it educates its children, of the way it spends its money,--it was as good as anything he's ever done, and it made no end of talk!

"And," concluded Susan contentedly, "we're at the bottom of the heap, instead of struggling up in the world, we're struggling down! When I talk to my girls' club, I can honestly say that I know some of their trials. I talked to a mothers' meeting the other day, about simple dressing and simple clothes for children, and they knew I had three children and no more money than they. And they know that my husband began his business career as a puddler, just as their sons are beginning now. In short, since the laboring cla.s.s can't, seemingly, help itself, and the upper cla.s.s can't help it, the situation seems to be waiting for just such people as we are, who know both sides!"

"A pretty heroic life, Susan!" Anna said shaking her head.

"Heroic? Nothing!" Susan answered, in healthy denial. "I like it! I've eaten maple mousse and guinea-hen at the Saunders', and I've eaten liver-and-bacon and rice pudding here, and I like this best. Billy's a hero, if you like," she added, suddenly, "Did I tell you about the fracas in August?"

"Not between you and Billy?" Anna laughed.

"No-o-o! We fight," said Susan modestly, "when he thinks Mart ought to be whipped and I don't, or when little Billums wipes sticky fingers on his razor strop, but he ain't never struck me, mum, and that's more than some can say! No, but this was really quite exciting," Susan resumed, seriously. "Let me see how it began--oh, yes!--Isabel Wallace's father asked Billy to dinner at the Bohemian Club,--in August, this was. Bill was terribly pleased, old Wallace introduced him to a lot of men, and asked him if he would like to be put up---"