"O, I understand. It is--can you understand the word, Suzanna--'exhilarating' sometimes."

"I feel what the word means, mother--like catching in your breath when you touch cold water."

"Exactly. Now please get the slippers."

Suzanna ran upstairs. Returning, slippers in hand, she found the other children had left.

"Has Maizie got the baby?" Suzanna asked anxiously.

Her mother smiled. "Yes, I carried him out to the yard. He's kicking about, happy on his blanket."

Suzanna, relieved, handed the slippers to her mother.

"And I brought my old black hair ribbon. That will do for the shirring, won't it, mother?"

"Nicely."

Together they evolved, worked, tried on, completed.

"It's more fun doing this than going to Bryson's and buying a new pair, isn't it, mother?"

"Well, I believe it is, daughter."

"I feel so warm here--" Suzanna touched her heart--"because we're doing something harder than just going out to the store and buying what we'd like."

Mrs. Procter gazed at her handiwork reflectively. "Well, it does make you feel that you've accomplished a great deal when you've created something out of nothing."

Mrs. Procter rose then, touched the new dress lovingly, and said: "So, we can put it away now, Suzanna; it's quite finished. The petticoat needs just a b.u.t.ton and b.u.t.tonhole."

Suzanna stood quite still. At last she looked up into her mother's face and put her question: "When will you begin to cut the goods out from under the lace, mother?"

Mrs. Procter, her thoughts now supperward, spoke abstractedly: "Oh, we'll not do that."

There was a silence, while the room suddenly whirled for Suzanna.

Recovering from the dizziness, with eyes large and black and her face very pale, Suzanna gazed unbelievingly at her mother. For a moment she was quite unable to speak. Then in a tiny voice which she endeavored to keep steady, she asked: "Not even from under the wide row round the bottom, mother?"

"No, Suzanna," Mrs. Procter answered, quite unconscious of the storm in the child's breast. She moved towards the door.

"But, mother, listen, please." Suzanna's hands were locked till they showed white at the knuckles. "If you don't cut the goods away the green petticoat won't gleam through the lace! You see, it's a rose dress and a rose has shining green leaves, just showing."

The plea was ardent, but Mrs. Procter was firm. Indeed she did not glance at Suzanna. The reaction from her days of hard and continuous work was setting in. She merely said: "Suzanna, we must make that dress last a long time. I made it so that it can be lengthened five inches. We can't weaken it by cutting the goods away from under the lace. Now, dear, go and see that the children aren't in mischief. I must start supper."

CHAPTER V

SUZANNA COMES TO A DECISION

The children were playing contentedly in the road, Suzanna a.s.sured herself. And finding them so, she wandered disconsolately back to the front porch, where seated in a little rocking chair she stared straight before her. She felt as one thrown suddenly from a great height. One moment she had been thrillingly happy, the next, the bitter fruit of disappointment touched her lips. So events occur lightningly quick in this world. The day itself was as beautiful as it had been an hour before, yet its sun had ceased to shine for little Suzanna, since the crowning touch of The Dress, the poetic completeness of it, was denied her.

Years ago it seemed she had wakened in the morning after dreaming of a rose gown with its glimpses of cool green flickering through rows of open lace; but no more could she dream, since that lace was now condemned to blindness, unable even to hint at concealed beauties, and this because Economy, the stern G.o.d of the Procter home, so ordained.

Two tears at last found their slow way down her cheek. Not the least of her woe was caused by the realization that now the dress was ingloriously what Maizie had termed it, a pale pink lawn at ten cents a yard, bearing no appeal to her imagination, fulfilling no place in Suzanna's great Scheme of Things.

Suzanna's distress, as the days pa.s.sed, did not abate. She never spoke of the dress, nor did she go to look at it as it hung shrouded in cheese cloth in the hall closet upstairs. No longer did she look forward with delight to the day when feelingly she should recite the troubles and the heroism of "The Little Martyr of Smyrna."

Instead she went quietly about performing her customary duties, finding for the time no real zest in life.

Mrs. Procter, innocent of the cause of Suzanna's listlessness, spoke no word. She wondered why the child had lost interest in the festival, indeed in all things pertaining to the occasion. It was difficult, she finally decided, to know how to cope with a child so complex, so changeable. She determined to treat the new mood with indifference, as being the most potent method. So she asked of Suzanna the performance of daily duties just as usual. When she discovered Suzanna gazing at her, Maizie close beside her with the same degree of reflection in her gray eyes, Mrs. Procter grew uncomfortable, then a trifle irritable. Both children seemed to regard her as an alien, one, for the time, quite outside their pale.

Suzanna, then, had taken Maizie into her confidence.

"One needs be clairvoyant," Mrs. Procter told her husband one evening, "to know what pa.s.ses through small minds."

"Clairvoyant and full of patience," he answered, looking up from his color book. "I can remember even now my own sensations when at times my mother failed to go with me into my land of dreams."

Mrs. Procter cast her memory back over the events of several days.

"I can't think what has so changed Suzanna," she said at last; "I've disappointed her, I fear, about something or other. Dear me, what insight versatile children do demand in a mother. And Suzanna takes everything so very seriously. And Maizie stares at me too, with a little bewildered expression. It's strange that Maizie, with all her literalness, can understand at times Suzanna's disappointments when her fancies are not given due value. For, of course, it is some fancy of Suzanna's that I've either not noticed, or perhaps laughed at." She paused to smile at her husband.

"Such children come of giving them an inventor father, an 'impractical genius,' as I've heard myself in satire called."

She flushed up angrily at this.

"You've done wonderfully well," she said, and believed the a.s.sertion; just as though at forty to weigh nails correctly and to sell so many yards of garden hose a week was a fine measure of success. "And your name will go ringing down the ages." She would never let him lose confidence in his own powers. Circ.u.mstances alone had thrown him into a mediocre position in a small town, but they should never hold him down.

He grew beneath her look; beneath her belief in him. And so the conversation ended on the personal note; ended with hands clasped and fond eyes seeing each the other's charm after many years.

Suzanna, arranging the pantry the next morning, sought her mother upstairs with a domestic announcement.

"The vinegar bottle is empty," she said.

"And the gherkins all ready," cried Mrs. Procter. "Will you run over to Mrs. Reynolds and ask her for some vinegar, Suzanna?"

Listlessly, Suzanna returned downstairs, and from the pantry procured a cup. Slowly she left the house, walked down the front path and across the road to Mrs. Reynolds' home. Arrived there, she went round to the back door and knocked with slack knuckles.

Mrs. Reynolds, a white cloth tied about her forehead, opened the door.

She gave out redolently the pungent odor of the commodity Suzanna sought to borrow.

Mrs. Reynolds was stout and comfortable looking ordinarily. A quaint and interesting personality, sprung from Welsh parentage, she fitted into the life of Anchorville only because of a certain natural adaptability.

She seemed to belong to a wilder, more pa.s.sionate people than those plain lives which surrounded her.

Suzanna knew her tenderness, her tragic depressions. She loved her deep voice, her resonant tones, all her quick changes of mood, and her occasional strange ways of expression, revealing her understanding of men and women's vagaries.

Mrs. Reynolds adored Suzanna. She had said often there was one thing she coveted from her neighbor, and that was her neighbor's child.