"New York! Well, very likely. But you try here. Go to the manager of the Alcazar, recite for him---"
"He wouldn't let me," Susan asserted, "and besides, I don't really know anything."
"Well, learn something. Ask him, when next some manager wants to make up a little road company---"
"A road company! Two nights in Stockton, two nights in Marysville-- horrors!" said Susan.
"But that wouldn't be for long, Sue. Perhaps two years. Then five or six years in stock somewhere---"
"Aunt Jo, I'd be past thirty!" Susan laughed and colored charmingly. "I--honestly, I couldn't give up my whole life for ten years on the chance of making a hit," she confessed.
"Well, but what then, Sue?"
"Now, I'll tell you what I've often wanted to do," Susan said, after a thoughtful interval.
"Ah, now we're coming to it!" Mrs. Carroll said, with satisfaction. They had left the kitchen now, and were sitting on the top step of the side porch, reveling in the lovely panorama of hillside and waterfront, and the smooth and shining stretch of bay below them.
"I've often thought I'd like to be the matron of some very smart school for girls," said Susan, "and live either in or near some big Eastern city, and take the girls to concerts and lectures and walking in the parks, and have a lovely room full of books and pictures, where they would come and tell me things, and go to Europe now and then for a vacation!"
"That would be a lovely life, Sue. Why not work for that?"
"Why, I don't know how. I don't know of any such school."
"Well, now let us suppose the head of such a school wants a matron," Mrs. Carroll said, "she naturally looks for a lady and a linguist, and a person of experience---"
"There you are! I've had no experience!" Susan said, instantly depressed. "I could rub up on French and German, and read up the treatment for toothache and burns--but experience!"
"But see how things work together, Sue!" Mrs. Carroll exclaimed, with a suddenly bright face.
"Here's Miss Berrat, who has the little school over here, simply CRAZY to find someone to help her out. She has eight--or nine, I forget--day scholars, and four or five boarders. And such a dear little cottage! Miss Pitcher is leaving her, to go to Miss North's school in Berkeley, and she wants someone at once!"