"The poor you have always with you," said Mary Lou, reverently. Susan laughed outright, and went around the table to kiss her cousin.
"You're an old darling, Mary Lou!" said she. Mary Lou accepted the tribute as just.
"No, but I don't think we ought to forget the IMMENSE good that rich people do, Billy," she said mildly. "Mrs. Holly's daughters gave a Christmas-tree party for eighty children yesterday, and the Saturday Morning Club will have a tree for two hundred on the twenty-eighth!"
"Holly made his money by running about a hundred little druggists out of the business," said Billy, darkly.
"Bought and paid for their businesses, you mean," Susan amended sharply.
"Yes, paid about two years' profits," Billy agreed, "and would have run them out of business if they hadn't sold. If you call that honest!"
"It's legally honest," Susan said lazily, shuffling a pack for solitaire. "It's no worse than a thousand other things that people do!"
"No, I agree with you there!" Billy said heartily, and he smiled as if he had had the best of the argument.
Susan followed her game for awhile in silence. Her thoughts were glad to escape to more absorbing topics, she reviewed the happy afternoon, and thrilled to a hundred little memories. The quiet, stupid evening carried her back, in spirit, to the Susan of a few years ago, the shabby little ill-dressed clerk of Hunter, Baxter & Hunter, who had been such a limited and suppressed little person. The Susan of to-day was an erect, well-corseted, well-manicured woman of the world; a person of noticeable nicety of speech, accustomed to move in the very highest society. No, she could never come back to this, to the old shiftless, penniless ways. Any alternative rather!
"And, besides, I haven't really done anything yet," Susan said to herself, uneasily, when she was brushing her hair that night, and Mary Lou was congratulating her upon her improved appearance and manner.
On Saturday she introduced her delighted aunt and cousin to Mr. Bocqueraz, who came to take her for a little stroll.
"I've always thought you were quite an unusual girl, Sue," said her aunt later in the afternoon, "and I do think it's a real compliment for a man like that to talk to a girl like you! I shouldn't know what to say to him, myself, and I was real proud of the way you spoke up; so easy and yet so ladylike!"