"I can't bear it!" mourned her aunt, "why can't you stay here happily with us, lovey? My own girls are happy. I don't know what has gotten into you girls lately, wanting to rush out like great, coarse men! Why can't you stay at home, doing all the little dainty, pretty things that only a woman can do, to make a home lovely?"
"Don't you suppose I'd much RATHER not work?" Susan demanded impatiently. "I can't have you supporting me, Auntie. That's it."
"Well, if that's it, that's nonsense, dear. As long as Auntie lives all she asks is to keep a comfortable home for her girls."
"Why, Sue, you'll be implying that we all ought to have taken horrid office positions," Virginia said, in smiling warning.
Susan remained mutinously silent.
"Have you any fault to find with Auntie's provision for you, dear?" asked Mrs. Lancaster, patiently.
"Oh, NO, auntie! That's not it AT ALL!" Susan protested, "it's just simply that I--I can't--I need money, sometimes--" She stopped, miserably.
"Come, now!" Mrs. Lancaster, all sweet tolerance of the vagary, folded her hands to await enlightenment. "Come, now! Tell auntie what you need money for. What is this special great need?"
"No one special thing, auntie--" Susan was anything but sure of her ground. As a matter of fact she did not want to work at all, she merely felt a frantic impulse to do something else than settle down for life as Mary Lou and Virginia and Georgie had done. "But clothes cost money," she pursued vaguely.
"What sort of a gown did you want, dear?" Mrs. Lancaster reached for her shabby purse. Susan refused the gift of a gown with many kisses, and no more was said for a while of her working.
This was in her seventeenth summer. For more than a year after that she drifted idly, reading a great many romantic novels, and wishing herself a young actress, a lone orphan, the adored daughter of an invalid father or of a rich and adoring mother, the capable, worshiped oldest sister in a jolly big family, a lovely cripple in a bright hospital ward, anything, in short, except what she was.
Then came the offer of a position in Front Office, and Susan took it on her own responsibility, and resigned herself to her aunt's anger. This was a most unhappy time for all concerned.
But it was all over now. Auntie rebeled no more, she accepted the fact as she had accepted other unwelcome facts in her life. And soon Susan's little salary came to be depended upon by the family; it was not much, but it did pay a gas or a laundry bill, it could be "borrowed" for the slippers Georgie must have in a hurry, or the ticket that should carry Alfie to Sacramento or Stockton for his new job. Virginia wondered if Sue would lend her two dollars for the subscription to the "Weekly Era," or asked, during the walk to church, if Susan had "plate-money" for two? Mary Lou used Susan's purse as her own. "I owe you a dollar, Sue," she would observe carelessly, "I took it yesterday for the cleaner."