But she kept on her way uptown, and by the time she reached the old library, where Mary Lou, very handsome in her well-brushed suit and dotted veil, with white gloves still odorous of benzine, was waiting, she was almost sure that she was not making a mistake.

Mary Lou was a famous shopper, capable of exhausting any saleswoman for a ten-cent purchase, and proportionately effective when, as to-day, a really considerable sum was to be spent.  She regretfully would decline a dozen varieties in handkerchiefs or ribbons, saying with pleasant plaintiveness to the saleswoman:  “Perhaps I am hard to please.  My mother is an old Southern lady—­the Ralstons, you know?—­ and her linen is, of course, like nothing one can get nowadays!  No; I wouldn’t care to show my mother this.

“My cousin, of course, only wants this for a little hack hat,” she added to Susan’s modest suggestion of price to the milliner, and in the White House she consented to Susan’s selections with a consoling reminder, “It isn’t as if you didn’t have your lovely French underwear at home, Sue!  These will do very nicely for your rough camping trip!”

Compared to Mary Lou, Susan was a very poor shopper.  She was always anxious to please the saleswoman, to buy after a certain amount of looking had been done, for no other reason than that she had caused most of the stock to be displayed.

“I like this, Mary Lou,” Susan would murmur nervously.  And, as the pompadoured saleswoman turned to take down still another heap of petticoats, Susan would repeat noiselessly, with an urgent nod, “This will do!”

“Wait, now, dear,” Mary Lou would return, unperturbed, arresting Susan’s hand with a white, well-filled glove.  “Wait, dear.  If we can’t get it here we can get it somewhere else.  Yes, let me see those you have there—–­”

“Thank you, just the same,” Susan always murmured uncomfortably, averting her eyes from the saleswoman, as they went away.  But the saleswoman, busily rearranging her stock, rarely responded.

To-day they bought, besides the fascinating white things, some tan shoes, and a rough straw hat covered with roses, and two linen skirts, and three linen blouses, and a little dress of dotted lavender lawn.  Everything was of the simplest, but Susan had never had so many new things in the course of her life before, and was elated beyond words as one purchase was made after another.

She carried home nearly ten dollars, planning to keep it until the first month’s salary should be paid, but Auntie was found, upon their return in the very act of dissuading the dark powers known as the “sewing-machine men” from removing that convenience, and Susan, only too thankful to be in time, gladly let seven dollars fall into the oily palm of the carrier in charge.

“Mary Lou,” said she, over her fascinating packages, just before dinner, “here’s a funny thing!  If I had gone bad, you know, so that I could keep buying nice, pretty, simple things like this, as fast as I needed them, I’d feel better—­I mean truly cleaner and more moral—­than when I was good!”