As the season ripened, she and Emily went to four or five luncheons every week, feminine affairs, with cards or matinee to follow.  Dinner invitations were more rare; there were men at the dinners, and the risk of boring a partner with Emily’s uninteresting little personality was too great to be often taken.  Her poor health served both herself and her friends as an excuse.  Ella went everywhere, even to the debutante’s affairs; but Emily was too entirely self-centered to be popular.

She and Susan were a great deal alone.  They chattered and laughed together through shopping trips, luncheons at the clubs, matinees, and trips home on the boat.  They bought prizes for Ella’s card-parties, or engagement cups and wedding-presents for those fortunate girls who claimed the center of the social stage now and then with the announcement of their personal plans.  They bought an endless variety of pretty things for Emily, who prided herself on the fact that she could not bear to have near her anything old or worn or ugly.  A thousand little reminders came to Emily wherever she went of things without which she could not exist.

“What a darling chain that woman’s wearing; let’s go straight up to Shreve’s and look at chains,” said Emily, on the boat; or “White-bait!  Here it is on this menu.  I hadn’t thought of it for months!  Do remind Mrs. Pullet to get some!” or “Can’t you remember what it was Isabel said that she was going to get?  Don’t you remember I said I needed it, too?”

If Susan had purchases of her own to make, Emily could barely wait with patience until they were completed, before adding: 

“I think I’ll have a pair of slippers, too.  Something a little nicer than that, please”; or “That’s going to make up into a dear wrapper for you, Sue,” she would enthusiastically declare, “I ought to have another wrapper, oughtn’t I?  Let’s go up to Chinatown, and see some of the big wadded ones at Sing Fat’s.  I really need one!”

Just before Christmas, Emily went to the southern part of the state with a visiting cousin from the East, and Susan gladly seized the opportunity for a little visit at home.  She found herself strangely stirred when she went in, from the bright winter sunshine, to the dingy, odorous old house, encountering the atmosphere familiar to her from babyhood, and the unaltered warm embraces of Mary Lou and her aunt.  Before she had hung up her hat and coat, she was swept again into the old ways, listening, while she changed her dress, to Mary Lou’s patient complaints and wistful questions, slipping out to the bakery just before dinner to bring home a great paper-bag of hot rolls, and ending the evening, after a little shopping expedition to Fillmore Street, with solitaire at the dining-room table.  The shabbiness and disorder and a sort of material sordidness were more marked than ever, but Susan was keenly conscious of some subtle, touching charm, unnoticed heretofore, that seemed to flavor the old environment to-night.  They were very pure and loving and loyal, her aunt and cousins, very practically considerate and tender toward each other, despite the flimsy fabric of their absurd dreams; very good, in the old-fashioned sense of the term, if not very successful or very clever.