in this humiliation, was that no one but herself could be quite sure of it.  Boys had liked her, confided in her, made her small Christmas presents,—­just how other girls led them from these stages to the moment of a positive declaration, she often wondered.  She knew that she was attractive to most people; babies and old men and women, servants and her associates in the office, strangers on ferryboats and sick people in hospitals alike responded to her friendliness and gaiety.  But none of these was marriageable, of course, and the moment Susan met a person who was, a subtle change crept over her whole personality, veiled the bright charm, made the friendliness stiff, the gaiety forced.  Susan, like all other girls, was not herself with the young unmarried men of her acquaintance; she was too eager to be exactly what they supposedly wanted her to be.  She felt vaguely the utter unnaturalness of this, without ever being able to analyze it.  Her attitude, the attitude of all her sex, was too entirely false to make an honest analysis possible.  Susan, and her cousins, and the girls in the office, rather than reveal their secret longings to be married, would have gone cheerfully to the stake.  Nevertheless, all their talk was of men and marriage, and each girl innocently appraised every man she met, and was mentally accepting or refusing an offer of marriage from him before she had known him five minutes.

Susan viewed the single state of her three pretty cousins with secret uneasiness.  Georgie always said that she had refused “dozens of fellows,” meeting her mother’s occasional mild challenge of some specific statement with an unanswerable “of course you didn’t know, for I never told you, Ma.”  And Virginia liked to bemoan the fact that so many nice men seemed inclined to fall in love with herself, a girl who gave absolutely no thought to such things at all.  Mrs. Lancaster supported Virginia’s suspicions by memories of young men who had suddenly and mysteriously appeared, to ask her to accept them as boarders, and young attorneys who had their places in church changed to the pews that surrounded the Lancaster pew.  But Susan dismissed these romantic vapors, and in her heart held Mary Lou in genuine admiration, because Mary Lou had undoubtedly and indisputably had a real lover, years ago.

Mary Lou loved to talk of Ferd Eastman still; his youth, his manly charms, his crossing an empty ball-room floor, on the memorable evening of their meeting, especially to be introduced to her, and to tell her that brown hair was his favorite color for hair.  After that the memories, if still fondly cherished, were less bright.  Mary Lou had been “perfectly wretched,” she had “cried for nights and nights” at the idea of leaving Ma; Ma had fainted frequently.  “Ma made it really hard for me,” said Mary Lou.  Ma was also held to blame for not reconciling the young people after the first quarrel.  Ma might have sent for Ferd.  Mary Lou, of course, could do nothing but weep.