And, borrowing a book, she departed, leaving Susan to finish her dressing in a very sober frame of mind.  She wondered if her relationship toward Emily could possibly impress any outsider as Connie’s attitude toward Dolly Ripley impressed her.

With Isabel Wallace she began, during this visit, the intimate and delightful friendship for which they two had been ready for a long time.  Isabel was two years older than Susan, a beautiful, grave-eyed brunette, gracious in manner, sweet of voice, the finest type that her class and environment can produce.  Isabel was well read, musical, traveled; she spoke two or three languages besides her mother tongue.  She had been adored all her life by three younger brothers, by her charming and simple, half-invalid mother, and her big, clever father, and now, all the girls were beginning to suspect, was also adored by the very delightful Eastern man who was at present Mrs. Butler Holmes’ guest in Burlingame, and upon whom all of them had been wasting their prettiest smiles.  John Furlong was college-bred, young, handsome, of a rich Eastern family, in every way a suitable husband for the beautiful woman with whom he was so visibly falling in love.

Susan watched the little affair with a heartache, not all unworthy.  She didn’t quite want to be Isabel, or want a lover quite like John.  But she did long for something beautiful and desirable all her own; it was hard to be always the outsider, always alone.  When she thought of Isabel’s father and mother, their joy in her joy, her own pleasure in pleasing them, a thrill of pain shook her.  If Isabel was all grateful, all radiant, all generous, she, Susan, could have been graceful and radiant and generous too!  She lay awake in the soft summer nights, thinking of what John would say to Isabel, and what Isabel, so lovely and so happy, would reply.

“Sue, you will know how wonderful it is when it comes to you!” Isabel said, on the last night of their Burlingame visit, when she gave Susan a shy hint that it was “all right,” if a profound secret still.

The girls did not stay for the theatricals, after all.  Emily was deeply disgusted at being excluded from some of the ensembles in which she had hoped to take part and, on the very eve of the festivities, she became alarmingly ill, threw Mrs. Keith’s household into utter consternation and confusion, and was escorted home immediately by Susan and a trained nurse.

Back at “High Gardens,” they settled down contentedly enough to the familiar routine.  Emily spent two-thirds of the time in bed, but Susan, fired by Isabel Wallace’s example, took regular exercises now, airing the dogs or finding commissions to execute for Emily or Mrs. Saunders, made radical changes in her diet, and attempted, with only partial success, to confine her reading to improving books.  A relative had sent Emily the first of the new jig-saw puzzles from New York, and Emily had immediately wired for more.  She and Susan spent hours over them; they became in fact an obsession, and Susan began to see jig-saw divisions:  in everything her eye rested on; the lawn, the clouds, or the drawing-room walls.