Poor Mary Lou’s weeping soon had good cause.  Ferd rushed away, rushed into another marriage, with an heiress and a beauty, as it happened, and Mary Lou had only the dubious consolation of a severe illness.

After that, she became cheerful, mild, unnecessary Mary Lou, doing a little bit of everything about the house, appreciated by nobody.  Ferd and his wife were the great people of their own little town, near Virginia City, and after a while Mary Lou had several pictures of their little boy to treasure,—­Robbie with stiff curls falling over a lace collar, and plaid kilts, in a swing, and Robbie in velvet knickerbockers, on a velocipede.

The boarding-house had a younger affair than Mary Lou’s just now in the attachment felt for lovely Loretta Parker by a young Mission doctor, Joseph O’Connor.  Susan did not admire the gentleman very much, with his well-trimmed little beard, and his throaty little voice, but she could not but respect the dreamy and indifferent Loretta for his unquestionable ardor.  Loretta wanted to enter a convent, to her mother’s bitter anguish, and Susan once convulsed Georgie by the remark that she thought Joe O’Connor would make a cute nun, himself.

“But think of sacrificing that lovely beard!” said Georgie.

“Oh, you and I could treasure it, Georgie!  Love’s token, don’t you know?”

Loretta’s affair was of course extremely interesting to everyone at Mrs. Lancaster’s, as were the various “cases” that Georgie continually talked of, and the changing stream of young men that came to see her night after night.  But also interesting were all the other lives that were shut up here together, the varied forms which sickness and money-trouble can take for the class that has not learned to be poor.  Little pretenses, timid enjoyments and mild extravagances were all overshadowed by a poverty real enough to show them ever more shadowy than they were.  Susan grew up in an atmosphere where a lost pair of overshoes, or a dentist’s bill, or a counterfeit half-dollar, was a real tragedy.  She was well used to seeing reddened eyes, and hearing resigned sighs at the breakfast table, without ever knowing what little unforeseen calamity had caused them.  Every door in the dark hallways shut in its own little story of suffering and privation.  Susan always thought of second-floor alcoved bedrooms as filled with the pungent fumes of Miss Beattie’s asthma powder, and of back rooms as redolent of hot kerosene and scorched woolen, from the pressing of old Mr. Keane’s suits, by Mrs. Keane.  She could have identified with her eyes shut any room in the house.  A curious chilliness lurked in the halls, from August to May, and an odor compounded of stale cigarette smoke, and carbolic acid, and coal-gas, and dust.

Those women in the house who did not go to business every day generally came down to the breakfast table very much as they rose from bed.  Limp faded wrappers and “Juliet” slippers were the only additions made to sleeping wear.  The one or two men of the house, with Susan and Jane Beattie and Lydia Lord, had breakfasted and gone long before these ladies drifted downstairs.  Sometimes Mrs. Parker and Loretta made an early trip to Church, but even then they wore only long cloaks over very informal attire, and joined the others, in wrappers, upon their return.