There was rather a musical atmosphere in Front Office; the girls without exception kept in touch with the popular music of the day, and liked to claim a certain knowledge of the old classics as well.  Certain girls always hummed certain airs, and no other girl ever usurped them.  Thus Thorny vocalized the “Spring Song,” when she felt particularly cheerful, and to Miss Violet Kirk were ceded all rights to Carmen’s own solos in “Carmen.”  Susan’s privilege included “The Rosary” and the little Hawaiian fare-well, “Aloha aoi.”  After the latter Thorny never failed to say dreamily, “I love that song!” and Susan to mutter surprisedly, “I didn’t know I was humming it!”

All the girls hummed the Toreador’s song, and the immediate favorites of the hour, “Just Because She Made Those Goo-Goo Eyes,” and “I Don’t Know Why I Love You but I Do,” and “Hilee-Hilo” and “The Mosquito Parade.”  Hot discussions as to the merits of various compositions arose, and the technique of various singers.

“Yes, Collamarini’s dramatic, and she has a good natural voice,” Miss Thornton would admit, “but she can’t get at it.”

Or, “That’s all very well,” Miss Cottle would assert boldly, “but Salassa sings better than either Plancon or de Reszke.  I’m not saying this myself, but a party that knows told me so.”

“Probably the person who told you so had never heard them,” Miss Thornton would say, bringing the angry color to Miss Cottle’s face, and the angry answer: 

“Well, if I could tell you who it is, you’d feel pretty small!”

Susan had small respect for the other girls’ opinions, and almost as little for her own.  She knew how ignorant she was.  But she took to herself what credit accrued to general quoting, quoting from newspapers, from her aunt’s boarders, from chance conversations overheard on the cars.

“Oh, Puccini will never do anything to touch Bizet!” Susan asserted firmly.  Or, “Well, we’d be fighting Spain still if it wasn’t for McKinley!” Or, “My grandmother had three hundred slaves, and slavery worked perfectly well, then!” If challenged, she got very angry.  “You simply are proving that you don’t know anything about it!” was Susan’s last, and adequate, answer to questioners.

But as a rule she was not challenged.  Some quality in Susan set her apart from the other girls, and they saw it as she did.  It was not that she was richer, or prettier, or better born, or better educated, than any or all of them.  But there was some sparkling, bubbling quality about her that was all her own.  She read, and assimilated rather than remembered what she read, adopted this little affectation in speech, this little nicety of manner.  She glowed with varied and absurd ambitions, and took the office into her confidence about them.  Wavering and incomplete as her aunt’s influence had been, one fact had early been impressed upon her; she was primarily and absolutely a “lady.”  Susan’s forebears had really been rather ordinary folk, improvident and carefree, enjoying prosperity when they had it with the uneducated, unpractical serenity of the Old South, shiftless and lazy and unhappy in less prosperous times.