Lydia Lord came down to get Mary’s dinner, and again Susan helped the watery vegetable into a pyramid of saucers, and passed the green glass dish of pickles, and the pink china sugar-bowl.  But she was happy to-night, and it seemed good to be home, where she could be her natural self, and put her elbows on the table, and be listened to and laughed at, instead of playing a role.

“Gosh, we need you in this family, Susie!” said William Oliver, won from fatigue and depression to a sudden appreciation of her gaiety.

“Do you, Willie darling?”

“Don’t you call me Willie!” he looked up to say scowlingly.

“Well, don’t you call me Susie, then!” retorted Susan.  Mrs. Lancaster patted her hand, and said affectionately, “Don’t it seem good to have the children scolding away at each other again!”

Susan and William had one of their long talks, after dinner, while they cracked and ate pine-nuts, and while Mary Lou, at the other end of the dining-room table, painstakingly wrote a letter to a friend of her girlhood.  Billy was frankly afraid that his men were reaching the point when a strike would be the natural step, and as president of their new-formed union, and spokesman for them whenever the powers had to be approached, he was anxious to delay extreme measures as long as he could.  Susan was inclined to regard the troubles of the workingman as very largely of his own making.  “You’ll simply lose your job,” said Susan, “and that’ll be the end of it.  If you made friends with the Carpenters, on the other hand, you’d be fixed for life.  And the Carpenters are perfectly lovely people.  Mrs. Carpenter is on the hospital board, and a great friend of Ella’s.  And she says that it’s ridiculous to think of paying those men better wages when their homes are so dirty and shiftless, and they spend their money as they do!  You know very well there will always be rich people and poor people, and that if all the money in the world was divided on Monday morning—–­”

“Don’t get that old chestnut off!” William entreated.

“Well, I don’t care!” Susan said, a little more warmly for the interruption.  “Why don’t they keep their houses clean, and bring their kids up decently, instead of giving them dancing lessons and white stockings!”

“Because they’ve had no decent training themselves, Sue—–­”

“Oh, decent training!  What about the schools?”

“Schools don’t teach anything!  But if they had fair play, and decent hours, and time to go home and play with the kids, and do a little gardening, they’d learn fast enough!”

“The poor you have always with you,” said Mary Lou, reverently.  Susan laughed outright, and went around the table to kiss her cousin.

“You’re an old darling, Mary Lou!” said she.  Mary Lou accepted the tribute as just.

“No, but I don’t think we ought to forget the immense good that rich people do, Billy,” she said mildly.  “Mrs. Holly’s daughters gave a Christmas-tree party for eighty children yesterday, and the Saturday Morning Club will have a tree for two hundred on the twenty-eighth!”