She was only making talk, with the kindliest motives, for a nervous passenger, but the blood rushed into Susan’s face.  Somehow it cut her to the heart to have to remember her father just at this instant; to make him, however distantly, a party to this troubled affair.

“And you’ve lost your dear mother,” Mrs. O’Connor said, misunderstanding the girl’s evident distress.  “Well, my dear, the trip will do you a world of good, and you’re blessed in this—­you’ve a good father left, and an uncle that would lay down and die for you.  I leave my own two girls, every time I go,” she pursued, comfortably.  “Angela’s married,—­she has a baby, poor child, and she’s not very strong,—­and Regina is still in boarding-school, in San Rafael.  It’s hard to leave them—–­”

Simple, kindly talk, such as Susan had heard from her babyhood.  And the homely honest face was not strange, nor the blue, faded eyes, with their heartening assurance of good-fellowship.

But suddenly it seemed to Susan that, with a hideous roaring and rocking, the world was crashing to pieces about her.  Her soul sickened and shrank within her.  She knew nothing of this good woman, who was straightening blankets and talking—­talking—­talking, three feet from her, but she felt she could not bear—­she could not bear this kindly trust and sympathy—­she could not bear the fear that some day she would be known to this woman for what she was!

A gulf yawned before her.  She had not foreseen this.  She had known that there were women in the world, plenty of them, Stephen said, who would understand what she was doing and like her in spite of it, even admire her.

But what these blue eyes would look when they knew it, she very well knew.  Whatever glories and heights awaited Susan Brown in the days to come, she could never talk as an equal with Ann O’Connor or her like again, never exchange homely, happy details of babies and boarding-school and mothers and fathers again!

Plenty of women in the world who would understand and excuse her,—­ but Susan had a mad desire to get among these sheltering women somehow, never to come in contact with these stupid, narrow-visioned others—–!

“Leo—­that’s my son-in-law, is an angel to her,” Mrs. O’Connor was saying, “and it’s not everyone would be, as you know, for poor Angela was sick all the time before Raymond came, and she’s hardly able to stir, even yet.  But Leo gets his own breakfasts——­”

Susan was at the washstand busy with brush and comb.  She paused.

Life stretched before her vision a darkened and wearisome place.  She had a sudden picture of Mrs. O’Connor’s daughter,—­of Georgie—­of all helpless women upon whom physical weakness lays its heavy load.  Pale, dispirited women, hanging over the little cradles, starting up at little cries in the night, comforted by the boyish, sympathetic husbands, and murmuring tired thanks and appreciations—–­