Madame Vera was a milliner; the most popular of her day.  Susan’s cheeks flamed as she read the little note.  But, meditating drearily, it occurred to her that it might be as well to go and see the woman.  She, Susan, had a knowledge of the social set that might be valuable in that connection.  While she dressed, she pleased herself with a vision of Mademoiselle Brown, very dignified and severely beautiful, in black silk, as Madame Vera’s right-hand woman.

The milliner was rushing about the back of her store at the moment that Susan chanced to choose for her nervously murmured remarks, and had to have them repeated several times.  Then she laughed heartily and merrily, and assured Susan in very imperfect and very audible English, that forty girls were already on her list waiting for positions in her establishment.

“I thought perhaps—­knowing all the people—­” Susan stammered very low.

“How—­why should that be so good?” Madame asked, with horrible clearness.  “Do I not know them myself?”

Susan was glad to escape without further parley.

“See, now,” said Madame Vera in a low tone, as she followed Susan to the door, “You do not come into my workshop, eh?”

“How much?” asked Susan, after a second’s thought.

“Seven dollars,” said the other with a quick persuasive nod, “and your dinner.  That is something, eh?  And more after a while.”

But Susan shook her head.  And, as she went out into the steadily falling rain again, bitter tears blinded her eyes.

She cried a great deal in these days, became nervous and sensitive and morbid.  She moped about the house, restless and excited, unwilling to do anything that would take her away from the house when the postman arrived, reading the steamship news in every morning’s paper.

Yet, curiously enough, she never accepted this experience as similar to what poor Mary Lou had undergone so many years ago,—­this was not a “disappointment in love,”—­this was only a passing episode.  Presently she would get herself in hand again and astonish them with some achievement brilliant enough to sweep these dark days from everyone’s memory.

She awaited her hour, impatiently at first, later with a sort of resentful calm.  Susan’s return home, however it affected them financially, was a real delight to her aunt and Mary Lou.  The cousins roomed together, were together all day long.

Susan presently flooded the house with the circulars of a New York dramatic school, wrote mysterious letters pertaining to them.  After a while these disappeared, and she spent a satisfied evening or two in filling blanks of application for admission into a hospital training-school.  In February she worked hard over a short story that was to win a hundred dollar prize.  Mary Lou had great confidence in it.

The two loitered over their toast and coffee, after the boarders’ breakfast, made more toast to finish the coffee, and more coffee to finish the toast.  The short winter mornings were swiftly gone; in the afternoon Susan and Mary Lou dressed with great care and went to market.  They would stop at the library for a book, buy a little bag of candy to eat over their solitaire in the evening, perhaps pay a call on some friend, whose mild history of financial difficulties and helpless endurance matched their own.