But little things about him worried her inordinately, sometimes she resented, for a whole silent evening, his absorption in other people, sometimes grew pettish and unresponsive and offended because he could keep neither eyes nor hands from her.  And there were evenings when they seemed to have nothing to talk about, and Billy, too tired to do anything but drowse in his big chair, was confronted with an alert and horrified Susan, sick with apprehension of all the long evenings, throughout all the years.  Susan was fretted by the financial barrier to the immediate marriage, too, it was humiliating, at twenty-six, to be affected by a mere matter of dollars and cents.

They quarreled, and came home silently from a dinner in town, Susan’s real motive in yielding to a reconciliation being her disinclination to confess to Mrs. Carroll,—­and those motherly eyes read her like a book,—­that she was punishing Billy for asking her not to “show off” before the waiter!

But early in the new year, they were drawn together by rapidly maturing plans.  The “Oliver Letter,” called the “Saturday Protest” now, was fairly launched.  Billy was less absorbed in the actual work, and began to feel sure of a moderate success.  He had rented for his office half of the lower floor of an old house in the Mission.  Like all the old homes that still stand to mark the era when Valencia Street was as desired an address as California Street is to-day, it stood upon bulkheaded ground, with a fat-pillared wooden fence bounding the wide lawns.

The fence was full of gaps, and the house, with double bay-windows, and with a porch over its front door, was shabby and bare.  Its big front door usually stood open; opposite Billy, across a wide hall, was a modest little millinery establishment, upstairs a nurses’ home, and a woman photographer occupied the top floor.  The “Protest,” a slim little sheet, innocent of contributed matter or advertising, and written, proofed and set up by Billy’s own hands, was housed in what had been the big front drawing-room.  Billy kept house in the two back rooms that completed the little suite.

Susan first saw the house on a Saturday in January, a day that they both remembered afterwards as being the first on which their marriage began to seem a definite thing.  It was in answer to Billy’s rather vague suggestion that they must begin to look at flats in the neighborhood that Susan said, half in earnest: 

“We couldn’t begin here, I suppose?  Have the office downstairs in the big front room, and clean up that old downstairs kitchen, and fix up these three rooms!”

Billy dismissed the idea.  But it rose again, when they walked downtown, in the afternoon sunlight, and kept them in animated talk over a happy dinner.

“The rent for the whole thing is only twenty dollars!” said Susan, “and we can fix it all up, pretty old-fashioned papers, and white paint!  You won’t know it!”