“Georgie is absolutely satisfied,” Susan said wistfully.  “Do you think we will ever reach our ideals, Aunt Jo, as she has hers?”

It was a summer Saturday, only a month or two after the birth of William Junior.  Susan had not been to Sausalito for a long time, and Mrs. Carroll was ending a day’s shopping with a call on mother and babies.  Martin, drowsy and contented, was in her arms.  Susan, luxuriating in an hour’s idleness and gossip, sat near the open window, with the tiny Billy.  Outside, a gusty August wind was sweeping chaff and papers before it; passers-by dodged it as if it were sleet.

“I think there’s no question about it, Sue,” Mrs. Carroll’s motherly voice said, cheerfully.  “This is a hard time; you and Billy are both doing too much,—­but this won’t last!  You’ll come out of it some day, dear, a splendid big experienced woman, ready for any big work.  And then you’ll look back, and think that the days when the boys needed you every hour were short enough.  Character is the one thing that you have to buy this way, Sue,—­by effort and hardship and self-denial!”

“But after all,” Susan said somberly, so eager to ease her full heart that she must keep her voice low to keep it steady, “after all, Aunt Jo, aren’t there lots of women who do this sort of thing year in and year out and don’t achieve anything?  As a means to an end,” said Susan, groping for words, “as a road—­this is comprehensible, but—­but one hates to think of it as a goal!”

“Hundreds of women reach their highest ambitions, Sue,” the other woman answered thoughtfully, “without necessarily reaching yours.  It depends upon which star you’ve selected for your wagon, Sue!  You have just been telling me that the Lords, for instance, are happier than crowned kings, in their little garden, with a state position assured for Lydia.  Then there’s Georgie; Georgie is one of the happiest women I ever saw!  And when you remember that the first thirty years of her life were practically wasted, it makes you feel very hopeful of anyone’s life!”

“Yes, but I couldn’t be happy as Mary and Lydia are, and Georgie’s life would drive me to strong drink!” Susan said, with a flash of her old fire.

“Exactly.  So your fulfilment will come in some other way,—­some way that they would probably think extremely terrifying or unconventional or strange.  Meanwhile you are learning something every day, about women who have tiny babies to care for, about housekeeping as half the women of the world have to regard it.  All that is extremely useful, if you ever want to do anything that touches women.  About office work you know, about life downtown.  Some day just the use for all this will come to you, and then I’ll feel that I was quite right when I expected great things of my Sue!”

“Of me?” stammered Susan.  A lovely color crept into her thin cheeks and a tear splashed down upon the cheek of the sleeping baby.