Susan had forgotten what a charming house it really was, bowered in gardens, flooded with sunshine, old-fashioned, elegant, comfortable and spacious.  The upper windows gave on the tree-hidden roofs of San Rafael’s nicest quarter, the hotel, the tennis-courts were but a few minutes’ walk away.

“Oh, if only you dear people could live here, what bliss we’d have!” sighed Isabel.

“Isabel—­it’s out of the question!  But what’s the rent?”

“Eighteen hundred—–­” submitted Isabel dubiously.  “What do you pay?”

“We’re buying, you know.  We pay six per cent, on a small mortgage.”

“Still, you could rent that house?” Isabel suggested, brightening.

“Well, that’s so!” Susan let her fancy play with it.  She saw Mart and Billy playing here, in this sheltered garden, peeping through the handsome iron fence at horsemen and motor-cars passing by.  She saw them growing up among such princely children as little Alan, saw herself the admired center of a group of women sensible enough to realize that young Mrs. Oliver was of no common clay.

Then she smiled and shook her head.  She went home depressed and silent, vexed at herself because the question of tipping or not tipping Isabel’s chauffeur spoiled the last half of the trip, and absent-minded over Billy’s account of the day, and the boys’ prayers.

Other undertakings, however, terminated more happily.  Susan went with Billy to various meetings, somehow found herself in charge of a girls’ dramatic club, and meeting in a bare hall with a score or two of little laundry-workers, waitresses and factory girls on every Tuesday evening.  Sometimes it was hard to leave the home lamp-light, and come out into the cold on Tuesday evenings, but Susan was always glad she had made the effort when she reached the hall and when her own particular friends among the “Swastika Hyacinth Club” girls came to meet her.

She had so recently been a working girl herself that it was easy to settle down among them, easy to ask the questions that brought their confidence, easy to discuss ways and means from their standpoint.  Susan became very popular; the girls laughed with her, copied her, confided in her.  At the monthly dances they introduced her to their “friends,” and their “friends” were always rendered red and incoherent with emotion upon learning that Mrs. Oliver was the wife of Mr. Oliver of the “Protest.”

Sometimes Susan took the children to see Virginia, who had long ago left Mary Lou’s home to accept a small position in the great institution for the blind.  Virginia, with her little class to teach, and her responsibilities when the children were in the refectory and dormitory, was a changed creature, busy, important, absorbed.  She showed the toddling Olivers the playroom and conservatory, and sent them home with their fat hands full of flowers.

“Bless their little hearts, they don’t know how fortunate they are!” said Virginia, saying good-bye to Mart and Billy.  “But I know!” And she sent a pitiful glance back toward her little charges.