“Anything I can do, Mary Lou?”

“Just get out of the way, lovey—­that’s about all—­I salted that once, Ma.  If you don’t want that table, Sue—­and shut the door, dear!  The smoke—­”

Susan was glad to get out of the kitchen, and in a moment Mrs. Lancaster and Mary Lou came into the dining-room, too, and Alice rang the dinner bell.  Instantly the boarders streamed downstairs, found their places with a general murmuring of mild little pleasantries.  Mrs. Lancaster helped the soup rapidly from a large tureen, her worried eyes moved over the table-furnishings without pause.

The soup was well cooled before the place next to Susan was filled by a tall and muscular young man, with very blue eyes, and a large and exceptionally charming mouth.  The youth had teeth of a dazzling whiteness, a smile that was a bewildering Irish compound of laughter and tears, and sooty blue-black hair that fitted his head like a thick cap.  He was a noisy lad, this William Oliver, opinionated, excitable, a type that in its bigness and broadness seemed almost coarse, sometimes, but he had all a big man’s tenderness and sweetness, and everyone liked him.  Susan and he quarreled with and criticized each other, William imitating her little affectations of speech and manner, Susan reviling his transparent and absurd ambitions, but they had been good friends for years.  Young Oliver’s mother had been Mrs. Lancaster’s housekeeper for the most prosperous period in the history of the house, and if Susan naturally felt that the son of a working housekeeper was seriously handicapped in a social sense, she nevertheless had many affectionate memories of his mother, as the kindly dignified “Nellie” who used to amuse them so delightfully on rainy days.  Nellie had been long dead, now, and her son had grown up into a vigorous, enthusiastic young person, burning his big hands with experiments in physics and chemistry, reading the Scientific American late into the night, until his broad shoulders were threatened with a permanent stoop, and his eager eyes blinked wearily at breakfast, anxious to disprove certain accepted theories, and as eager to introduce others, unaffected, irreverent, and irresistibly buoyant.  William could not hear an opera praised without dragging Susan off to gallery seats, which the lady frankly characterized as “smelly,” to see if his opinion agreed with that of the critics.  If it did not, Susan must listen to long dissertations upon the degeneracy of modern music.  His current passion was the German language, which he was studying in odd moments so that he might translate certain scientific treatises in a manner more to the scientific mind.

“Hello, Susan, darling!” he said now, as he slipped into his chair.

“Hello, heart’s delight!” Susan answered composedly.

“Well, here—­here—­here!” said an aged gentleman who was known for no good reason as “Major,” “what’s all this?  You young folks going to give us a wedding?”