"It's idolatry, mon Guillaume," said Mrs. Oliver, briskly, when she was discussing the case of the Hoffmanns with her lord. "Now, I'm crazy enough about you, as you well know," continued Susan, "but, at the same time, I don't turn pale, start up, and whisper, 'Oh, it's Willie!' when you happen to come home half an hour earlier than usual. I don't stammer with excitement when I meet you downtown, and I don't cry when you--well, yes, I do! I feel pretty badly when you have to be away overnight!" confessed Susan, rather tamely.
"Wait until little Con comes!" Billy predicted comfortably. "Then they'll be less strong on the balcony scene!"
"They think they want one," said Susan wisely, "but I don't believe they really do!"
On the fifth anniversary of her wedding day Susan's daughter was born, and the whole household welcomed the tiny Josephine, whose sudden arrival took all their hearts by storm.
"Take your slangy, freckled, roller-skating, rifle-shooting boys and be off with you!" said Susan, over the hour-old baby, to Billy, who had come flying home in mid-morning. "Now I feel like David Copperfield's landlady, 'at last I have summat I can love!' Oh, the mistakes that you WON'T make, Jo!" she apostrophized the baby. "The smart, capable, self-sufficient way that you'll manage everything!"
"Do you really want me to take the boys away for a few days?" asked Billy, who was kneeling down for a better view of mother and child.
Susan's eyes widened with instant alarm.
"Why should you?" she asked, cool fingers tightening on his.
"I thought you had no further use for the sex," answered Billy meekly.
"Oh---?" Susan dimpled. "Oh, she's too little to really absorb me yet," she said. "I'll continue a sort of superficial interest in the boys until she's eighteen or so!"
Sometimes echoes of the old life came to her, and Susan, pondering them for an hour or two, let them drift away from her again. Billy showed her the headlines one day that told of Peter Coleman's narrow escape from death, in his falling airship, and later she learned that he was well again and had given up aeronautics, and was going around the world to add to his matchless collection of semi-precious stones. Susan was sobered one day to hear of Emily Saunders' sudden death. She sat for a long time wondering over the empty and wasted life. Mrs. Kenneth Saunders, with a smartly clad little girl, was caught by press cameras at many fashionable European watering- places; Kenneth spent much of his time in institutions and sanitariums, Susan heard. She heard that he worshipped his little girl.