The children behaved well, but Susan was too nervous about their behavior to appreciate that until the visit was long over, and the exquisite ease and order of Isabel's home made her feel hopelessly clumsy, shabby and strange. Her mood communicated itself somewhat to Billy, but Billy forgot all lesser emotions in the heat of a discussion into which he entered with Isabel's father during dinner. The old man was interested, tolerant, amused. Susan thought Billy nothing short of rude, although the meal finished harmoniously enough, and the men made an engagement the next morning to see each other again, and thresh out the subject thoroughly.
Isabel kept Susan until afternoon, and strolled with her across the road to show her the pretty house that had been the Wallaces' home, in her mother's lifetime, empty now, and ready to lease.
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.