"Oh, Puccini will never do anything to TOUCH Bizet!" Susan asserted firmly. Or, "Well, we'd be fighting Spain still if it wasn't for McKinley!" Or, "My grandmother had three hundred slaves, and slavery worked perfectly well, then!" If challenged, she got very angry. "You simply are proving that you don't know anything about it!" was Susan's last, and adequate, answer to questioners.
But as a rule she was not challenged. Some quality in Susan set her apart from the other girls, and they saw it as she did. It was not that she was richer, or prettier, or better born, or better educated, than any or all of them. But there was some sparkling, bubbling quality about her that was all her own. She read, and assimilated rather than remembered what she read, adopted this little affectation in speech, this little nicety of manner. She glowed with varied and absurd ambitions, and took the office into her confidence about them. Wavering and incomplete as her aunt's influence had been, one fact had early been impressed upon her; she was primarily and absolutely a "lady." Susan's forebears had really been rather ordinary folk, improvident and carefree, enjoying prosperity when they had it with the uneducated, unpractical serenity of the Old South, shiftless and lazy and unhappy in less prosperous times.
But she thought of them as most distinguished and accomplished gentlefolk, beautiful women environed by spacious estates, by exquisite old linen and silver and jewels, and dashing cavaliers rising in gay gallantry alike to the conquest of feminine hearts, or to their country's defense. She bore herself proudly, as became their descendants. She brought the gaze of her honest blue eyes frankly to all the other eyes in the world, a lady was unembarrassed in the presence of her equals, a lady was always gracious to her inferiors.
Her own father had been less elevated in rank than his wife, yet Susan could think of him with genuine satisfaction. He was only a vague memory to her now, this bold heart who had challenged a whole family's opposition, a quarter of a century before, and carried off Miss Sue Rose Ralston, whose age was not quite half his forty years, under her father's very eyes.
When Susan was born, four years later, the young wife was still regarded by her family as an outcast. But even the baby Susan, growing happily old enough to toddle about in the Santa Barbara rose-garden that sheltered the still infatuated pair, knew that Mother was supremely indifferent to the feeling toward her in any heart but one. Martin Brown was an Irishman, and a writer of random essays. His position on a Los Angeles daily newspaper kept the little family in touch with just the people they cared to see, and, when the husband and father was found dead at his desk one day, with his wife's picture over the heart that had suddenly and simply ceased to serve him, there were friends all about to urge the beautiful widow to take up at least a part of his work, in the old environment.