Susan listened interestedly. But when they were home again, and Ella was dressing for some dinner party, she very firmly declined the old lady's eager invitation to remain. She was a little more touched by Emily's rudeness than she would admit, a little afraid to trust herself any further to so uncertain a hostess.
She went soberly home, in the summer twilight, soothed in spite of herself by the beauty of the quiet bay, and pondering deeply. Had she deserved this slight in any way? she wondered. Should she have come away directly after luncheon? No, for they had asked her, with great warmth, for dinner! Was it something that she should, in all dignity, resent? Should Peter be treated a little coolly; Emily's next overture declined?
She decided against any display of resentment. It was only the strange way of these people, no claim of courtesy was strong enough to offset the counter-claim of any random desire. They were too used to taking what they wanted, to forgetting what it was not entirely convenient to remember. They would think it absurd, even delightfully amusing in her, to show the least feeling.
Arriving late, she gave her cousins a glowing account of the day, and laughed with Georgie over the account of a call from Loretta's Doctor O'Connor. "Loretta's beau having the nerve to call on me!" Georgie said, with great amusement.
Almost hourly, in these days when she saw him constantly, Susan tried to convince herself that her heart was not quite committed yet to Peter Coleman's keeping. But always without success. The big, sweet-tempered, laughing fellow, with his generosity, his wealth, his position, had become all her world, or rather he had become the reigning personage in that other world at whose doorway Susan stood, longing and enraptured.
A year ago, at the prospect of seeing him so often, of feeling so sure of his admiration and affection, of calling him "Peter," Susan would have felt herself only too fortunate. But these privileges, fully realized now, brought her more pain than joy. A restless unhappiness clouded their gay times together, and when she was alone Susan spent troubled hours in analysis of his tones, his looks, his words. If a chance careless phrase of his seemed to indicate a deepening of the feeling between them, Susan hugged that phrase to her heart. If Peter, on the other hand, eagerly sketched to her plans for a future that had no place for her, Susan drooped, and lay wakeful and heartsick long into the night. She cared for him truly and deeply, although she never said so, even to herself, and she longed with all her ardent young soul for the place in the world that awaited his wife. Susan knew that she could fill it, that he would never be anything but proud of her; she only awaited the word- -less than a word!--that should give her the right to enter into her kingdom.