I
Susan Parker was twenty-six and nothing had ever happened. To speak more accurately, plenty of things had happened, but Man had never happened. As a college girl and afterward, Susie had, to be sure, known many men; but they had all passed by on the other side. A young man of literary ambitions had once directed a sonnet at Susie, but she was not without critical judgment and she knew it for a weak effort. This young man afterward became the sporting editor of a great newspaper, and but for Susie’s fastidiousness in the matter of sonnets she might have shared his prosperity and fame. A professor of theology had once sent her a sermon on the strength of a chance meeting at a tea; but this, though encouraging, was hardly what might be called a thrilling incident. Still, the young professor had later been called to an important church, and a little more enthusiasm for sermons on Susie’s part might have changed the current of her life.
The brother of one of Susie’s Vassar classmates had evinced a deep interest in Susie for a few months, spending weekends at Poughkeepsie that might much better have been devoted to working off his conditions at New Haven; but the frail argosy of their young affections had gone to smash with incredible ease and swiftness over a careless assertion by Susie that, after all, Harvard was the greatest American university. All universities looked alike to her, and she had really been no more interested in Harvard than in the academic centers of Wyoming or Oklahoma. Now this young gentleman was launched successfully as a mining engineer and had passed Susan by for another of his sister’s classmates, who was not nearly so interesting or amusing as Susie.
Susie’s mother had died while she was in college, and her father, in the year she was graduated. As he had chosen a good name rather than great riches, Susie had found it necessary to adjust herself to conditions, which she did by taking the library course at Witter Institute. In Syracuse, where Susan was born, old friends of the family had said how fortunate it was that her education made library work possible for her. And, though this was true, Susie resented their tone of condescension. In its various implications it dismissed her from the world to which she had been accustomed to another and very different sphere. It meant that if she became an attendant in the Syracuse Library she would assist at no more teas, and that gradually she would be forgotten in the compilations of lists of eligibles for such functions as illuminate the social horizon of Syracuse.
Whereupon, being a duly accredited librarian, entitled to consideration as such wherever book warehouses exist, Susan decided to try her luck in a strange land, where hours from nine to six would be less heart-breaking than in a town where every one would say how brave Susie was, or how shameful it was that her father had not at least kept up his life insurance.
The archives of Denver, Omaha and Indianapolis beckoned. She chose Indianapolis as being nearer the ocean.
In her changes of status and habitat the thing that hurt Susan most was the fact that the transition fixed her, apparently for all time, among the Susans. She had been named Susan for an aunt with money, but the money had gone to foreign missions when Susie was six. In college she had always been Susie to those who did not call her Miss Parker. Her introduction to the library in the Hoosier capital was, of course, as Miss Parker; but she saw Miss Susan looming darkly ahead of her. She visualized herself down the gray vistas, preyed upon daily by harassed women in search of easy catercorners to club papers, who would ask at the counter for Miss Susan. And she resented, with all the strength of her healthy young soul, the thought of being Miss Susan.
Just why Sue and Susie express various shades of character and personal atmosphere not hinted in the least by Susan pertains to the psychology of names, and is not for this writing. Susie was a small human package with a great deal of yellow hair, big blue eyes, an absurdly small mouth and a determined little nose. As a child and throughout her college years she had been frolicsome and prankish. Her intimates had rejected Sue as an inappropriate diminutive for her. Sue and Susie are not interchangeable. Sue may be applied to tall, dark girls; but no one can imagine a Susie as tall or dark. In college the girls had by unanimous consent called her Susie, with an affectionate lingering upon the second syllable and a prolongation of the “e.”
To get exactly the right effect, one should first bite into a tart gooseberry. In her corridor at Vassar it had been no uncommon thing to speak of her affectionately as Susie the Goosie. Another term of endearment she evoked was Susie the Syracuse Goosie, usually when she was in disgrace with the powers.
And Susie was the least bit spoiled. She had liked these plays upon her name. Her sayings and doings were much quoted and described in those good old days before she became Miss Susan Parker on a public library payroll. An admiring classmate had suggested the writing of a book to be called the Susiness of Susie. And Susie was funny—every one admitted that she was. She left behind her at college a reputation as a past mistress of the unexpected, and a graceful skater over the thin ice of academic delinquency. She had liked the admiration of her classmates and had more or less consciously played for it. She did not mind so much being small when it was so clear that her compact figure contributed so considerably to her general Susiness.
And the manner of the way in which Susan became Susie again fell in this wise:
Last summer the newest certain rich man in Indianapolis, having builded himself a house so large that his wife took the children and went abroad to be comfortable, fell under the fascinations of a book agent, who equipped his library with four thousand of the books that are books. The capitalist really meant to read them when he got time—if he ever did; and, in order that he might the more readily avail himself of his library when leisure offered, he acted upon the agent’s hint that it should be scientifically catalogued. The public librarian had suggested Miss Parker as a competent person for the task; and Logan, the owner of the unread books, having been pleased with the candidate’s appearance, had suggested that she live in the house while doing the work, to be company for his wife’s aunt, who was marooned there during Mrs. Logan’s absence. Logan thereupon went to Alaska to look at an investment. The aunt proved agreeable and the big Logan house was, of course, a much pleasanter place than Susan’s boarding house, where she had been annoyed by the efforts of one or two young gentlemen to flirt with her. Though her isolation emphasized the passing of her Susiness, she was reasonably happy, and set up her typewriter among the new books to do the cataloguing. In the long, eventless evenings she read to the aunt or cut leaves, and felt the years of her Susihood receding.
And it was not until the very last week of her stay in the Logan house that Miss Susan Parker experienced a recrudescence of her Susiness.