Luckily Susan had not been arrested under her own name; there existed no court record which could be brought forward as proof by some nosing newspaper.
Susan herself marveled that there was not more trace of her underworld experience in her face and in her mind. She could not account for it. Yet the matter was simple enough to one viewing it from the outside. It is what we think, what we feel about ourselves, that makes up our expression of body and soul. And never in her lowest hour had her soul struck its flag and surrendered to the idea that she was a fallen creature. She had a temperament that estimated her acts not as right and wrong but as necessity. Men, all the rest of the world, might regard her as nothing but sex symbol; she regarded herself as an intelligence. And the filth slipped from her and could not soak in to change the texture of her being. She had no more the feeling or air of the cocotte than has the married woman who lives with her husband for a living. Her expression, her way of looking at her fellow beings and of meeting their looks, was that of the woman of the world who is for whatever reason above that slavery to opinion, that fear of being thought bold or forward which causes women of the usual run to be sensitive about staring or being stared at. Sometimes—in cocottes, in stage women, in fashionable women—this expression is self-conscious, or supercilious. It was not so with Susan, for she had little self-consciousness and no snobbishness at all. It merely gave the charm of worldly experience and expertness to a beauty which, without it, might have been too melancholy.
Susan, become by sheer compulsion philosopher about the vagaries of fat, did not fret over possible future dangers. She dismissed them and put all her intelligence and energy to the business in hand—to learning and to helping Palmer learn the ways of that world which includes all worlds.
Toward the end of the voyage she said to him:
"About my salary—or allowance—or whatever it is—— I've been thinking things over. I've made up my mind to save some money. My only chance is that salary. Have you any objection to my saving it—as much of it as I can?"
He laughed. "Tuck away anything and everything you can lay your hands on," said he. "I'm not one of those fools who try to hold women by being close and small with them. I'd not want you about if you were of the sort that could be held that way."
"No—I'll put by only from my salary," said she. "I admit I've no right to do that. But I've become sensible enough to realize that I mustn't ever risk being out again with no money. It has got on my mind so that I'd not be able to think of much else for worrying—unless I had at least a little."
"Do you want me to make you independent?"
"No," replied she. "Whatever you gave me I'd have to give back if we separated."
"That isn't the way to get on, my dear," said he.