"Somewhat," said Brent. "But my friend Gourdain is stark mad about women's dressing well. That lilac dress you had on yesterday did for him. He was your servant; he is your slave."
Abruptly—for no apparent cause, as was often the case—Susan had that sickening sense of the unreality of her luxurious present, of being about to awaken in Vine Street with Etta—or in the filthy bed with old Mrs. Tucker. Absently she glanced down at her foot, holding it out as if for inspection. She saw Brent's look of amusement at her seeming vanity.
"I was looking to see if my shoes were leaky," she explained.
A subtle change came over his face. He understood instantly.
"Have you ever been—cold?" she asked, looking at him strangely.
"One cold February—cold and damp—I had no underclothes—and no overcoat."
"And dirty beds—filthy rooms—filthy people?"
"A ten-cent lodging house with a tramp for bedfellow."
They were looking at each other, with the perfect understanding and sympathy that can come only to two people of the same fiber who have braved the same storms. Each glanced hastily away.
Her enthusiasm for doing the apartment was due full as much to the fact that it gave her definitely directed occupation as to its congeniality. That early training of hers from Aunt Fanny Warham had made it forever impossible for her in any circumstances to become the typical luxuriously sheltered woman, whether legally or illegally kept—the lie-abed woman, the woman who dresses only to go out and show off, the woman who wastes her life in petty, piffling trifles—without purpose, without order or system, without morals or personal self-respect. She had never lost the systematic instinct—the instinct to use time instead of wasting it—that Fanny Warham had implanted in her during the years that determine character. Not for a moment, even without distinctly definite aim, was she in danger of the creeping paralysis that is epidemic among the rich, enfeebling and slowing down mental and physical activity. She had a regular life; she read, she walked in the Bois; she made the best of each day. And when this definite thing to accomplish offered, she did not have to learn how to work before she could begin the work itself.