The end with Freddie might be far away. But end, she saw, there would be the day when he would somehow get her in his power and so would drive her to leave him. For she could not again become a slave. Extreme youth, utter inexperience, no knowledge of real freedom—these had enabled her to endure in former days. But she was wholly different now. She could not sink back. Steadily she was growing less and less able to take orders from anyone. This full-grown passion for freedom, this intolerance of the least restraint—how dangerous, if she should find herself in a position where she would have to put up with the caprices of some man or drop down and down!
What real, secure support had she? None. Her building was without solid foundations. Her struggle with Freddie was a revelation and a warning. There were days when, driving about in her luxurious car, she could do nothing but search among the crowds in the streets for the lonely old women in rags, picking and peering along the refuse of the cafés—weazened, warped figures swathed in rags, creeping along, mumbling to themselves, lips folded in and in over toothless gums.
One day Brent saw again the look she often could not keep from her face when that vision of the dance hall in the slums was horrifying her. He said impulsively:
"What is it? Tell me—what is it, Susan?"
It was the first and the last time he ever called her by her only personal name. He flushed deeply. To cover his confusion—and her own—she said in her most frivolous way:
"I was thinking that if I am ever rich I shall have more pairs of shoes and stockings and take care of more orphans than anyone else in the world."
"A purpose! At last a purpose!" laughed he. "Now you will go to work."
Through Gourdain she got a French teacher—and her first woman friend.
The young widow he recommended, a Madame Clélie Délière, was the most attractive woman she had ever known. She had all the best French characteristics—a good heart, a lively mind, was imaginative yet sensible, had good taste in all things. Like most of the attractive French women, she was not beautiful, but had that which is of far greater importance—charm. She knew not a word of English, and it was perhaps Susan's chief incentive toward working hard at French that she could not really be friends with this fascinating person until she learned to speak her language. Palmer—partly by nature, partly through early experience in the polyglot tenement district of New York—had more aptitude for language than had Susan. But he had been lazy about acquiring French in a city where English is spoken almost universally. With the coming of young Madame Délière to live in the apartment, he became interested.
It was not a month after her coming when you might have seen at one of the fashionable gay restaurants any evening a party of four—Gourdain was the fourth—talking French almost volubly. Palmer's accent was better than Susan's. She could not—and felt she never could—get the accent of the trans-Alleghany region out of her voice—and so long as that remained she would not speak good French. "But don't let that trouble you," said Clélie. "Your voice is your greatest charm. It is so honest and so human. Of the Americans I have met, I have liked only those with that same tone in their voices."