In the seventh week he abruptly took her out of the company and up to London to have each day an hour of singing, an hour of dancing, and an hour of fencing. "You'll ruin her health," protested Freddie. "You're making her work like a ditch digger."
Brent replied, "If she hasn't the health, she's got to abandon the career. If she has health, this training will give it steadiness and solidity. If there's a weakness anywhere, it'll show itself and can be remedied."
And he piled the work on her, dictated her hours of sleep, her hours for rest and for walking, her diet—and little he gave her to eat. When he had her thoroughly broken to his regimen, he announced that business compelled his going immediately to America. "I shall be back in a month," said he.
"I think I'll run over with you," said Palmer. "Do you mind, Susan?"
"Clélie and I shall get on very well," she replied. She would be glad to have both out of the way that she might give her whole mind to the only thing that now interested her. For the first time she was experiencing the highest joy that comes to mortals, the only joy that endures and grows and defies all the calamities of circumstances—the joy of work congenial and developing.
"Yes—come along," said Brent to Palmer. "Here you'll be tempting her to break the rules." He added, "Not that you would succeed. She understands what it all means, now—and nothing could stop her. That's why I feel free to leave her."
"Yes, I understand," said Susan. She was gazing away into space; at sight of her expression Freddie turned hastily away.
On a Saturday morning Susan and Clélie, after waiting on the platform at Euston Station until the long, crowded train for Liverpool and the Lusitania disappeared, went back to the lodgings in Half Moon Street with a sudden sense of the vastness of London, of its loneliness and dreariness, of its awkward inhospitality to the stranger under its pall of foggy smoke. Susan was thinking of Brent's last words:
She had said, "I'll try to deserve all the pains you've taken,
Mr. Brent."
"Yes, I have done a lot for you," he had replied. "I've put you beyond the reach of any of the calamities of life—beyond the need of any of its consolations. Don't forget that if the steamer goes down with all on board."