"He wouldn't let me," Susan asserted, "and besides, I don't really know anything."
"Well, learn something. Ask him, when next some manager wants to make up a little road company---"
"A road company! Two nights in Stockton, two nights in Marysville--horrors!" said Susan.
"But that wouldn't be for long, Sue. Perhaps two years. Then five or six years in stock somewhere---"
"Aunt Jo, I'd be past thirty!" Susan laughed and colored charmingly. "I--honestly, I couldn't give up my whole life for ten years on the chance of making a hit," she confessed.
"Well, but what then, Sue?"
"Now, I'll tell you what I've often wanted to do," Susan said, after a thoughtful interval.
"Ah, now we're coming to it!" Mrs. Carroll said, with satisfaction. They had left the kitchen now, and were sitting on the top step of the side porch, reveling in the lovely panorama of hillside and waterfront, and the smooth and shining stretch of bay below them.
"I've often thought I'd like to be the matron of some very smart school for girls," said Susan, "and live either in or near some big Eastern city, and take the girls to concerts and lectures and walking in the parks, and have a lovely room full of books and pictures, where they would come and tell me things, and go to Europe now and then for a vacation!"
"That would be a lovely life, Sue. Why not work for that?"