The milliner was rushing about the back of her store at the moment that Susan chanced to choose for her nervously murmured remarks, and had to have them repeated several times. Then she laughed heartily and merrily, and assured Susan in very imperfect and very audible English, that forty girls were already on her list waiting for positions in her establishment.
"I thought perhaps--knowing all the people--" Susan stammered very low.
"How--why should that be so good?" Madame asked, with horrible clearness. "Do I not know them myself?"
Susan was glad to escape without further parley.
"See, now," said Madame Vera in a low tone, as she followed Susan to the door, "You do not come into my workshop, eh?"
"How much?" asked Susan, after a second's thought.
"Seven dollars," said the other with a quick persuasive nod, "and your dinner. That is something, eh? And more after a while."
But Susan shook her head. And, as she went out into the steadily falling rain again, bitter tears blinded her eyes.
She cried a great deal in these days, became nervous and sensitive and morbid. She moped about the house, restless and excited, unwilling to do anything that would take her away from the house when the postman arrived, reading the steamship news in every morning's paper.
Yet, curiously enough, she never accepted this experience as similar to what poor Mary Lou had undergone so many years ago,--this was not a "disappointment in love,"--this was only a passing episode. Presently she would get herself in hand again and astonish them with some achievement brilliant enough to sweep these dark days from everyone's memory.