"Why Sue--why Sue!" The motherly arm was about her, she felt Mrs. Carroll's cheek against her hair. "Why, little girl, you musn't talk of failure at your age!" said Mrs. Carroll, tenderly.
"I'll be twenty-six this fall," Susan said, wiping her eyes, "and I'm not started yet! I don't know how to begin. Sometimes I think," said Susan, with angry vigor, "that if I was picked right out of this city and put down anywhere else on the globe, I could be useful and happy! But here I can't! How---" she appealed to the older woman passionately, "How can I take an interest in Auntie's boarding-house when she herself never keeps a bill, doesn't believe in system, and likes to do things her own way?"
"Sue, I do think that things at home are very hard for you," Mrs. Carroll said with quick sympathy. "It's too bad, dear, it's just the sort of thing that I think you fine, energetic, capable young creatures ought to be saved! I wish we could think of just the work that would interest you."
"But that's it--I have no gift!" Susan said, despondingly.
"But you don't need a gift, Sue. The work of the world isn't all for girls with gifts! No, my dear, you want to use your energies--you won't be happy until you do. You want happiness, we all do. And there's only one rule for happiness in this world, Sue, and that's service. Just to the degree that they serve people are happy, and no more. It's an infallible test. You can try nations by it, you can try kings and beggars. Poor people are just as unhappy as rich people, when they're idle; and rich people are really happy only when they're serving somebody or something. A millionaire--a multimillionaire--may be utterly wretched, and some poor little clerk who goes home to a sick wife, and to a couple of little babies, may be absolutely content--probably is."
"But you don't think that the poor, as a class, are happier than the rich?"
"Why, of course they are!"
"Lots of workingmen's wives are unhappy," submitted Susan.
"Because they're idle and shiftless and selfish, Sue. But there are some among them who are so busy mixing up spice cake, and making school-aprons, and filling lamps and watering gardens that they can't stop to read the new magazines,--and those are the happiest people in the world, I think. No, little girl, remember that rule. Not money, or success, or position or travel or love makes happiness,--service is the secret."
Susan was watching her earnestly, wistfully. Now she asked simply: