"I think there's no question about it, Sue," Mrs. Carroll's motherly voice said, cheerfully. "This is a hard time; you and Billy are both doing too much,--but this won't last! You'll come out of it some day, dear, a splendid big experienced woman, ready for any big work. And then you'll look back, and think that the days when the boys needed you every hour were short enough. Character is the one thing that you have to buy this way, Sue,--by effort and hardship and self-denial!"
"But after all," Susan said somberly, so eager to ease her full heart that she must keep her voice low to keep it steady, "after all, Aunt Jo, aren't there lots of women who do this sort of thing year in and year out and DON'T achieve anything? As a means to an end," said Susan, groping for words, "as a road--this is comprehensible, but--but one hates to think of it as a goal!"
"Hundreds of women reach their highest ambitions, Sue," the other woman answered thoughtfully, "without necessarily reaching YOURS. It depends upon which star you've selected for your wagon, Sue! You have just been telling me that the Lords, for instance, are happier than crowned kings, in their little garden, with a state position assured for Lydia. Then there's Georgie; Georgie is one of the happiest women I ever saw! And when you remember that the first thirty years of her life were practically wasted, it makes you feel very hopeful of anyone's life!"
"Yes, but I couldn't be happy as Mary and Lydia are, and Georgie's life would drive me to strong drink!" Susan said, with a flash of her old fire.
"Exactly. So YOUR fulfilment will come in some other way,--some way that they would probably think extremely terrifying or unconventional or strange. Meanwhile you are learning something every day, about women who have tiny babies to care for, about housekeeping as half the women of the world have to regard it. All that is extremely useful, if you ever want to do anything that touches women. About office work you know, about life downtown. Some day just the use for all this will come to you, and then I'll feel that I was quite right when I expected great things of my Sue!"
"Of me?" stammered Susan. A lovely color crept into her thin cheeks and a tear splashed down upon the cheek of the sleeping baby.
Anna's dearest dream was suddenly realized that summer, and Anna, lovelier than ever, came out to tell Sue of the chance meeting with Doctor Hoffmann in the laboratory that had, in two short minutes, turned the entire current of her life. It was all wonderful and delightful beyond words, not a tiny cloud darkened the sky.
Conrad Hoffmann was forty-five years old, seventeen years older than his promised wife, but splendidly tall and strong, and--Anna and Susan agreed--STRIKINGLY handsome. He was at the very top of his profession, managed his own small surgical hospital, and maintained one of the prettiest homes in the city. A musician, a humanitarian, rich in his own right, he was so conspicuous a figure among the unmarried men of San Francisco that Anna's marriage created no small stir, and the six weeks of her engagement were packed with affairs in her honor.
Susan's little sons were presently taken to Sausalito to be present at Aunt Anna's wedding. Susan was nervous and tired before she had finished her own dressing, wrapped and fed the beribboned baby, and slipped the wriggling Martin into his best white clothes. But she forgot everything but pride and pleasure when Betsey, the bride and "Grandma" fell with shrieks of rapture upon the children, and during the whole happy day she found herself over and over again at Billy's side, listening to him, watching him, and his effect on other people, slipping her hand into his. It was as if, after quiet months of taking him for granted, she had suddenly seen her big, clever, gentle husband as a stranger again, and fallen again in love with him.
Susan felt strangely older than Anna to-day; she thought of that other day when she and Billy had gone up to the big woods; she remembered the odor of roses and acacia, the fragrance of her gown, the stiffness of her rose-crowned hat.