"I suppose it couldn't be worked," he said sadly. And no more of it was said.
He came into the office but once that week. Late in a summer-like afternoon Susan looked down at Mr. Baxter's office to see Peter spreading his steamer tickets on the desk. He looked up and laughed at her, and later ran up to the deck for a few minutes to say good-bye. They said it laughingly, among the hot-water bags and surgical accessories, but when Susan went back to her desk the laughter had died from her eyes.
It was an unseasonably warm spring day, she was wearing the first shirtwaist of the year, and had come downtown that morning through the fresh early air on the dummy-front. It was hard to-day to be shut up in a stuffy office. Outside, the watercarts were making the season's first trip along Front Street and pedestrians chose the shady side to-day. Susan thought of the big Oriental liner, the awnings that shaded the decks, the exquisitely cool and orderly little cabins, the green water rushing alongside. And for her the languorous bright afternoon had lost its charm.
She did not see Peter Coleman again for a long time. Summer came, and Susan went on quiet little Sunday picnics to the beach with Auntie and Mary Lou, or stayed at home and pressed her collars and washed her hair. Once or twice she and Billy went over to the Carrolls' Sausalito home, to spend a happy, quiet week-end. Susan gossiped with the busy, cheerful mother over the dish-pan, played "Parchesi" with fifteen-year-old Jim and seventeen-year-old Betsey, reveled in a confidential, sisterly attitude with handsome Phil, the oldest of the half-dozen, and lay awake deep into the warm nights to talk, and talk, and talk with Josephine, who, at her own age, seemed to Susan a much finer, stronger and more developed character. If Anna, the lovely serious oldest daughter, happened to be at home on one of her rare absences from the training-hospital, Susan became her shadow. She loved few people in the world as she loved Anna Carroll. But, in a lesser degree, she loved them all, and found these hours in the shabby, frugal little home among the very happiest of a lonely summer.
About once a month she was carried off by the Saunders, in whose perfectly appointed guest-room she was by this time quite at home. The Fourth of July fell on a Friday this year, and Mr. Brauer, of his own volition, offered Susan the following day as a holiday, too. So that Susan, with a heart as light as sunshine itself, was free to go with Ella Saunders for a memorable visit to Del Monte and Santa Cruz.
It was one of the perfect experiences only possible to youth and irresponsibility. They swam, they went for the Seventeen-Mile Drive, they rode horseback. Ella knew every inch of the great hotels, even some of the waiters and housekeepers. She had the best rooms, she saw that Susan missed nothing. They dressed for dinner, loitered about among the roses in the long twilight, and Susan met a young Englishman who later wrote her three letters on his way home to Oxfordshire. Ella's exquisite gowns had a chapter all to themselves when Susan was telling her cousins about it, but Susan herself alternated contentedly enough between the brown linen with the daisy-hat and the black net with the pearl band in her hair. Miss Saunders' compliments, her confidences, half-intoxicated the girl.
It was with a little effort that she came back to sober every-day living. She gave a whole evening to Mary Lord, in her eagerness to share her pleasure. The sick woman was not interested in gowns, but she went fairly wild when Susan spoke of Monterey,--the riotous gardens with their walls of white plaster topped with red pipe, the gulls wheeling over the little town, the breakers creaming in lazy, interlocking curves on the crescent of the beach, and the little old plaster church, with its hundred-year-old red altar-cloth, and its altar-step worn into grooves from the knees of the faithful.
"Oh, I must see the sea again!" cried Mary.
"Well, don't talk that way! You will," Lydia said cheerfully. But Susan, seeing the shadow on the kind, plain face, wished that she had held her tongue.