“I don’t see much difference between her now and a week ago, when you used to kiss her when you wanted her to do anything for you.” Leila flared up, and a very sisterly fight ensued. Linnie was no match for the hardheaded Leila in a contest of words, but in revenge, later in the day, she told Clara how Susie had been treated. This happened to be a good policy, though not intended as such. Clara drew her arm about Linnie, saying, “I am glad, sister dear, that you show some feeling. I knew you would, and I have wanted to take you into my confidence, for you are more mature for your age than Leila is; but mamma thought it not best. I think she is wrong, and I am going to tell you the truth. You have guessed it already. Susie, you know, has loved Dan since she was your age, and she has been foolish of course; but I want you to remember that she was a poor, ignorant, neglected child, and Dan was engaged to marry her. I blame him infinitely more than I do her. He was very selfish and unprincipled.”
“So I think, sissy. I thought it must be Dan—the mean thing. I’m real sorry for Susie; but what a goose she must be to care so for him.” And so another friend was won over to Susie. Linnie grew immensely important in her own eyes after this confidence of Clara, who told her, among other pretty compliments, that she was “right womanly” in her sentiments.
On one of those weary days, when Susie felt like destroying her life despite the kindness and sympathy of Clara and her father, she received a note from Dan. It was written in a cold, heartless style that she could scarcely believe him capable of after all she knew of him, and ended: “I don’t want you to be disgraced through me, and I am willing to marry you. Name the time and place, and I will be on hand. It is no use to palaver and swear I shall be supremely happy, and all that; but you are ‘ruined,’ of course, if I don’t, and I’m willing to do it, and ought to for the prospective brat’s sake, at least.” The letter enclosed a cheque for fifty dollars. Susie regarded the money greedily. She had never had half as much in her whole life, and this would buy so many things she needed, and then she read Dan’s heartless letter again, crying bitterly. Not one word of tenderness; nothing of the old love was left, only pity and an offer to sacrifice himself to save her. Disgust with her weakness, self-reproach, indignation, possessed her by turns, and the result was sending back the letter and the cheque, with only these words: “I can beg in the streets for myself or for your child much easier than I can accept charity from you. O my God! that I should come to this—to have money thrown at me like a bone to a dog, from one, too, whom I have so loved and trusted. Believe me, the only favor I ask, is that you may forget that I ever cared for you, for—
‘I am shamed through all my being
To have loved so weak a thing.’”
When Dan received this, he was surprised, to say the least, and chewed his moustache viciously. Beyond all his pique at the way his offer was received, there was a dawning respect for the girl he had ruined, as he thought; but Susie was not quite ruined yet, thanks to the generous sympathy of Dr. Forest and his daughter; and losing her respect for Dan, through finding out how soulless and unworthy he was, her heart-aches on account of his faithlessness gradually began to subside. Pretty soon another letter came, containing one hundred dollars in greenbacks. This time he confessed admiration for her “pluck,” as he called it, but swore that if she sent back this money he would burn it, leaving enough of the notes to show her he had kept his word. This was why he had sent greenbacks, which, if destroyed, could not be made good like a bank cheque.
Susie resolved to show this letter to Clara, and ask her advice, apologizing for not doing so with the first one. In fact Susie had enjoyed, in a bitter way, her answer, knowing it would wound Dan’s vanity, and she had feared that Clara’s advice would interfere with this satisfaction. The letter was written in a moment of exaltation, and was the wisest thing Susie could have done; but yet after it was in the post-office and beyond recall, the poor girl suffered new tortures lest her words should alienate him still further from her; for she had to own that, after all, she had not utterly given up the hope that he was only temporarily under some new influence, that made him act so dishonorably toward her. Love is not only blind, but absolutely idiotic, in its faith. When once we are even partially free from his gilded toils, how wide our eyes are opened! How microscopic their power to detect and measure infinitesimal quantities of meanness in the lover.
Clara was away when the second letter came, and Mrs. Forest and her visitor were out riding. Just as she had folded and put away Dan’s second letter, the doctor came in. He greeted her pleasantly, and threw himself wearily on the lounge in the dining-room. Upon his inquiring for Clara, Susie told him she was out. “But cannot I take her place, just for once?” she asked. “You want your bath, I know, for you always say that nothing rests you so much;” and not waiting for any verbal assent, Susie ran and pumped the water from the rain-cistern into the bath-tub, and added a pail of hot water from Dinah’s range. The bath refreshed him, as it always did, and when he came back Susie had his pipe filled for him, and a cup of fresh coffee beside it.
“What a grand sachem I am, to be so coddled by nice women. Now come and talk to me, Susie,” he said, stretching himself on the lounge. Susie sat down beside him on a low stool, and showed him Dan’s first letter and a copy of her answer.
“Good for your answer, Susie. I rather like it, though it is a little romantic. Yes, I like it; but your sending back the money—ah! that was too romantic by far. He’s a spendthrift, and the best possible use he can make of his money is to give it to you. Don’t you do it again—hear?—if he sends you any more.”