Neither Susan nor Gladys came to their room until 102 the last moment allowed for remaining away. Susan was overwhelmed with congratulations on her success. The teacher of rhetoric told her she felt repaid for all the hours she had spent in teaching her, by the skill she had shown in this composition, and if she continued to improve, she saw nothing to prevent her taking her place, by and by, among the best writers in the land. Kate Underwood pretended to be vexed, “having her laurels taken away from her,” she said “was not to be borne;” and Delia Williams, the rival of Kate in the estimation of the school, made even more fun than Kate over her own disappointment. Some of the girls made a crown of bright papers and would have put it on Susan’s head, but she testily pushed it away.
Susan’s love of prominence was well known in the school, and even this small rejection of popular applause they wondered over.
And when the girls began to cluster around her, and to ask if she had ever been to that West Rock, if there was really such a place, and if all those things she wrote of so beautifully had ever happened? she was silent and sulky; and in the end, crowned with her new honors, at the point in her life she had always longed for, and never before reached, she looked more like a girl who was ashamed of herself, than like one whose vanity and love of praise had for the first time been fully gratified.
She dreaded going to her room; she was afraid something to mar her success was waiting for her 103 there. She wished Marion Parke had never come from the West, that Gladys had never been weak enough to take her in for a room-mate. In short, Susan was more unhappy than she had ever been before. Gladys, full of frolic with a large clique of girls in another part of the room, had not given her a thought.
To have Susan write so good a story had been the same surprise to her that it was to every one; but the reading was no sooner over, than she had forgotten it, and if the teacher had not told her it was time she went to her room, she would also have forgotten there was any room to go to.
When she saw Susan she said, “Come on if you don’t want to get reported. I say, Sue, haven’t we had a real jolly time?” but much to Susan’s relief not a word about “Storied West Rock.”
Dorothy had been waiting for Susan, and when the gas was out and they were all in bed, she whispered to her,—
“O Sue! I’m so glad for you.” Dorothy thought a moment after she heard a sound like a smothered sob, but Susan not answering or moving, she concluded she had fallen quickly asleep, and that was a half snore; so she went to sleep herself, but not without some troubled thoughts about Marion and her unusual behavior.
When Marion and Susan met the next morning, Marion noticed that Susan avoided her, never even looked at her; and when Dorothy and Gladys went 104 away to a recitation, leaving them alone, Susan hastily gathered up her books, and going into her bedroom, shut the door.
Marion thought this over. To her it looked as if Susan felt guilty and was afraid; but she had determined not to watch her, not even to seem to suspect her. “How should she know that I remember the story?” she thought, “or, indeed, that I have ever so much as read it? I will put it off my mind; I will! I will!”