rives to proclaim
himself individual and free.

With her instinct for recognizing the best at first sight,
Susan at once understood. And she was like one who has been
stumbling about searching for the right road, and has it
suddenly shown to him. She fairly darted along this right
road. She was immediately busy, noting the mistakes in her
own ideas of manners and dress, of good and bad taste. She
realized how much she had to learn. But this did not
discourage her. For she realized at the same time that she
could learn--and his obvious belief in her as a possibility
was most encouraging.

When he bade her good-by at the front door and it closed
behind her, she was all at once so tired that it seemed to her
she would then and there sink down through sheer fatigue and
fall asleep. For no physical exercise so quickly and utterly
exhausts as real brain exercise--thinking, studying, learning
with all the concentrated intensity of a thoroughbred in the
last quarter of the mile race.

CHAPTER XV

SPENSER had time and thought for his play only. He no longer
tormented himself with jealousy of the abilities and income
and fame of Brent and the other successful writers for the
stage; was not he about to equal them, probably to surpass
them? As a rule, none of the mean emotions is able to
thrive--unless it has the noxious vapors from disappointment
and failure to feed upon. Spenser, in spirits and in hope
again, was content with himself. Jealousy of Brent about
Susan had been born of dissatisfaction with himself as a
failure and envy of Brent as a success; it died with that
dissatisfaction and that envy. His vanity assured him that
while there might be possibly--ways in which he was not
without rivals, certainly where women were concerned he simply
could not be equaled; the woman he wanted he could have--and he
could hold her as long as he wished. The idea that Susan
would give a sentimental thought to a man "old enough to be
her father"--Brent was forty-one--was too preposterous to
present itself to his mind. She loved the handsome,
fascinating, youthful Roderick Spenser; she would soon be
crazy about him.

Rarely does it occur to a man to wonder what a woman is
thinking. During courtship very young men attribute intellect
and qualities of mystery and awe to the woman they love. But
after men get an insight into the mind of woman and discover
how trivial are the matters that of necessity usually