from anyone. This full-grown passion for freedom,
this intolerance of the least restraint--how dangerous, if she
should find herself in a position where she would have to put
up with the caprices of some man or drop down and down!

What real, secure support had she? None. Her building was
without solid foundations. Her struggle with Freddie was a
revelation and a warning. There were days when, driving about
in her luxurious car, she could do nothing but search among
the crowds in the streets for the lonely old women in rags,
picking and peering along the refuse of the cafes--weazened,
warped figures swathed in rags, creeping along, mumbling to
themselves, lips folded in and in over toothless gums.

One day Brent saw again the look she often could not keep from
her face when that vision of the dance hall in the slums was
horrifying her. He said impulsively:

"What is it? Tell me--what is it, Susan?"

It was the first and the last time he ever called her by her
only personal name. He flushed deeply. To cover his
confusion--and her own--she said in her most frivolous way:

"I was thinking that if I am ever rich I shall have more pairs
of shoes and stockings and take care of more orphans than
anyone else in the world."

"A purpose! At last a purpose!" laughed he. "Now you will go
to work."

Through Gourdain she got a French teacher--and her first woman friend.

The young widow he recommended, a Madame Clelie Deliere, was
the most attractive woman she had ever known. She had all the
best French characteristics--a good heart, a lively mind, was
imaginative yet sensible, had good taste in all things. Like
most of the attractive French women, she was not beautiful,
but had that which is of far greater importance--charm. She
knew not a word of English, and it was perhaps Susan's chief
incentive toward working hard at French that she could not
really be friends with this fascinating person until she
learned to speak her language. Palmer--partly by nature,
partly through early experience in the polyglot tenement
district of New York--had more aptitude for language than had
Susan. But he had been lazy about acquiring French in a city
where English is spoken almost universally. With the coming of
young Madame Deliere to live in the apartment, he became interested.

It was not a month after her coming when you might have seen
at one of the fashionable gay restaurants any evening a party
of four--Gourdai