hile
Susan deciphered tight little legal hands which rarely filled more than
a page, and always conveyed the same impression of jocular and breezy
goodwill.

"I do hope Mr. Hutchinson will like me, Arthur," she said, looking up.

"Who's your loving Flo?" asked Arthur.

"Flo Graves--the girl I told you about, who was engaged to that dreadful
Mr. Vincent," said Susan. "Is Mr. Hutchinson married?" she asked.

Already her mind was busy with benevolent plans for her friends, or
rather with one magnificent plan--which was simple too--they were all to
get married--at once--directly she got back. Marriage, marriage that was
the right thing, the only thing, the solution required by every one she
knew, and a great part of her meditations was spent in tracing every
instance of discomfort, loneliness, ill-health, unsatisfied ambition,
restlessness, eccentricity, taking things up and dropping them again,
public speaking, and philanthropic activity on the part of men and
particularly on the part of women to the fact that they wanted to marry,
were trying to marry, and had not succeeded in getting married. If, as
she was bound to own, these symptoms sometimes persisted after marriage,
she could only ascribe them to the unhappy law of nature which decreed
that there was only one Arthur Venning, and only one Susan who could
marry him. Her theory, of course, had the merit of being fully supported
by her own case. She had been vaguely uncomfortable at home for two or
three years now, and a voyage like this with her selfish old aunt,
who paid her fare but treated her as servant and companion in one, was
typical of the kind of thing people expected of her. Directly she
became engaged, Mrs. Paley behaved with instinctive respect, positively
protested when Susan as usual knelt down to lace her shoes, and appeared
really grateful for an hour of Susan's company where she had been used
to exact two or three as her right. She therefore foresaw a life of far
greater comfort than she had been used to, and the change had already
produced a great increase of warmth in her feelings towards other
people.

It was close on twenty years now since Mrs. Paley had been able to lace
her own shoes or even to see them, the disappearance of her feet having
coincided more or less accurately with the death of her husband, a man
of business, soon after which event Mrs. Paley began to grow stout.
She was a selfish, independent old woman, possessed of a consider