"Put it straight out of your head," replied he."I never waste time.To live is to learn.Already you've given me a new play--don't forget that.In a month I'll have it ready for us to use.Besides, in teaching you I teach myself.Hungry?""No--that is, yes.I hadn't thought of it, but I'm starved.""This sort of thing gives one an appetite like a field hand."He accompanied her to the door of the rear dressing-room on the floor below."Go down to the reception room when you're ready," said he, as he left her to go on to his own suite to change his clothes."I'll be there."The maid came immediately, drew a bath for her, afterward helped her to dress.It was Susan's first experience with a maid, her first realization how much time and trouble one saves oneself if free from the routine, menial things.And then and there a maid was set down upon her secret list of the luxurious comforts to which she would treat herself--_when?_The craving for luxury is always a part, usually a powerful part, of an ambitious temperament.Ambition is simply a variously manifested and variously directed impulse toward improvement--a discomfort so keen that it compels effort to change to a position less uncomfortable.There had never been a time when luxury had not attracted her.At the slightest opportunity she had always pushed out for luxuries--for better food, better clothing, more agreeable surroundings.Even in her worst hours of discouragement she had not really relaxed in the struggle against rags and dirt.And when moral horror had been blunted by custom and drink, physical horror had remained acute.For, human nature being a development upward through the physical to the spiritual, when a process of degeneration sets in, the topmost layers, the spiritual, wear away first--then those in which the spiritual is a larger ingredient than the material--then those in which the material is the larger--and last of all those that are purely material.
As life educated her, as her intelligence and her knowledge grew, her appreciation of luxury had grown apace and her desire for it.With most human beings, the imagination is a heavy bird of feeble wing; it flies low, seeing only the things of the earth.When they describe heaven, it has houses of marble and streets of gold.Their pretense to sight of higher things is either sheer pretense or sight at second hand.Susan was of the few whose fancy can soar.She saw the earthy things; she saw the things of the upper regions also.
And she saw the lower region from the altitudes of the higher--and in their perspective.
As she and Brent stood together on the sidewalk before his house, about to enter his big limousine, his smile told her that he had read her thought--her desire for such an automobile as her very own."I can't help it," said she.
"It's my nature to want these things."
"And to want them intelligently," said he."Everybody wants, but only the few want intelligently--and they get.The three worst things in the world are sickness, poverty and obscurity.
Your splendid health safeguards you against sickness.Your looks and your brains can carry you far away from the other two.Your one danger is of yielding to the temptation to become the wife or the mistress of some rich man.The prospect of several years of heart-breaking hard work isn't wildly attractive at twenty-two.""You don't know me," said Susan--but the boast was uttered under her breath.
The auto rushed up to Delmonico's entrance, came to a halt abruptly yet gently.The attentiveness of the personnel, the staring and whispering of the people in the palm room showed how well known Brent was.There were several women--handsome women of what is called the New York type, though it certainly does not represent the average New York woman, who is poorly dressed in flimsy ready-made clothes and has the mottled skin that indicates bad food and too little sleep.These handsome women were dressed beautifully as well as expensively, in models got in--not from--Paris.One of them smiled sweetly at Brent, who responded, so Susan thought, rather formally.She felt dowdy in her home-made dress.All her pride in it vanished; she saw only its defects.And the gracefully careless manner of these women--the manners of those who feel sure of themselves--made her feel "green" and out of place.
She was disgusted with the folly that had caused her to thrill with pleasure when his order to his chauffeur at his door told her she was actually to be taken to one of the restaurants in which she had wished to exhibit herself with him.She heartily wished she had insisted on going where she would have been as well dressed and as much at home as anyone there.
She lifted her eyes, to distract her mind from these depressing sensations.Brent was looking at her with that amused, mocking yet sympathetic expression which was most characteristic of him.She blushed furiously.
He laughed."No, I'm not ashamed of your homemade dress,"said he."I don't care what is thought of me by people who don't give me any money.And, anyhow, you are easily the most unusual looking and the most tastefully dressed woman here.
