not at all like me.
I was middling small, with a square jaw, snub nose and sandy hair. Sue
was tall and easy moving, with an abundance of soft brown hair worn low
over large and irregular features. She had fascinating eyes. She could
sprawl on a rug or a sofa as lazy and indolent as you please--all but
her eyes, they were always doing something or other, letting this out or
keeping that back, practicing on me!

"Oh, yes, she'll marry soon enough," I thought. "This talk of a job for
life is a joke."

Some nights I would listen to her for hours. It was so good to come back
to life, to feel younger than my worries, to forget for a little while
that stark heavy certainty that poor old Dad would soon be a burden in
spite of himself, and that with a family on my hands I'd have to spend
the best years of my life slaving for a little hay.

I took the same delight in her friends.

Starting with her classmates in a Brooklyn high school, most of whom
were working over in New York, Sue had followed in their trail, and at
settlements, in studios and in girl bachelor flats she had picked up an
amazing assortment of friends. "Radicals," they called themselves.
Nothing was too wild or new for these friends of Sue's to jump into--and
what was more, to tie themselves to by a regular job in some queer
irregular office. "Votes for Women" was just starting up, and one of
this group, a stenographer in a suffragette office, had been in the
first small parade. Another, a stout florid youth who wrote poems for
magazines, had paraded bravely in her wake. Here were two girls who
lived in a tenement, did their own cooking and pushed East Side
investigations that they said would soon "shake up the town." There were
several rising muckrakers, too, some of whom did free work on the side
for socialist papers. There was one real socialist, a painter, who had a
red membership card in his pocket to prove that he belonged to "the
Party." Others were spreading music and art and dramatics through the
tenements--new music, new art and new dramatics. One young husband and
wife, intensely in love with one another, were working together night
and day for easier divorces which would put an end to the old-fashioned
home.

These people seemed to me to be laughing at a different old thing every
time. But when they weren't laughing they were scowling, over some new
attack upon life--and when they did that they were laughable. At least
so they were to me. Not t