ted to be left for three months by
their parents, but on condition that a good reader was provided for
them!

"Very well--I will! But what shall I be expected to read to you?" she
had gaily questioned; and Junie had answered, after one of her sober
pauses of reflection: "The little ones like nearly everything; but Nat
and I want poetry particularly, because if we read it to ourselves we so
often pronounce the puzzling words wrong, and then it sounds so horrid."

"Oh, I hope I shall pronounce them right," Susy murmured, stricken with
self-distrust and humility.

Apparently she did; for her reading was a success, and even the twins
and Geordie, once they had grown used to her, seemed to prefer a ringing
page of Henry V, or the fairy scenes from the Midsummer Night's Dream,
to their own more specialized literature, though that had also at times
to be provided.

There were, in fact, no lulls in her life with the Fulmers; but
its commotions seemed to Susy less meaningless, and therefore less
fatiguing, than those that punctuated the existence of people like
Altringham, Ursula Gillow, Ellie Vanderlyn and their train; and the
noisy uncomfortable little house at Passy was beginning to greet her
with the eyes of home when she returned there after her tramps to and
from the children's classes. At any rate she had the sense of doing
something useful and even necessary, and of earning her own keep, though
on so modest a scale; and when the children were in their quiet
mood, and demanded books or music (or, even, on one occasion, at the
surprising Junie's instigation, a collective visit to the Louvre, where
they recognized the most unlikely pictures, and the two elders emitted
startling technical judgments, and called their companion's attention to
details she had not observed); on these occasions, Susy had a surprised
sense of being drawn back into her brief life with Nick, or even still
farther and deeper, into those visions of Nick's own childhood on which
the trivial later years had heaped their dust.

It was curious to think that if he and she had remained together, and
she had had a child--the vision used to come to her, in her sleepless
hours, when she looked at little Geordie, in his cot by her bed--their
life together might have been very much like the life she was now
leading, a small obscure business to the outer world, but to themselves
how wide and deep and crowded!

She could not bear, at that moment, the though