Why do you live with a man you don't love?" she suddenly asked out of
the utter stillness.

It startled me, that question. It also embarrassed me, for I could
feel my color mount as Susie's lapis-lazuli eyes rested on my face.

"What makes you think I don't love him?" I countered, reminding myself
that Susie, after all, was still a girl in her teens.

"It's not a matter of thinking," was Susie's quiet retort. "I _know_
you don't."

"Then I wish I could be equally certain," I said with a defensive
stiffening of the lines of dignity.

But Susie smiled rather wearily at my forlorn little parade of
_hauteur_. Then she looked at the fire.

"It's hell, isn't it, being a woman?" she finally observed,
unconsciously paraphrasing a much older philosopher.

"Sometimes," I admitted.

"I don't see why you stand it," was her next meditative shaft in my
direction.

"What would you do about it?" I guardedly inquired.

Susie's face took on one of its intent looks. She was only in her
teens, but life, after all, hadn't dealt over-lightly with her. She
impressed me, at the moment, as a secretly ardent young person whose
hard-glazed little body might be a crucible of incandescent though
invisible emotions.

"What would you do about it?" I repeated, wondering what gave some
persons the royal right of doing the questionable and making it seem
unquestionable.

"_Live!_" said Susie with quite unlooked-for emphasis.
"_Live_--whatever it costs!"

"Wouldn't you regard this as living?" I asked, after a moment of
thought.

"Not as you ought to be," averred Susie.

"Why not?" I parried.

Susie sighed. She began to see that it was beyond argument, I suppose.
Then she too had her period of silence.

"But what are you getting out of it?" she finally demanded. "What is
going to happen? What ever _has_ happened?"

"To whom?" I asked, resenting the unconscious cruelty of her
questioning.

"To you," was the reply of the hard-glazed young hedonist confronting
me.

"Are you flattering me with the inference that I was cut out for
better things?" I interrogated as my gaze met Susie's. It was her turn
to color up a bit. Then she sighed again, and shook her head.

"I don't suppose it's doing either of us one earthly bit of good," she
said with a listless small smile of atonement. "And I'm sorry."

So we let the skeletons stalk away from our pleasant fireside and
secrete themselves in their customary closets of silence.

But I've