cate
her, but it was an open secret that they had not taught her much.
Susan did not take kindly to books. No one had ever been able to teach
her how to cipher and learning the piano had been a fruitless effort
abandoned in her fifteenth year. It is only just to her to say that
she had her little talents. She was an excellent housekeeper, and she
could cook certain dishes better, the doctor said, than the chefs in
some of the fine restaurants in New York City.

But what were the sober pleasures of housekeeping and cooking beside
the rough, deep-living exhilaration of gypsy life on the plains! She
looked back pityingly at those days of stagnant peace, compared the
entertainment to be extracted from embroidering a petticoat frill to
the exultant joy of a ride in the morning over the green swells. Who
would sip tea in the close curtained primness of the parlor when they
could crouch by the camp fire and eat a corn cake baked on the ashes or
drink brown coffee from a tin cup? And her buffalo robe on the ground,
the blanket tucked round her shoulder, the rustling of furtive animal
life in the grass outside the tent wall--was there any comparison
between its comfort and that of her narrow white bed at home, between
the clean sheets of which she had snuggled so luxuriously?

There were other matters of charm and interest in the wilderness,
matters that Susan did not speak about--hardly admitted to herself, for
she was a modest maid. She had never yet had a lover; no man had ever
kissed her or held her hand longer than a cool, impersonal respect
dictated. In Rochester no one had turned to look at the doctor's
daughter as she walked by, for, in truth, there were many girls much
prettier and more piquant than Susan Gillespie. But, nevertheless, she
had had her dreams about the lover that some day was to come and carry
her off under a wreath of orange blossoms and a white veil. She did
not aspire to a struggling hoard of suitors, but she thought it would
be only fair and entirely within the realm of the possible if she had
two; most girls had two.

Now she felt the secret elation that follows on the dream realized.
She did not tell herself that David and Leff were in love with her.
She would have regarded all speculations on such a sacred subject as
low and unmaidenly. But the consciousness of it permeated her being
with a gratified sense of her worth as a woman. It made her feel her
value. Like all girls of her pr