pleasantries. Mrs. Lancaster helped the soup rapidly from a large
tureen, her worried eyes moved over the table-furnishings without
pause.

The soup was well cooled before the place next to Susan was filled
by a tall and muscular young man, with very blue eyes, and a large
and exceptionally charming mouth. The youth had teeth of a dazzling
whiteness, a smile that was a bewildering Irish compound of laughter
and tears, and sooty blue-black hair that fitted his head like a
thick cap. He was a noisy lad, this William Oliver, opinionated,
excitable, a type that in its bigness and broadness seemed almost
coarse, sometimes, but he had all a big man's tenderness and
sweetness, and everyone liked him. Susan and he quarreled with and
criticized each other, William imitating her little affectations of
speech and manner, Susan reviling his transparent and absurd
ambitions, but they had been good friends for years. Young Oliver's
mother had been Mrs. Lancaster's housekeeper for the most prosperous
period in the history of the house, and if Susan naturally felt that
the son of a working housekeeper was seriously handicapped in a
social sense, she nevertheless had many affectionate memories of his
mother, as the kindly dignified "Nellie" who used to amuse them so
delightfully on rainy days. Nellie had been long dead, now, and her
son had grown up into a vigorous, enthusiastic young person, burning
his big hands with experiments in physics and chemistry, reading the
Scientific American late into the night, until his broad shoulders
were threatened with a permanent stoop, and his eager eyes blinked
wearily at breakfast, anxious to disprove certain accepted theories,
and as eager to introduce others, unaffected, irreverent, and
irresistibly buoyant. William could not hear an opera praised
without dragging Susan off to gallery seats, which the lady frankly