Chapter 25 - Page 2

privileges had not been without difficulty for Susy.

Besides this, there were material difficulties to deal with.
The six of them, and the breathless bonne who cooked and slaved
for them all, had but a slim budget to live on; and, as Junie
remarked, you'd have thought the boys ate their shoes, the way
they vanished. They ate, certainly, a great deal else, and
mostly of a nourishing and expensive kind. They had definite
views about the amount and quality of their food, and were
capable of concerted rebellion when Susy's catering fell beneath
their standard. All this made her life a hurried and harassing
business, but never-- what she had most feared it would be a
dull or depressing one.

It was not, she owned to herself, that the society of the Fulmer
children had roused in her any abstract passion for the human
young. She knew--had known since Nick's first kiss--how she
would love any child of his and hers; and she had cherished poor
little Clarissa Vanderlyn with a shrinking and wistful
solicitude. But in these rough young Fulmers she took a
positive delight, and for reasons that were increasingly clear
to her. It was because, in the first place, they were all
intelligent; and because their intelligence had been fed only on
things worth caring for. However inadequate Grace Fulmer's
bringing-up of her increasing tribe had been, they had heard in
her company nothing trivial or dull: good music, good books and
good talk had been their daily food, and if at times they
stamped and roared and crashed about like children unblessed by
such privileges, at others they shone with the light of poetry
and spoke with the voice of wisdom.

That had been Susy's discovery: for the first time she was
among awakening minds which had been wakened only to beauty.
>From their cramped and uncomfortable household Grace and Nat
Fulmer had managed to keep out mean envies, vulgar admirations,
shabby discontents; above all the din and confusion the great
images of beauty had brooded, like those ancestral figures that
stood apart on their shelf in the poorest Roman households.

No, the task she had undertaken for want of a better gave Susy
no sense of a missed vocation: "mothering" on a large scale
would never, she perceived, be her job. Rather it gave her, in
odd ways, the sense of being herself mothered, of taking her
first steps in the life of immaterial values which had begun to
seem so much more substantial than any she had known.

On the day when she had gone to Grace Fulmer for counsel and
comfort she had little guessed that they would come to her in
this form. She had found her friend, more than ever distracted
and yet buoyant, riding the large untidy waves of her life with