no special friendliness in it; no exalted notion either about conferring happiness; why she liked to do so, she never thought; and if she had thought and questioned, would have been puzzled to tell; she did it as little children gregariously by instinct do, when they exclaim, "Oh, let 's do" this, or that, or the other—"it will be so nice!" That this was a surface and sensuous view of life, cannot be denied; but then, we are not drawing an ideal character; we are merely telling the exact truth about Susan Sweetser. She was not a saint by any manner of means, nor the stuff of which saints are made. She got no end of preaching to from pastors and from self-elected advisers, who saw in the free-souled young heiress a great opportunity for that obnoxious practice known as "doing good." But against all their lectures and sermons Susan's light-heartedness was a more effectual barrier than the hardest-heartedness in the world could have been. When they came, asking her for money, she pulled out her purse and gave it to them; not always so much as they asked for, because on some such points Susan had her own ideas of proportion and disproportion; yet she always gave liberally. But when they came preaching to her that she herself should do this and that, should go here and there, should be this and that, Susan smiled pleasantly, said little, but went on her way undisturbed. The odd thing was that she kept this undisturbed placidity of being comfortable in her own fashion, in
