“She’s always talked that way,” Billy answered, surprised at her vehemence.  “You used to talk that way yourself.  You’re the one that has changed.”

Winter came on rapidly.  The mornings were dark and cold now when Susan dressed, the office did not grow comfortably warm until ten o’clock, and the girls wore their coats loose across their shoulders as they worked.

Sometimes at noon Miss Thornton and Susan fared forth into the cold, sunny streets, and spent the last half of the lunch-hour in a brisk walk.  They went into the high-vaulted old Post Street Library for books, threaded their way along Kearney Street, where the noontide crowd was gaily ebbing and flowing, and loitered at the Flower Market, at Lotta’s Fountain, drinking in the glory of violets and daffodils, under the winter sun.  Now and then they lunched uptown at some inexpensive restaurant that was still quiet and refined.  The big hotels were far too costly but there were several pretty lunchrooms, “The Bird of Paradise,” “The London Tearoom,” and, most popular of all, “The Ladies Exchange.”

The girls always divided a twenty-five-cent entree between them, and each selected a ten-cent dessert, leaving a tip for the waitress out of their stipulated half-dollar.  It was among the unwritten laws that the meal must appear to more than satisfy both.

“Thorny, you’ve got to have the rest of this rice!” Susan would urge, gathering the slender remains of “Curried chicken family style” in her serving spoon.

“Honestly, Susan, I couldn’t!  I’ve got more than I want here,” was the orthodox response.

“It’ll simply go to waste here,” Susan always said, but somehow it never did.  The girls loitered over these meals, watching the other tables, and the women who came to the counters to buy embroidered baby-sacques, and home-made cakes and jellies.

“Wouldn’t you honestly like another piece of plum pie, Sue?” Thorny would ask.

“I?  Oh, I couldn’t!  But you have one, Thorny—­”

“I simply couldn’t!” So it was time to ask for the check.

They were better satisfied, if less elegantly surrounded, when they went to one of the downtown markets, and had fried oysters for lunch.  Susan loved the big, echoing places, cool on the hottest day, never too cold, lined with long rows of dangling, picked fowls, bright with boxes of apples and oranges.  The air was pleasantly odorous of cheeses and cooked meats, cocks crowed unseen in crates and cages, bare-headed boys pushed loaded trucks through the narrow aisles.  Susan and Miss Thornton would climb a short flight of whitewashed stairs to a little lunch-room over one of the oyster stalls.  Here they could sit at a small table, and look down at the market, the shoppers coming and going, stout matrons sampling sausages and cheeses, and Chinese cooks, bareheaded, bare-ankled, dressed in dark blue duck, selecting broilers and roasts.