After a hasty breakfast, of which she remembered nothing but that she had eaten it, Susanna found herself on the street car bound for college.
She had indeed been dimly aware of the states through which she had passed up to the time of her presence in the car; had known that getting out of bed felt cold and premature; that bathing felt pleasurably hot; that her hair fixed itself becomingly this morning, and that she looked well in the mirror over the dressing table. But her only fully conscious moments, when thoughts and sensations met in focused attention, were those spent before that other mirror situated in the recesses of the right hand corner of her dressing-room which a shaft of light, penetrating from the bedroom, struck, and partially illumined.
For in this mirror Susanna suddenly became beautiful. But it was not because she became beautiful that Susanna contemplated herself with sharp attention, it was because unhappily she suspected that in beautifying her this enchanted mirror had coincidently transformed her into some one totally unlike herself.
She suspected—: she was not certain; in spite of her eighteen years of life, and the very pronounced interest she took in her appearance, she had in truth only the faintest idea of what “she looked like.” And in critically illumined moments she knew that she did not know how she really looked, and it disturbed her deeply.— It even disconcerted her to remember what had occurred not long ago, one evening, when she was sitting out a dance with Mr. Whitney, who admired her, and whose admiration, flowing from so difficult a source, flattered her.
To this source of admiration, then, reputedly run dry through years of wasted sentimental experience, she had à propos of some compliment boldly remarked: “Oh, I know that my face isn’t regular; it’s only interesting.”
“But you’re quite mistaken, Miss Susanna,” the oldish livedout-to-the-point-of-being-devoid-of-tact Mr. Whitney, aged thirty-three, had replied, with a flicker in his fishy eye; “your features are quite perfectly regular, and your countenance is entirely charming, but not, as yet, unusually interesting.”
Indeed, whenever Susanna recalled this conversational occurrence, or, more accurately put, whenever this occurrence recalled itself to Susanna, as it did with unpleasant persistency, and preferably at this mirror, bringing a blush along with it posthumously as it were,—Susanna wondered whether she had deserved to have this upsetting liberty taken by Mr. Whitney. Deserved it for having been so very personal herself. . . . For, in accordance with what were generally held to be purely-social-intercoursemanners, she had of course transgressed; she had not, of course, conformed to the standards implicit in conversations ending abruptly with “oh, if you are going to be personal, we had better change the subject.” But, in accordance with her own feelings it was quite as natural and quite as fascinating to jump into a personal conversation as for a child to play with fire. . . . And in regard to the resultant burn, Susanna felt doubtful whether she would have known it to be an unpleasant pain if she had not so insistently been told so,—because, really, in feeling, it was rather a pleasant pain.
Thus, gazing into the mirror situated in the shadows, in which she became so dramatically beautiful a creature in the style of a chiaroscuro photograph, Susanna’s thoughts, feelings and sensations fused in a moment of full and complex consciousness. It contained not only her unhappy suspicion that she was decidedly less goodlooking than this strange simulacrum,—it contained not only the frustrated wish to know just how goodlooking she really was, and how goodlooking a, b, and c thought her, but it crystallized finally into a sharp worry lest her looks and her character did not sufficiently match one another. . . . She suddenly feared that this physical type of hers, which she found so difficult to realize, might somehow restrict her spiritual development within its own limits, as a frame limits and delimits its picture.
And how—Susanna reflected uneasily—could she or anyone else realize and define a type which from the front view was one, and from the side view another. . . . As now, for instance, she viewed herself in this mirror, she saw an oval the colour of pale ivory, an aureole of shining copper hair, wide open serious grey eyes with straight brows that rose a little at the inner ends, bowshaped, full but compressed lips, an ordinary straight nose;—in combination an even, regular, almost classical face, a face a little like a passport face, she thought,—but she thought it very low, so to say, because she instinctively disliked the strange self-face to overhear these critical thoughts that had a way of obtruding themselves without her permission. . . . On the other hand—she reflected—looked at from the side, this baffling but beloved face was totally changed. The oval became pointed; the nose springy and uplifted; the lips developed dimpled corners; the eyes were chiefly lashes, and the general air was that of frivolity. . . . And when she smiled! . . . Oh, she gave it up, this getting a whole out of incongruous aspects! She would simply adopt the full face and ignore the rest, which wasn’t there anyway unless one arranged the mirrors in a certain way, an operation that took time; and time was her most precious possession. . . .
And after all, Susanna concluded for the time being, with an expression that made her full face match her side face exactly, one thing was certain: she was goodlooking enough for all practical purposes, and far better looking than most people; and if it should turn out that she was in any way very wonderful looking, so much the better; and if it didn’t, and she wasn’t, why then it was just as well not to know it now!
And as for that other matter, the matter of being personal,— even though it entailed some embarrassment, and some real and potential blushes, wasn’t finding things out worth these discomforts—supposing them to be discomforts and not merely an exciting game? Might it not indeed be one’s duty to be personal as a means to knowledge?
Yes, it may be my duty to be extremely personal and direct in my dealings with my fellow men, Susanna told herself, lingering on the “may.” For she liked the mood “may”: finality was distasteful to her. Finality, she thought, definitely closed paths and thereby ended that doubt whence sprang inquiry, knowledge, and freedom,—as Dewey and Descartes put it for her in a more systematized region of the mind. . . . But with “may” and its vision of infinite possibilities stretching in all directions, her own chances of spiritual becoming multiplied into infinity. . . .
And having smiled expectantly at her more limited and stationary self, and having clasped an amber chain under the chin that was round in the full view and pointed in the side, she had turned herself and her thoughts from the mirror.
Susanna hung to a strap in the crowded car, and critically surveyed the seated crowd spreading just below, from which no one had separated and individualized himself by giving her a seat. Yet several of the men were young and fat and perfectly fitted for the performance of such an act. They think I’m a schoolgirl, Susanna observed to herself, pursing her lips into what she conceived to be a subtle sarcastic sneer, and squeezing a little the Aristotle she carried under her arm together with Kidding’s Sociology and a volume of Morley. And feeling pleasantly misunderstood and undervalued and hence a shade romantic, she carried her sarcastic-feeling and naïve-looking stare from one to the other of these strange people, of whom but one thing seemed conclusively certain: that they wished to remain seated.
There were among them—she thought to see—worried nervous little women, gazing into the past or into the future,—absent from the present at any rate; there were apathetic stout ones, fully occupied with just sitting there; there were elderly men concealed somewhere back of beards, eyeglasses and newspapers; middle-aged clean-shaven ones whose minds were in their offices and whose persons were travelling there a little more slowly; and then there were those who like herself were young. Yet even these were not alert and alive to the moment, to its complexity and fulness. . . . Even they, thought Susanna, are not concrete. Yes, that is it, that is the solution of these dumb and deadish human beings and their lack of expression: they are at present, when in isolation and unoccupied, not so much abstracted, as really abstract. They possess the faculties of thinking and feeling,—but latently, as it were, that is to say, they are potentially individuals, but actually nothing individual is happening to them, or in them, or through their agency. Hence, actually, each is only in so far an individual as he partakes of the general concept—the idea—of humanity.
Susanna was pleased, quite charmed, in fact, with this Platonically flavoured analysis. What, she wondered, would Dr. Miller of Philosophy 4., or Dr. Duke have thought of it. . . . And her lips parted sweetly in a smile of imagined satisfaction, and her eyes grew large and bright with a warm flame just when, in their progressive survey, they alighted on a remote passenger, one of the suitable, stout young men. And here in the wide, welcoming and inviting smile of his response their flame was instantly and definitely extinguished.
Withdrawing her offended eyes into her head, as it were, Susanna moved bodily away, as far as possible, from contact with this experience. She frowned; her lips compressed themselves; her chin lifted: indignation filled her. How dared he. . . how loathsome were these cars. . . why didn’t Auntie have a motor anyway instead of those lazy horses, she would have to sooner or later—: this was all that formulated itself in her mind, while her feelings registered nothing more definite than impatience and resentment. Yet, all of a sudden everything had changed for her.— She now sensed a chaos of new things—: coughs and yawns and snorts and sighs and stampings and scrapings and the clanging of the bell and the voices of the people and the smell of their various perfumes and their various dampnesses. . . . She now felt the heat and the cold of the opening and closing of the door, and the stuffiness of the air, and the touch of the clothed bodies that brushed against her. She now felt tightly encompassed—almost smothered—by surrounding happenings.
Things were no longer dead or even abstract—Susanna could think no more until she had left that car.
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From Love Days by Ettie Stettheimer. Used with permission of the publisher, Mandylion Press. Copyright © 2026.
