Take care of five Fulmers for three months

　　Take care of five Fulmers for three months! The prospect cowedher. If there had been only Junie and Geordie, the oldest andyoungest of the band, she might have felt less hesitation. Butthere was Nat, the second in age, whose motor-horn had drivenher and Nick out to the hill-side on their fatal day at theFulmers' and there were the twins, Jack and Peggy, of whom shehad kept memories almost equally disquieting. To rule thisuproarious tribe would be a sterner business than trying tobeguile Clarissa Vanderlyn's ladylike leisure; and she wouldhave refused on the spot, as she had refused once before, if theonly possible alternatives had not come to seem so much lessbearable, and if Junie, called in for advice, and standingthere, small, plain and competent, had not said in her quietgrown-up voice: "Oh, yes, I'm sure Mrs. Lansing and I canmanage while you're away--especially if she reads aloud well."Reads aloud well! The stipulation had enchanted Susy. She hadnever before known children who cared to be read aloud to; sheremembered with a shiver her attempts to interest Clarissa inanything but gossip and the fashions, and the tone in which thechild had said, showing Strefford's trinket to her father:
　　"Because I said I'd rather have it than a book."And here were children who consented to be left for three monthsby their parents, but on condition that a good reader wasprovided for them!
　　"Very well--I will! But what shall I be expected to read toyou?" she had gaily questioned; and Junie had answered, afterone of her sober pauses of reflection: "The little ones likenearly everything; but Nat and I want poetry particularly,because if we read it to ourselves we so often pronounce thepuzzling words wrong, and then it sounds so horrid.""Oh, I hope I shall pronounce them right," Susy murmured,stricken with self-distrust and humility.
　　Apparently she did; for her reading was a success, and even thetwins and Geordie, once they had grown used to her, seemed toprefer a ringing page of Henry V, or the fairy scenes from theMidsummer Night's Dream, to their own more specializedliterature, though that had also at times to be provided.
　　There were, in fact, no lulls in her life with the Fulmers; butits commotions seemed to Susy less meaningless, and thereforeless fatiguing, than those that punctuated the existence ofpeople like Altringham, Ursula Gillow, Ellie Vanderlyn and theirtrain; and the noisy uncomfortable little house at Passy wasbeginning to greet her with the eyes of home when she returnedthere after her tramps to and from the children's classes. Atany rate she had the sense of doing something useful and evennecessary, and of earning her own keep, though on so modest ascale; and when the children were in their quiet mood, anddemanded books or music (or, even, on one occasion, at thesurprising Junie's instigation, a collective visit to theLouvre, where they recognized the most unlikely pictures, andthe two elders emitted startling technical judgments, and calledtheir companion's attention to details she had not observed); onthese occasions, Susy had a surprised sense of being drawn backinto her brief life with Nick, or even still farther and deeper,into those visions of Nick's own childhood on which the triviallater years had heaped their dust.
　　It was curious to think that if he and she had remainedtogether, and she had had a child--the vision used to come toher, in her sleepless hours, when she looked at little Geordie,in his cot by her bed--their life together might have been verymuch like the life she was now leading, a small obscure businessto the outer world, but to themselves how wide and deep andcrowded!