After a breakfast that passed in a blur of haste, with memory failing her except for the fact that she had actually eaten something, Susanna found herself seated on a streetcar heading toward her college.
She carried a fuzzy sense of the states she had drifted through on the way, aware that waking had felt chilly and premature, that washing herself had a strangely comforting heat to it, that her hair had settled into a flattering arrangement that morning, and that, when she looked into the dressing-table mirror, she appeared agreeable. Yet the only moments she could truly call her own—moments when thoughts and sensations coalesced into a single, deliberate focus—were those spent before another mirror tucked away in the far right corner of her dressing room, a shaft of light from the bedroom casting a partial glow upon it.
For in that reflective surface, Susanna suddenly appeared beautiful. But it wasn’t the beauty itself that drew her gaze with such sharpness; it was the troubling sense that in making her seem more beautiful, the magical mirror might have inadvertently transformed her into someone altogether unlike herself.
She suspected—though she could not be sure—that despite her eighteen years and the keen interest she took in her looks, she possessed only a vague notion of her own appearance. In those moments of heightened scrutiny she understood that she did not truly know how she looked, and the thought unsettled her profoundly. It even unsettled her to recall a recent episode, one evening when she had been dancing with Mr. Whitney, who admired her, and whose admiration—drawn from a rather unlikely source—had flattered her.
To this source of flattery, now seemingly exhausted after years of unfulfilled romantic escapades, she had boldly remarked, in response to a compliment: “Oh, I know my face isn’t perfectly regular; it’s only interesting.”
“But you’re quite mistaken, Miss Susanna,” the older, blunt Mr. Whitney had replied, with a glint in his questionable eye, “your features are quite evenly matched, and your visage is entirely charming, but not, as yet, extraordinarily interesting.”
Whenever Susanna recalled that exchange, or the moment when it occurred and intruded on her memory in such a vivid way, she wondered whether she had deserved the brazen liberty he had taken—being so intimate in a way that went beyond social convention. She felt the strange burn of it, though it had a curious sweetness to it, something more like a provocative thrill than a hurt.
Thus, peering into the shadowed mirror where she could so dramatically resemble a figure from a chiaroscuro photograph, Susanna’s thoughts and feelings merged into a single, intricate awareness. It contained not only the unhappy doubt that she was less striking than the strange illusion before her, but also the frustrated wish to know precisely how attractive she truly was and how others—A, B, and C—might judge her. And it crystallized into a sharp concern that her outward beauty might not align with her inner character, as though a physical form could confine and define a person’s spirit.
And how, she wondered uneasily, could anyone truly determine a type that appeared one way from the front and wholly different from the side? In that moment, as she studied herself, the front view presented a pale ivory oval, a halo of copper hair, serious gray eyes beneath straight brows that barely curled at the inner corners, a bow-shaped, full yet restrained mouth, and a straightforward nose—an otherwise balanced, almost classical countenance, a face she could imagine as passport-like, though she found it too conventional and resented overhearing such critical thoughts. On the other hand, viewed from the side, the beloved face shifted entirely. The oval thinned to a point, the nose became springy and lifted, the lips curved into faint dimples, and the eyes were reduced to their lashes, radiating an air of frivolity. And when she smiled! She abandoned the attempt to extract a single, coherent whole from these conflicting traits. She would simply accept the complete face and disregard the rest, which only existed if the mirrors were arranged in a particular way—a configuration that consumed time, and time, in her view, was her most precious possession.
Yet, in the end, she concluded that, for the moment, with only a moment’s expression to make the two views align, she was certainly attractive enough for ordinary purposes, perhaps even more handsome than many. If by chance she could be exceptionally striking, that would be all the better; if not, and she remained merely ordinary, well, then it was perhaps best not to know it just yet.
As for the question of being personal—though it brought embarrassment and a blush or two—didn’t the pursuit of truth justify the discomfort? Could it not be a form of duty to approach knowledge through intimate disclosure?
Yes, she told herself, it might be her duty to be highly personal and direct in dealing with others, lingering on the permissive mood of “may.” For she preferred that sense of possibility to the dull finality of “must.” Finality, she imagined, closes off paths and thereby stifles doubt, inquiry, knowledge, and freedom—echoing the way Dewey and Descartes had once framed it in her more systematic musings. Yet the prospect of “may” opened boundless horizons for her inner evolution.
Having given a hopeful nod to her more cautious, fixed self and while securing an amber chain under her chin that lay flat in the foreground and pointed to the side, she turned away from the mirror, her reflections left behind.
Susanna clung to a strap in the crowded car, surveying the seated crowd beneath her with a critical eye. No one among them had given her a seat, though several of the men were young and well-fed enough to spare one. She thought to herself that they must see her as a schoolgirl, pursing her lips into a sly, sardonic smile, while she squeezed the Aristotle she carried alongside Kidding’s Sociology and a volume of Morley. Feeling briefly misunderstood and undervalued, and perhaps a touch romantic, she shifted her gaze from one passenger to the next, convinced of only one thing: they all preferred to stay in their places rather than offer her a seat.
Among them she imagined there were anxious little women, fretting over the past or the future and not fully anchored in the present; there were stout, indifferent souls content merely to sit there; older men tucked away behind beards, spectacles, and newspapers; middle-aged, clean-shaven men whose thoughts lay with their offices, their bodies moving along a little more slowly; and then there were those her own age, though not all of them seemed fully alert to the moment and its richness. Even they, she thought, were not concrete. That, she decided, is the solution for these dull, lifeless humans and their quiet emptiness: when set apart and idle, they are not truly concrete at all. They possess the powers of thought and feeling, but only in latent form; in truth, each is only an individual insofar as he shares in the general concept—the idea—of humanity.
Susanna was delighted, genuinely charmed by this Platonic tint to her reflections. What would Dr. Miller of Philosophy 4. have made of it? What would Dr. Duke say? She let a soft smile spread across her lips and her eyes glow with a warm light, just as her glance moved along the carriage and landed on a distant passenger—one of the younger, sturdier men who seemed most likely to respond in kind. But the moment his face opened into a broad, welcoming smile in return, the flame of her interest promptly extinguished.
She drew her gaze inward, turning away from the stranger with a sense of affront. Indignation rose within her. How dared he. How repulsive, these cars. Why hadn’t Auntie chosen a motorvehicle instead of those lazy horses? That thought formed in her mind while her feelings remained only vaguely defined as impatience and resentment. And yet suddenly everything about this experience shifted for her. A flood of new sensations and noises rushed in: coughing, yawning, snorts, sighs, stamping, scraping, the ringing of the bell, the voices of the people, and the mingling scents of their perfumes and dampness. She felt the warmth and the chill of the doors as they opened and closed, the air’s stuffiness, and the touch of clothed bodies brushing against her. She felt surrounded—almost suffocated—by the immediacy of the world around her.
Things were no longer flat or abstract—Susanna could not think clearly until the car had carried her away.
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From Love Days by Ettie Stettheimer. Used with permission of the publisher, Mandylion Press. Copyright © 2026.
