Susie Byng

Susie Byng is an American abroad in Paris whose talkative self-assurance conceals a practical sympathy for homesickness. In the pension, she helps transform Hastings's painful sense of expatriate isolation into an initial social bond, then gives him a concrete route toward the Luxembourg Gardens, a place she associates with the recovery of home within a foreign city.

Identity and Introduction

Susie first appears at a pension with her mother, having been in Paris for three weeks. The narrator presents her as a thin young American woman who is alert to the social possibilities of the room: she knows that Hastings is present, is willing to be flattered if he looks at her, and at the same time feels superior because he has evidently only just arrived and has not yet unpacked his steamer trunk. Her experience is therefore limited but socially confident. Three weeks in Paris have given her enough local familiarity to judge a newcomer, though not enough to make her anything like a seasoned cosmopolitan.

Her conversation with her mother about the relative merits of the Louvre and the Bon Marché reinforces this mixture of confidence and superficiality. Susie's talk is described as complacent, while her mother contributes chiefly cautious interjections. The exchange places Susie within a recognizable expatriate type: an American traveler measuring Paris through famous institutions, shopping, and the performance of knowingness. Yet the character is not confined to that single note. Her later recognition of Hastings's homesickness reveals a more attentive and generous capacity beneath the conversational display.

Encounter with Hastings

At first Susie addresses her remarks chiefly to Mr. Bladen, while Mr. Bladen makes himself agreeable to Hastings after announcing that he recognizes him as American. The social arrangement is hesitant and indirect. Hastings, who is deeply homesick, responds gratefully when the conversation opens to him; Susie's general questions eventually include him, and the resulting exchange establishes what the narrative calls an entente cordiale. Susie and her mother then extend a kind of protectorate over Hastings, who has entered their social space as neutral territory rather than as an established acquaintance.

This protection is modest but consequential. Susie invites Hastings not to desert the pension every evening, warning that Paris is an awful place for young gentlemen and characterizing Mr. Bladen as a horrid cynic. The remark is partly social banter, but it also gives Hastings a reason to remain connected to the household. Her welcome counters the indifference he has just experienced from other Americans. In the pension's crowded social world, recognition itself becomes a form of assistance: Susie does not solve his homesickness, but she prevents it from becoming complete solitude.

Homesickness and the Luxembourg Gardens

Susie's most important moment comes when she identifies Hastings's emotional condition directly. She tells him that he is homesick, and when he blushes she follows the observation with a sympathetic account of her own early experience. At first, she says, walking with her mother in the Luxembourg Gardens made her feel nearer to home than anything else in the artificial city. Her explanation gives the garden a personal rather than merely touristic significance. It is not simply a Parisian attraction; for Susie, its old-fashioned character has allowed foreign surroundings to release memories of familiar life.

The contrast between Susie's feeling and her mother's mild skepticism is central to the exchange. Mrs. Byng sees marble statues and does not understand the resemblance to home, whereas Susie recognizes that emotional resemblance need not be literal. Her response to homesickness is therefore based on association, atmosphere, and movement through a place rather than on rational explanation. The garden becomes a portable emotional refuge: Paris remains artificial and foreign, yet a particular route through it can bring an American nearer to what has been left behind.

Hastings asks where the Luxembourg is, and Susie immediately turns sympathy into practical guidance. She walks with him to the gate and points out the rue Vavin at the foot of the street, explaining that he must pass the convent on the right. The scene gives her a small but definite agency in the plot. She does not merely diagnose Hastings's feeling or offer abstract comfort; she supplies directions that enable him to pursue the restorative experience she has described.

Social Role and Significance

Susie occupies a bridging position between arrival and belonging. She is herself a relatively recent visitor, but her three weeks in Paris have made her sufficiently oriented to guide someone newer. Her position lets her recognize both the vulnerability of Hastings and the awkward codes of expatriate sociability. She can speak within the lightly competitive conversation of the pension while also noticing the emotional reality that the room's chatter obscures.

Her characterization also complicates the masculine social environment around her. Hastings's depression is observed through his difficulty eating, his vacant responses, and his intensified pain at being ignored; Susie answers that condition with attention rather than mockery. Even her initial talkativeness, which reflects vanity and a desire to be noticed, becomes part of a more useful social performance when it creates an opening for Hastings. The narrative thus presents her as neither a purely idealized comforter nor a merely comic American tourist. She is socially self-conscious, somewhat patronizing, conversationally dominant, and nevertheless capable of genuine sympathy.

Susie's importance lies in this conversion of ordinary sociability into emotional intervention. A question, a recollection of walking with her mother, and directions toward the Luxembourg Gardens give Hastings a path out of isolation. Her influence is quiet and local, but it changes the texture of his experience in Paris: the city that had seemed wholly artificial acquires a remembered counterpart, and a stranger becomes, however briefly, a guide toward home.