BOOK III

THE BENT TWIG

BY

DOROTHY CANFIELD

1915

CONTENTS

BOOK I

_IN ARCADIA_

CHAPTER

I SYLVIA'S HOME

II THE MARSHALLS' FRIENDS

III BROTHER AND SISTER

IV EVERY ONE'S OPINION OF EVERY ONE ELSE

V SOMETHING ABOUT HUSBANDS

VI THE SIGHTS OF LA CHANCE

VII "WE HOLD THESE TRUTHS TO BE SELF-EVIDENT ..."

VIII SABOTAGE

IX THE END OF CHILDHOOD

BOOK II

_A FALSE START TO ATHENS_

X SYLVIA'S FIRST GLIMPSE OF MODERN CIVILIZATION

XI ARNOLD'S FUTURE Is CASUALLY DECIDED

XII ONE MAN'S MEAT

XIII AN INSTRUMENT IN TUNE

XIV HIGHER EDUCATION

XV MRS. DRAPER BLOWS THE COALS

XVI PLAYING WITH MATCHES

XVII MRS. MARSHALL STICKS TO HER PRINCIPLES

XVIII SYLVIA SKATES MERRILY ON THIN ICE

XIX AS A BIRD OUT OF A SNARE

XX "BLOW, WIND; SWELL, BILLOW; AND SWIM, BARK!"

XXI SOME YEARS DURING WHICH NOTHING HAPPENS

BOOK III

_IN CAPUA AT LAST_

XXII A GRATEFUL CARTHAGINIAN

XXIII MORE TALK BETWEEN YOUNG MODERNS

XXIV ANOTHER BRAND OF MODERN TALK

XXV NOTHING IN THE LEAST MODERN

XXVI MOLLY IN HER ELEMENT

XXVII BETWEEN WINDWARD AND HEMLOCK MOUNTAINS

XXVIII SYLVIA ASKS HERSELF "WHY NOT?"

XXIX A HYPOTHETICAL LIVELIHOOD

XXX ARNOLD CONTINUES TO DODGE THE RENAISSANCE

XXXI SYLVIA MEETS WITH PITY

XXXII MUCH ADO

XXXIII "WHOM GOD HATH JOINED..."

XXXIV SYLVIA TELLS THE TRUTH

XXXV "A MILESTONE PASSED, THE ROAD SEEMS CLEAR"

XXXVI THE ROAD IS NOT SO CLEAR

XXXVII "... _His wife and children perceiving it, began

to cry after him to return; but the man put his

fingers in his ears and ran on, crying, 'Life!

Life Eternal_!'"

XXXVIII SYLVIA COMES TO THE WICKET GATE

XXXIX SYLVIA DRIFTS WITH THE MAJORITY

BOOK IV

_THE STRAIT PATH_

XL A CALL FROM HOME

XLI HOME AGAIN

XLII "_Strange that we creatures of the petty ways,

Poor prisoners behind these fleshly bars,

Can sometimes think us thoughts with God ablaze,

Touching the fringes of the outer stars_"

XLIII "_Call now; is there any that will answer thee_?"

XLIV "_A bruised reed will He not break, and a dimly

burning wick will He not quench_"

XLV "_That our soul may swim

We sink our heart down, bubbling, under wave_"

XLVI A LONG TALK WITH ARNOLD

XLVII "...AND ALL THE TRUMPETS SOUNDED!"

THE BENT TWIG

BOOK I

_IN ARCADIA_

CHAPTER I

SYLVIA'S HOME

Like most happy childhoods, Sylvia's early years lay back of her in a

long, cheerful procession of featureless days, the outlines of which

were blurred into one shimmering glow by the very radiance of their

sunshine. Here and there she remembered patches, sensations, pictures,

scents: Mother holding baby sister up for her to kiss, and the

fragrance of the baby powder--the pine-trees near the house chanting

loudly in an autumn wind--her father's alert face, intent on the

toy water-wheel he was setting for her in the little creek in their

field--the beautiful sheen of the pink silk dress Aunt Victoria had

sent her--the look of her mother's steady, grave eyes when she was so

sick--the leathery smell of the books in the University Library

one day when she followed her father there--the sound of the rain

pattering on the low, slanting roof of her bedroom--these were the

occasional clearly outlined, bright-colored illuminations wrought on

the burnished gold of her sunny little life. But from her seventh

birthday her memories began to have perspective, continuity. She

remembered an occasional whole scene, a whole afternoon, just as it

happened.

The first of these must have marked the passing of some unrecognized

mental milestone, for there was nothing about it to set it apart from

any one of a hundred afternoons. It may have been the first time she

looked at what was about her, and saw it.

Mother was putting the baby to bed for his nap--not the

baby-sister--she was a big girl of five by this time, but another

baby, a little year-old brother, with blue eyes and yellow hair,

instead of brown eyes and hair like his two sisters'. And when Mother

stooped over the little bed, her white fichu fell forward and Sylvia

leaned to hold it back from the baby's face, a bit of thoughtfulness

which had a rich reward in a smile of thanks from Mother. That was

what began the remembered afternoon. Mother's smiles were golden coin,

not squandered on every occasion. Then, she and Mother and Judith

tiptoed out of the bedroom into Mother's room and there stood Father,

with his University clothes on and yet his hair rather rumpled up, as

though he had been teaching very hard. He had a pile of papers in his

hand and he said, "Barbara, are you awfully busy just now?"

Mother said, Oh no, she wasn't at all. (She never was busy when Father

asked her to do something, although Sylvia could not remember ever

once having seen her sit and do nothing, no, not even for a minute!)

Then Father said, "Well, if you _could_ run over these, I'd have time

to have some ball with the seminar after they're dismissed. These are

the papers the Freshmen handed in for that Economics quiz." Mother

said, "Sure she could," or the equivalent of that, and Father thanked

her, turned Judith upside-down and right-side-up again so quick that

she didn't know what had happened, and left them all laughing as they

usually were when Father ran down from the study for something.

So Sylvia and Judith, quite used to this procedure, sat down on the

floor with a book to keep them quiet until Mother should be through.

Neither of them could read, although Sylvia was beginning to learn,

but they had been told the stories so many times that they knew them

from the pictures. The book they looked at that day had the story of

the people who had rowed a great boat across the water to get a gold

sheepskin, and Sylvia told it to Judith, word for word, as Father

always told it. She glanced up at Mother from time to time to make

sure she was getting it right; and ever afterwards the mention of the

Argonauts brought up before Sylvia's eyes the picture of her mother

that day, sitting very straight, her strong brown fingers making an

occasional mark on the papers, as she turned them over with a crisp

rustle, her quiet face bent, in a calm fixity of attention, over the

pages.

Before they knew it, the work was done, Father had come for the

papers, and showed Sylvia one more twist in the acrobatic stunt they

were learning together. She could already take his hands and run up

to his shoulders in one squirrel-like dash; but she was to learn the

reverse and come down on the other side, and she still got tangled up

with which foot to put first. So they practised whenever they had, as

now, a minute or two to spare.

Then Judith was set to play with her blocks like the baby she still

was, while Sylvia and Mother had a lesson in reading. Sylvia could

remember the very sound of Mother's clear voice as she corrected a

mistake. They were reading a story about what happened to a drop of

water that fell into the brook in their field; how, watering the

thirsty cornfields as it flowed, the brook ran down to the river

near La Chance, where it worked ever so many mills and factories and

things. Then on through bigger and bigger rivers until it reached

the Mississippi, where boats rode on its back; and so on down to the

ocean. And there, after resting a while, it was pumped up by the sun

and made into a cloud, and the wind blew it back over the land and

to their field again, where it fell into the brook and said, "Why,

how-de-do, Sylvia--you still here?"

Father had written the story, and Mother had copied it out on the

typewriter so it would be easy for Sylvia to read.

After they had finished she remembered looking out of the window and

watching the big white clouds drift across the pale bright April sky.

They were full of hundreds of drops of water, she thought, that were

going to fall into hundreds of other brooks, and then travel and work

till they reached the sea, and then rest for a while and begin all

over again. Her dark eyes grew very wide as she watched the endless

procession of white mountains move across the great arch of the sky.

Her imagination was stirred almost painfully, her mind expanding with

the effort to take in the new conception of size, of great numbers, of

the small place of her own brook, her own field in the hugeness of

the world. And yet it was an ordered hugeness full of comforting

similarity! Now, no matter where she might go, or what brooks she

might see, she would know that they were all of one family, that the

same things happened to them all, that every one ended in the ocean.

Something she had read on a piece of paper made her see the familiar

home field with the yellow water of the little creek, as a part of the

whole world. It was very strange. She tried to tell Mother something

of what was in her mind, but, though Mother listened in a sympathetic

silence, it was evident that she could make nothing out of the

incoherent account. Sylvia thought that she would try to tell Father,

the next chance she had. Even at seven, although she loved her mother

passionately and jealously, she was aware that her father's mind was

more like her own. He understood some things that Mother didn't,

although Mother was always, always right, and Father wasn't. She fell

into silence again, standing by her mother's knee, staring out of the

window and watching the clouds move steadily across the sky doing

their share of the world's work for all they looked so soft and lazy.

Her mother did not break in on this meditative contemplation. She took

up her sewing-basket and began busily to sew buttons on a small pair

of half-finished night-drawers. The sobered child beside her, gazing

up at the blue-and-white infinity of the sky, heard faintly and

distantly, for the first time in her life, the whirring reverberations

of the great mystic wheel of change and motion and life.

Then, all at once, there was a scraping of chairs overhead in Father's

study, a clattering on the stairs, and the sound of a great many

voices. The Saturday seminar was over. The door below opened, and the

students came out, Father at the head, very tall, very straight, his

ruddy hair shining in the late afternoon sun, his shirt-sleeves rolled

up over his arms, and a baseball in his hand. "Come on, folks," Sylvia

heard him call, as he had so many times before. "Let's have a couple

of innings before you go!" Sylvia must have seen the picture a hundred

times before, but that was the first time it impressed itself on her,

the close-cut grass of their yard as lustrous as enamel, the big

pine-trees standing high, the scattered players, laughing and running

about, the young men casting off their coats and hats, the detached

fielders running long-legged to their places. At the first sound of

the voices, Judith, always alert, never wasting time in reveries, had

scampered down the stairs and out in the midst of the stir-about.

Judith was sure to be in the middle of whatever was going on. She had

attached herself to young Professor Saunders, a special favorite of

the children, and now was dragging him from the field to play horse

with her. Father looked up to the window where Sylvia and Mother sat,

and called: "Come on, Barbara! Come on and amuse Judith. She won't let

Saunders pitch."

Mother nodded, ran downstairs, coaxed Judith over beyond first base to

play catch with a soft rubber ball; and Sylvia, carried away by the

cheerful excitement, hopped about everywhere at once, screaming

encouragement to the base runners, picking up foul balls, and sending

them with proud importance back to the pitcher.

So they all played and shouted and ran and laughed, while the long,

pale-golden spring afternoon stood still, until Mother held up her

finger and stopped the game. "The baby's awake!" she said, and Father

went bounding off. When he came back with the downy pink morsel,

everybody gathered around to see it and exclaim over the tiny fat

hands and hungry little rosebud mouth. "He's starved!" said Mother.

"He wants his supper, poor little Buddy! He doesn't want a lot of

people staring at him, do you, Buddy-baby?" She snatched him out

of Father's arms and went off with him, holding him high over her

shoulders so that the sunshine shone on his yellow hair, and made a

circle of gold around his flushed, sleepy face. Then everybody picked

up books and wraps and note-books and said, "Good-by, 'Perfessor!'"

and went off.

Father and Sylvia and Judith went out in the garden to the hotbed to

pick the lettuce for supper and then back in the kitchen to get things

ready. When Mother was through giving Buddy his supper and came

hurrying in to help, Sylvia was proud that they had nearly everything

done--all but the omelet. Father had made cocoa and creamed

potatoes--nobody in the world could make creamed potatoes as good as

his--and Sylvia and Judith had between them, somewhat wranglingly,

made the toast and set the table. Sylvia was sure that Judith was

really too little to be allowed to help, but Father insisted that she

should try, for he said, with a turn in his voice that made Sylvia

aware he was laughing at her, "You only learned through trying, all

those many years ago when you were Judith's age!"

Mother put on one of her big gingham aprons and made the omelet, and

they sat down to the table out on the veranda as they always did in

warm weather. In La Chance it begins to be warm enough for outdoor

life in April. Although it was still bright daylight for ever so long

after the sun had set, the moon came and looked at them palely over

the tops of the trees.

After supper they jumped up to "race through the dishes," as the

family catchword ran. They tried to beat their record every evening

and it was always a lively occasion, with Mother washing like

lightning, and Father hurrying to keep up, Sylvia running back and

forth to put things away, and Judith bothering 'round, handing out dry

dish-towels, and putting away the silver. She was allowed to handle

that because she couldn't break it. Mother and Judith worked in a

swift silence, but a great deal of talking and laughing went on

between Sylvia and her father, while Buddy, from his high-chair where

he was watching the others, occasionally broke out in a loud, high

crow of delight. They did it all, even to washing and hanging out

the dish-towels, in eleven and a half minutes that evening, Sylvia

remembered.

Then she and Judith went to sit on the porch on the little bench

Mother had made them. They tried to see who could catch the first

glimpse of the evening star every evening. Mother was putting Buddy to

bed and Father was starting the breakfast cereal cooking on the stove.

After a while he went into the living-room and began to play something

on the piano, something full of deep, swaying chords that lifted

Sylvia's heart up and down as though she were floating on the water.

The air was full of the moist fragrance of spring. When the music held

its breath for a moment you could hear the bedtime note of sleepy

birds in the oaks. Judith, who did not care much for music, began

to get sleepy and leaned all her soft, warm weight against her big

sister. Sylvia for the first time in her life was consciously aware of

being very happy. When, some time later, the evening star shone out

through the trees, she drew a long breath. "See, Judith," she cried

softly and began to recite,

"Star-light, star-bright,

First star I've seen tonight--"

She stopped short--it was Aunt Victoria who had taught her that poem,

the last time she had come to see them, a year ago, the time when she

had brought Sylvia the pink silk dress, the only dress-up dress with

lace and ribbons on it Sylvia had had up to that time. As suddenly as

the evening star had shone out, another radiant vision flashed across

Sylvia's mind, Aunt Victoria, magnificent in her lacy dress, her

golden hair shining under the taut silk of her parasol, her white,

soft fingers gleaming with rings, her air of being a condescending

goddess, visiting mortals ...

After a time Mother stepped out on the porch and said, "Oh, quick,

children, wish on the shooting star."

Judith had dropped asleep like a little kitten tired of play, and

Sylvia looked at her mother blankly. "I didn't see any shooting star,"

she said.

Mother was surprised. "Why, your face was pointed right up at the

spot."

"I didn't see it," repeated Sylvia.

Mother fixed her keen dark eyes on Sylvia. "What's the matter?" she

asked in her voice that always required an answer. Sylvia wriggled

uncomfortably. Hers was a nature which suffers under the categorical

question; but her mother's was one which presses them home.

"What's the matter with you?" she said again.

Sylvia turned a clouded face to her mother. "I was wondering why it's

not nice to be idyllic."

"_What_?" asked her mother, quite at a loss. Sylvia was having one of

her unaccountable notions.

Sylvia went to lean on her mother's knee, looking with troubled eyes

up into the kind, attentive, uncomprehending face. "Why, the last time

Aunt Victoria was here--that long time ago--when they were all out

playing ball--she looked round and round at everything--at your dress

and mine and the furniture--_you_ know--the--the uncomfortable way she

does sometimes--and she said, 'Well, Sylvia--nobody can say that your

parents aren't leading you a very idyllic life.'"

Mother laughed out. Her rare laugh was too sudden and loud to be very

musical, but it was immensely infectious, like a man's hearty mirth.

"I didn't hear her say it--but I can imagine that she did. Well, what

_of_ it? What if she did?"

For once Sylvia did not respond to another's mood. She continued

anxiously, "Well, it means something perfectly horrid, doesn't it?"

Mother was still laughing. "No, no, child, what in the world makes you

think that?"

"Oh, if you'd heard Aunt Victoria _say_ it!" cried Sylvia with

conviction. Father came out on the veranda, saying to Mother, "Isn't

that crescendo superb?" To Sylvia he said, as though sure of her

comprehension, "Didn't you like the ending, dear--where it sounded

like the Argonauts all striking the oars into the water at once and

shouting?"

Sylvia had been taught above everything to tell the truth. Moreover

(perhaps a stronger reason for frankness), Mother was there, who would

know whether she told the truth or not. "I didn't hear the end."

Father looked quickly from Sylvia's face to her mother's. "What's the

matter?" he asked.

"Sylvia was so concerned because her Aunt Victoria had called our life

idyllic that she couldn't think of anything else," explained Mother

briefly, still smiling. Father did not smile. He sat down by Sylvia

and had her repeat to him what she had said to her mother. When she

had finished he looked grave and said: "You mustn't mind what your

Aunt Victoria says, dear. Her ideas are very different from ours."

Sylvia's mother cried out, "Why, a child of Sylvia's age couldn't have

taken in the significance of--"

"I'm afraid," said Father, "that Sylvia's very quick to take in such a

significance."

Sylvia remained silent, uncomfortable at being discussed, vaguely

ashamed of herself, but comforted that Father had not laughed, had

understood. As happened so frequently, it was Father who understood

and Mother who did the right thing. She suddenly made an enigmatic,

emphatic exclamation, "Goodness _gracious_!" and reaching out her long

arms, pulled Sylvia up on her lap, holding her close. The last thought

of that remembered time for Sylvia was that Mother's arms were very

strong, and her breast very soft. The little girl laid her head down

on it with a contented sigh, watching the slow, silent procession of

the stars.

CHAPTER II

THE MARSHALLS' FRIENDS

Any one of the more sophisticated members of the faculty of the State

University at La Chance would have stated without hesitation that the

Marshalls had not the slightest part in the social activities of the

University; but no one could have called their life either isolated or

solitary. Sylvia, in her memories of childhood, always heard the low,

brown house ringing with music or echoing to the laughter and talk

of many voices. To begin with, a good many of Professor Marshall's

students came and went familiarly through the plainly furnished rooms,

although there was, of course, in each year's class, a little circle

of young people with a taste for social distinctions who held aloof

from the very unselect and heterogeneous gatherings at the Marshall

house.

These young aristocrats were, for the most part, students from the

town itself, from La Chance's "best families," who through parental

tyranny or temporary financial depression were not allowed to go East

to a well-known college with a sizable matriculation fee, but were

forced to endure four years of the promiscuous, swarming, gratuitous

education of the State University. All these august victims of family

despotism associated as little as possible with the common rabble of

their fellow-students, and accepted invitations only from such faculty

families as were recognized by the inner circle of the town society.

The Marshalls were not among this select circle. Indeed, no faculty

family was farther from it. Every detail of the Marshalls' life was in

contradiction not only to the standards and ideals of the exclusive

"town set," but to those of their own colleagues. They did not live

in the right part of town. They did not live in the right sort of a

house. They did not live in the right sort of a way. And consequently,

although no family had more visitors, they were not the right sort of

visitors.

This was, of course, not apparent to the children for a good many

years. Home was home, as it is to children. It did not seem strange

to them that instead of living in a small rented house on a closely

built-up street near the campus in the section of the city occupied by

the other faculty families, they lived in a rambling, large-roomed old

farmhouse with five acres of land around it, on the edge of the West

Side. They did not know how heartily this land-owning stability was

condemned as folly by the rent-paying professors, perching on the

bough with calculated impermanence so that they might be free to

accept at any moment the always anticipated call to a larger salary.

They did not know, not even Sylvia, for many years, that the West Side

was the quite unfashionable part of town. It did not seem strange to

them to see their father sweeping his third-floor study with his own

hands, and they were quite used to a family routine which included

housework for every one of them. Indeed, a certain amount of this was

part of the family fun. "Come on, folks!" Professor Marshall would

call, rising up from the breakfast table, "Tuesday--day to clean the

living-room--all hands turn to!" In a gay helter-skelter all hands

turned to. The lighter furniture was put out on the porch. Professor

Marshall, joking and laughing, donned a loose linen overall suit to

protect his "University clothes," and cleaned the bare floor with a

big oiled mop; Mrs. Marshall, silent and swift, looked after mirrors,

windows, the tops of bookcases, things hard for children to reach;

Sylvia flourished a duster; and Judith and Lawrence out on the porch,

each armed with a whisk-broom, brushed and whacked at the chairs and

sofas. There were no rugs to shake, and it took but an instant to set

things back in their places in the clean-smelling, dustless room.

This daily drill, coming as it did early in the morning, usually

escaped the observation of any but passing farmers, who saw nothing

amiss in it; but facetiously exaggerated reports of its humors reached

the campus, and a certain set considered it very clever to lay bets as

to whether the Professor of Political Economy would pull out of his

pocket a handkerchief, or a duster, or a child's shirt, for it was

notorious that the children never had nursemaids and that their father

took as much care of them as their mother.

The question of clothes, usually such a sorely insoluble problem for

academic people of small means, was solved by the Marshalls in an

eccentric, easy-going manner which was considered by the other faculty

families as nothing less than treasonable to their caste. Professor

Marshall, it is true, having to make a public appearance on the

campus every day, was generally, like every other professor,

undistinguishable from a commercial traveler. But Mrs. Marshall, who

often let a good many days pass without a trip to town, had adopted

early in her married life a sort of home uniform, which year after

year she wore in one form or another. It varied according to the

season, and according to the occasion on which she wore it, but it had

certain unchanging characteristics. It was always very plain as to

line, and simple as to cut, having a skirt neither full nor scant, a

waist crossed in front with a white fichu, and sleeves reaching just

below the elbow with white turn-back cuffs. As Mrs. Marshall, though

not at all pretty, was a tall, upright, powerfully built woman, with

a dark, shapely head gallantly poised on her shoulders, this garb,

whether short-skirted, of blue serge in the morning, or trailing, of

ruby-colored cashmere in the evening, was very becoming to her. But

there is no denying that it was always startlingly and outrageously

unfashionable. At a time when every woman and female child in the

United States had more cloth in her sleeves than in all the rest of

her dress, the rounded muscles of Mrs. Marshall's arm, showing through

the fabric of her sleeves, smote shockingly upon the eye of the

ordinary observer, trained to the American habit of sheep-like

uniformity of appearance. And at the time when the front of every

woman's waist fell far below her belt in a copiously blousing sag,

Mrs. Marshall's trim tautness had in it something horrifying. It must

be said for her that she did not go out of her way to inflict these

concussions upon the brains of spectators, since she always had in

her closet one evening dress and one street dress, sufficiently

approximating the prevailing style to pass unnoticed. These costumes

lasted long, and they took in the long run but little from the

Marshall exchequer: for she wore them seldom, only assuming what her

husband called, with a laugh, her "disguise" when going into town.

For a long time, until Sylvia's individuality began to assert itself,

the question of dress for the children was solved, with similar ease,

by the typical Marshall expedient, most heartily resented by their

faculty acquaintances, the mean-spirited expedient of getting along

comfortably on inadequate means by not attempting to associate with

people to whose society their brains and cultivation gave them the

right--that is to say, those families of La Chance whose incomes were

from three to five times that of college professors. The Marshall

children played, for the most part, with the children of their

neighbors, farmers, or small merchants, and continued this humble

connection after they went into the public schools, where their

parents sent them, instead of to "the" exclusive private school

of town. Consequently the plainest, simplest clothes made them

indistinguishable from their fellows. Sylvia and Judith also enjoyed

the unfair advantage of being quite unusually pretty little girls

(Judith being nothing less than a beauty), so that even on the few

occasions when they were invited to a children's party in the faculty

circle their burnished, abundant hair, bright eyes, and fresh, alert

faces made up for the plainness of their white dresses and thick

shoes.

It was, moreover, not only in externals like clothes that the

childhood of Sylvia and Judith and Lawrence differed from that of the

other faculty children. Their lives were untouched by the ominous

black cloud familiar to academic households, the fear for the future,

the fear which comes of living from hand to mouth, the dread of "being

obliged to hand in one's resignation," a truly academic periphasis

which is as dismally familiar to most faculty children as its blunt

Anglo-Saxon equivalent of "losing your job" is to children of plainer

workpeople. Once, it is true, this possibility had loomed up large

before the Marshalls, when a high-protection legislature objected

loudly to the professor's unreverent attitude towards the tariff. But

although the Marshall children knew all about this crisis, as they

knew all about everything that happened to the family, they had had

no experience of the anxious talks and heartsick consultations which

would have gone on in any other faculty household. Their father had

been angry, and their mother resolute--but there was nothing new in

that. There had been, on Professor Marshall's part, belligerent,

vociferous talk about "freedom of speech," and on Mrs. Marshall's a

quiet estimate that, with her early training on a Vermont farm, and

with the high state of cultivation under which she had brought their

five acres, they could successfully go into the truck-farming

business like their neighbors. Besides this, they had the resource,

extraordinary among University families, of an account in the

savings-bank on which to fall back. They had always been able to pay

their debts and have a small surplus by the expedient of refusing to

acknowledge a tenth part of the social obligations under which

the rest of the faculty groaned and sweated with martyr's pride.

Perfidiously refusing to do their share in the heart-breaking struggle

to "keep up the dignity" of the academic profession, they were not

overwhelmed by the super-human difficulties of that undertaking.

So it happened that the Marshall children heard no forebodings about

the future, but only heated statements of what seemed to their father

the right of a teacher to say what he believed. Professor Marshall had

gone of his own initiative to face the legislative committee which was

"investigating" him, had quite lost his temper (never very securely

held in leash), had told them his highly spiced opinion of their

strictures on his teaching and of the worth of any teacher they could

find who would submit to them. Then he had gone home and put on

his overalls. This last was rather a rhetorical flourish; for his

cosmopolitan, urban youth had left him ineradicably ignorant of the

processes of agriculture. But like all Professor Marshall's flourishes

it was a perfectly sincere one. He was quite cheerfully prepared to

submit himself to his wife's instruction in the new way of life.

All these picturesque facts, as was inevitable in America, had

instantly reached the newspapers, which, lacking more exciting news

for the moment, took that matter up with headlined characterizations

of Professor Marshall as a "martyr of the cause of academic freedom,"

and other rather cheap phrases about "persecution" and "America, the

land of free speech." The legislative committee, alarmed, retreated

from its position. Professor Marshall had not "been obliged to hand in

his resignation," but quite the contrary, had become the hero of the

hour and was warmly complimented by his colleagues, who hoped to

profit by an action which none of them would have dared to imitate.

It had been an exciting drama to the Marshall children as long as it

lasted. They had looked with pride at an abominable reproduction of

their father's photograph in the evening paper of La Chance, and they

had added an acquaintance with the manners of newspaper reporters to

their already very heterogeneous experience with callers of every

variety; but of real anxiety the episode had brought them nothing.

As to that same extraordinary assortment of visitors at the Marshall

house, one of the University co-eds had said facetiously that you

met there every sort of person in the world, from spiritualists to

atheists--everybody except swells. The atheist of her dictum was the

distinguished and misanthropic old Professor Kennedy, head of

the Department of Mathematics, whose ample means and high social

connections with the leading family of La Chance made his misanthropy

a source of much chagrin to the faculty ladies, and who professed

for the Marshalls, for Mrs. Marshall in particular, a wrong-headed

admiration which was inexplicable to the wives of the other

professors. The faculty circle saw little to admire in the Marshalls.

The spiritualist of the co-ed's remark was, of course, poor foolish

Cousin Parnelia, the children's pet detestation, whose rusty clothes

and incoherent speech they were prevented from ridiculing only by

stern pressure from their mother. She always wore a black straw hat,

summer and winter, always carried a faded green shopping bag, with a

supply of yellow writing paper, and always had tucked under one arm

the curious, heart-shaped bit of wood, with the pencil attached, which

spiritualists call "planchette." The Marshall children thought this

the most laughable name imaginable, and were not always successful

in restraining the cruel giggles of childhood when she spoke of

planchette's writing such beautiful messages from her long-since-dead

husband and children. Although he had a dramatic sympathy for her

sorrow, Professor Marshall's greater vivacity of temperament made it

harder for him than for his wife to keep a straight face when Cousin

Parnelia proposed to be the medium whereby he might converse with

Milton or Homer. Indeed, his fatigued tolerance for her had been a

positive distaste ever since the day when he found her showing Sylvia,

aged ten, how to write with planchette. With an outbreak of temper,

for which he had afterwards apologized to his wife, he had forbidden

her ever to mention her damn unseemly nonsense to his children again.

He himself was a stout unbeliever in individual immortality, teaching

his children that the craving for it was one of the egotistic impulses

of the unregenerate human heart.

Between the two extremes represented by shabby, crack-brained Cousin

Parnelia and elegant, sardonic old Professor Kennedy, there were many

other habitual visitors at the house--raw, earnest, graceless students

of both sexes, touchingly grateful for the home atmosphere they were

allowed to enter; a bushy-haired Single-tax fanatic named Hecht, who

worked in the iron-foundries by day, and wrote political pamphlets by

night; Miss Lindström, the elderly Swedish woman laboring among

the poor negroes of Flytown; a constant sprinkling from the

Scandinavian-Americans whose well-kept truck-farms filled the region

near the Marshall home; one-armed Mr. Howell, the editor of a luridly

radical Socialist weekly paper, whom Judith called in private the

"old puss-cat" on account of his soft, rather weak voice and mild,

ingratiating ways. Yes, the co-ed had been right, one met at the

Marshalls' every variety of person except the exclusive.

These habitués of the house came and went with the greatest

familiarity. As they all knew there was no servant to answer the

doorbell, they seldom bothered to ring, but opened the door, stepped

into the hall, hung up their wraps on the long line of hooks, and went

into the big, low-ceilinged living-room. If nobody was there, they

usually took a book from one of the shelves lining the room and sat

down before the fire to wait. Sometimes they stayed to the next

meal and helped wash up the dishes afterwards. Sometimes they had a

satisfactory visit with each other, two or three callers happening to

meet together before the fire, and went away without having seen any

of the Marshalls. Informality could go no further.

The only occurrence in the Marshall life remotely approaching the

regularity and formality of a real social event was the weekly meeting

of the string quartet which Professor Marshall had founded soon after

his arrival in La Chance.

It was on Sunday evening that the quartet met regularly for their

seance. Old Reinhardt, the violin teacher, was first violin and

leader; Mr. Bauermeister (in everyday life a well-to-do wholesale

plumber) was second violin; Professor Marshall played the viola, and

old Professor Kennedy bent his fine, melancholy face over the 'cello.

Any one who chose might go to the Marshall house on Sunday evenings,

on condition that he should not talk during the music, and did not

expect any attention.

The music began at seven promptly and ended at ten. A little before

that time, Mrs. Marshall, followed by any one who felt like helping,

went out into the kitchen and made hot coffee and sandwiches, and when

the last chord had stopped vibrating, the company adjourned into the

dining-room and partook of this simple fare. During the evening no

talk was allowed except the occasional wranglings of the musicians

over tempo and shading, but afterwards, every one's tongue, chastened

by the long silence, was loosened into loud and cheerful loquacity.

Professor Marshall, sitting at the head of the table, talked faster

and louder than any one else, throwing the ball to his especial

favorite, brilliant young Professor Saunders, who tossed it back with

a sureness and felicity of phrase which he had learned nowhere but in

this give-and-take. Mrs. Marshall poured the coffee, saw that every

one was served with sandwiches, and occasionally when the talk,

running over every known topic, grew too noisy, or the discussion too

hot, cast in one of the pregnant and occasionally caustic remarks of

which she held the secret. They were never brilliant, Mrs. Marshall's

remarks--but they were apt to have a dry humor, and almost always when

she had said her brief say? there loomed out of the rainbow mist of

her husband's flashing, controversial talk the outlines of the true

proportions of the case.

After the homely feast was eaten, each guest rose and carried his own

cup and saucer and plate into the kitchen in a gay procession, and

since it was well known that, for the most part, the Marshalls "did

their own work," several of the younger ones helped wash the dishes,

while the musicians put away the music-racks and music, and the rest

put on their wraps. Then Professor Marshall stood at the door holding

up a lamp while the company trooped down the long front walk to

the gate in the hedge, and turned along the country road to the

cross-roads where the big Interurban cars whizzed by.

All this happened with that unbroken continuity which was the

characteristic of the Marshall life, most marking them as different

from the other faculty families. Week after week, and month after

month, this program was followed with little variation, except for the

music which was played, and the slight picturesque uncertainty as

to whether old Reinhardt would or would not arrive mildly under the

influence of long Sunday imbibings. Not that this factor interfered at

all with the music. One of Sylvia's most vivid childhood recollections

was the dramatic contrast between old Reinhardt with, and without, his

violin. Partly from age, and partly from a too convivial life, the

old, heavily veined hands trembled so that he could scarcely unbutton

his overcoat, or handle his cup of hot coffee. His head shook too, and

his kind, rheumy eyes, in their endeavor to focus themselves, seemed

to flicker back and forth in their sockets. The child used to watch

him, fascinated, as he fumbled endlessly at the fastenings of his

violin-case, and put back the top with uncertain fingers. She was

waiting for the thrilling moment when he should tuck the instrument

away under his pendulous double chin and draw his bow across the

strings in the long sonorous singing chord, which ran up and down

Sylvia's back like forked lightning.

This was while all the others were tuning and scraping and tugging at

their pegs, a pleasant bustle of discord which became so much a

part of Sylvia's brain that she could never in after years hear the

strumming and sawing of an orchestra preparing to play, without seeing

the big living-room of her father's house, with its low whitewashed

ceiling, its bare, dully shining floor, its walls lined with books,

its shabby, comfortable furniture, the whole quickened by the

Promethean glow from the blaze in the grate and glorified by the

chastened passion of the singing strings.

The two Anglo-Saxon, professors were but able amateurs of their

instruments. Bauermeister, huge, red, and impassive, was by virtue of

his blood, a lifelong training, and a musical ancestry, considerably

more than an amateur; and old Reinhardt was the master of them all.

His was a history which would have been tragic if it had happened to

any but Reinhardt, who cared for nothing but an easy life, beer, and

the divine tones which he alone could draw from his violin. He had

offered, fifty years ago in Vienna, the most brilliant promise of a

most brilliant career, a promise which had come to naught because

of his monstrous lack of ambition, and his endless yielding to

circumstance, which had finally, by a series of inconceivable

migrations, landed him in the German colony of La Chance, impecunious

and obscure and invincibly convinced that he had everything worth

having in life. "Of vat use?" he would say, even now, when asked to

play in public--"de moosic ist all--and dat is eben so goodt here mit

friends." Or, "Dere goes a thousand peoples to a goncert--maybe fife

from dat thousand lofes de moosic--let dose fife gome to me--and

I play dem all day for noding!" or again, more iconoclastically

still,--when told of golden harvests to be reaped, "And for vat den? I

can't play on more dan von fioleen at a time--is it? I got a good one

now. And if I drink more beer dan now, I might make myself seeck!"

This with a prodigiously sly wink of one heavy eyelid.

He gave enough music lessons to pay his small expenses, although after

one or two stormy passages in which he treated with outrageous and

unjustifiable violence the dawdling pupils coming from well-to-do

families, he made it a rule to take no pupils whose parents employed a

servant, and confined himself to children of the poorer classes, among

whom he kept up a small orchestra which played together twice a week

and never gave any concerts. And almost since the arrival of the

Marshalls in La Chance and his unceremonious entrance into the house

as, walking across the fields on a Sunday afternoon, he had heard

Professor Marshall playing the Doric Toccata on the newly installed

piano, he had spent his every Sunday evening in their big living-room.

He had seen the children appear and grow older, and adored them

with Teutonic sentimentality, especially Sylvia, whom he called his

"Moonbeam brincess," his "little ellfen fairy," and whom, when she was

still tiny, he used to take up on his greasy old knees and, resting

his violin on her head, play his wildest fantasies, that she might

feel how it "talked to her bones."

In early childhood Sylvia was so used to him that, like the others

of her circle, she accepted, indeed hardly noticed, his somewhat

startling eccentricities, his dirty linen, his face and hands to

match, his shapeless garments hanging loosely over the flabby

corpulence of his uncomely old body, his beery breath. To her, old

Reinhardt was but the queer external symbol of a never-failing

enchantment. Through the pleasant harmonious give-and-take of the

other instruments, the voice of his violin vibrated with the throbbing

passion of a living thing. His dirty old hand might shake and quaver,

but once the neck of the fiddle rested between thumb and forefinger,

the seraph who made his odd abiding-place in old Reinhardt's soul

sang out in swelling tones and spoke of heavenly things, and of the

Paradise where we might live, if we were but willing.

Even when they were quite little children, Sylvia and Judith, and

later, Lawrence, were allowed to sit up on Sunday evenings to

listen to the music. Judith nearly always slept, steadily; and not

infrequently after a long day of outdoor fun, stupefied with fresh

air and exercise, Lawrence, and Sylvia too, could not keep their eyes

open, and dozed and woke and dozed again, coiled like so many little

kittens among the cushions of the big divan. In all the intensely

enjoyed personal pleasures of her later youth, and these were many for

Sylvia, she was never to know a more utter sweetness than thus to fall

asleep, the music a far-off murmur in her ears, and to wake again to

the restrained, clarified ecstasy of the four concerted voices.

And yet it was in connection with this very quartet that she had her

first shocked vision of how her home-life appeared to other people.

She once chanced, when she was about eight years old, to go with her

father on a Saturday to his office at the University, where he had

forgotten some papers necessary for his seminar. There, sitting on

the front steps of the Main Building, waiting for her father, she had

encountered the wife of the professor of European History with her

beautiful young-lady sister from New York and her two daughters,

exquisite little girls in white serge, whose tailored, immaculate

perfection made Sylvia's heart heavy with a sense of the plebeian

inelegance of her own Saturday-morning play-clothes. Mrs. Hubert,

obeying an impulse of curiosity, stopped to speak to the little

Marshall girl, about whose queer upbringing there were so many stories

current, and was struck with the decorative possibilities of the

pretty child, apparent to her practised eye. As she made the kindly

intended, vague remarks customarily served out to unknown children,

she was thinking: "How _can_ any woman with a vestige of a woman's

instinct dress that lovely child in ready-made, commonplace,

dark-colored clothes? She would repay any amount of care and

"thought." So you take music-lessons too, besides your school?" she

asked mechanically. She explained to her sister, a stranger in La

Chance: "Music is one of the things I _starve_ for, out here! We never

hear it unless we go clear to Chicago--and such prices! Here, there is

simply _no_ musical feeling!" She glanced again at Sylvia, who was

now answering her questions, fluttered with pleasure at having the

beautiful lady speak to her. The beautiful lady had but an inattentive

ear for Sylvia's statement that, yes, lately Father had begun to give

her lessons on the piano. With the smoothly working imagination coming

from a lifetime of devotion to the subject, Mrs. Hubert was stripping

off Sylvia's trite little blue coat and uninteresting dark hat, and

was arraying her in scarlet serge with a green velvet collar--"with

those eyes and that coloring she could carry off striking 'color

combinations--and a big white felt hat with a soft pompon of silk

on one side--no, a long, stiff, scarlet quill would suit her style

better. Then, with white stockings and shoes and gloves--or perhaps

pearl-gray would be better. Yes, with low-cut suede shoes, fastening

with two big smoked-pearl buttons." She looked down with pitying eyes

at Sylvia's sturdy, heavy-soled shoes which could not conceal the

slender, shapely feet within them--"but, what on earth was the child

saying?--"

"--every Sunday evening--it's beautiful, and now I'm getting so big I

can help some. I can turn over the pages for them in hard places,

and when old Mr. Reinhardt has had too much to drink and his hands

tremble, he lets me unfasten his violin-case and tighten up his bow

and--"

Mrs. Hubert cried out, "Your parents don't let you have anything to do

with that old, drunken Reinhardt!"

Sylvia was smitten into silence by the other's horrified tone and

hung her head miserably, only murmuring, after a pause, in damning

extenuation, "He's never so _very_ drunk!"

"Well, upon my word!" exclaimed Mrs. Hubert, in a widely spaced,

emphatic phrase of condemnation. To her sister she added, "It's really

not exaggeration then, what one hears about their home life." One of

her daughters, a child about Sylvia's age, turned a candid, blank

little face up to hers, "Mother, what is a drunken reinhardt?" she

asked in a thin little pipe.

Mrs. Hubert frowned, shook her head, and said in a tone of dark

mystery: "Never mind, darling, don't think about it. It's something

that nice little girls shouldn't know anything about. Come, Margery;

come, Eleanor." She took their hands and began to draw them away

without another look at Sylvia, who remained behind, drooping,

ostracised, pierced momentarily with her first blighting misgiving

about the order of things she had always known.

CHAPTER III

BROTHER AND SISTER

A fuller initiation into the kaleidoscopic divergencies of adult

standards was given Sylvia during the visits of her Aunt Victoria.

These visits were angelic in their extreme rarity, and for Sylvia were

always a mixture of the beatific and the distressing. Only to look at

Aunt Victoria was a bright revelation of elegance and grace. And yet

the talk around table and hearth on the two or three occasions when

the beautiful young widow honored their roof with a sojourn was hard

on Sylvia's sensitive nerves.

It was not merely that a good deal of what was said was

unintelligible. The Marshall children were quite accustomed to

incessant conversations between their elders of which they could

gather but the vaguest glimmering. They played about, busy in

their own absorbing occupations, lending an absent but not wholly

unattentive ear to the gabble of their elders, full of odd and

ridiculous-sounding words like Single-tax, and contrapuntal

development, and root-propagation, and Benthamism, and Byzantine,

and nitrogenous fertilizers, and Alexandrine, and chiaroscuro, and

surviving archaisms, and diminishing utility--for to keep up such a

flood-tide of talk as streamed through the Marshall house required

contributions from many diverging rivers. Sylvia was entirely used to

this phenomenon and, although it occasionally annoyed her that good

attention was wasted on projects so much less vital than those of the

children, she bore it no grudge. But on the rare occasions when Aunt

Victoria was with them, there was a different and ominous note to the

talk which made Sylvia acutely uneasy, although she was quite unable

to follow what was said. This uncomfortable note did not at all come

from mere difference of opinion, for that too was a familiar element

in Sylvia's world. Indeed, it seemed to her that everybody who came to

the Marshall house disagreed with everybody else about everything.

The young men, students or younger professors, engaged in perpetual

discussions, carried on in acrimonious tones which nevertheless seemed

not in the least to impair the good feeling between them. When there

was nobody else there for Father to disagree with, he disagreed with

Mother, occasionally, to his great delight, rousing her from her

customary self-contained economy of words to a heat as voluble as his

own. Often as the two moved briskly about, preparing a meal together,

they shouted out from the dining-room to the kitchen a discussion on

some unintelligible topic such as the "anachronism of the competitive

system," so loudly voiced and so energetically pursued that when

they came to sit down to table, they would be quite red-cheeked and

stirred-up, and ate their dinners with as vigorous an appetite as

though they had been pursuing each other on foot instead of verbally.

The older habitués of the house were no more peaceable and were

equally given to what seemed to childish listeners endless disputes

about matters of no importance. Professor La Rue's white mustache and

pointed beard quivered with the intensity of his scorn for the modern

school of poetry, and Madame La Rue, who might be supposed to be

insulated by the vast bulk of her rosy flesh from the currents of

passionate conviction flashing through the Marshall house, had fixed

ideas on the Franco-Prussian War, on the relative values of American

and French bed-making, and the correct method of bringing up girls

(she was childless), which needed only to be remotely stirred to burst

into showers of fiery sparks. And old Professor Kennedy was nothing

less than abusive when started on an altercation about one of the

topics vital to him, such as the ignoble idiocy of the leisure-class

ideal, or the generally contemptible nature of modern society. No, it

was not mere difference of opinion which so charged the air during

Aunt Victoria's rare visits with menacing electricity.

As a matter of fact, if she did differ in opinion from her brother and

his wife, the children would never have been able to guess it from the

invariably restrained tones of her fluent and agreeable speech, so

different from the outspoken virulence with which people in that house

were accustomed to defend their ideas. But, indefinable though it was

to Sylvia's undeveloped powers of analysis, she felt that the advent

of her father's beautiful and gracious sister was like a drop of

transparent but bitter medicine in a glass of clear water. There

was no outward sign of change, but everything was tinctured by

it. Especially was her father changed from his usual brilliantly

effervescent self. In answer to the most harmless remark of Aunt

Victoria, he might reply with a sudden grim sneering note in his voice

which made Sylvia look up at him half-afraid. If Aunt Victoria noticed

this sardonic accent, she never paid it the tribute of a break in the

smooth surface of her own consistent good-will, rebuking her brother's

prickly hostility only by the most indulgent tolerance of his

queer ways, a tolerance which never had on Professor Marshall's

sensibilities the soothing effect which might have seemed its natural

result.

The visit which Aunt Victoria paid them when Sylvia was ten years old

was more peaceable than the one before it. Perhaps the interval of

five years between the two had mellowed the relationship; or more

probably the friction was diminished because Aunt Victoria arranged

matters so that she was less constantly in the house than usual. On

that occasion, in addition to the maid who always accompanied her,

she brought her little stepson and his tutor, and with characteristic

thoughtfulness refused to impose this considerable train of attendants

on a household so primitively organized as that of the Marshalls. They

all spent the fortnight of their stay at the main hotel of the town, a

large new edifice, the conspicuous costliness of which was one of the

most recent sources of civic pride in La Chance. Here in a suite of

four much-decorated rooms, which seemed unutterably elegant to Sylvia,

the travelers slept, and ate most of their meals, making their trips

out to the Marshall house in a small, neat, open carriage, which,

although engaged at a livery-stable by Mrs. Marshall-Smith for the

period of her stay, was not to be distinguished from a privately owned

equipage.

It can be imagined what an event in the pre-eminently stationary life

of the Marshall children was this fortnight. To Judith and Lawrence,

eight and four respectively, Aunt Victoria's charms and amenities were

non-existent. She was for Judith as negligible as all other grown-ups,

save the few who had good sense enough to play games and go in

swimming. Judith's interest centered in the new boy, whom the

Marshalls now saw for the first time, and who was in every way a

specimen novel in their limited experience of children. During their

first encounter, the well-groomed, white-linen-clad boy with his

preternaturally clean face, his light-brown hair brushed till it shone

like lacquer, his polished nails and his adult appendage of a tutor,

aroused a contempt in Judith's mind which was only equaled by her

astonishment. On that occasion he sat upright in a chair between his

stepmother and his tutor, looking intently out of very bright blue

eyes at the two gipsy-brown little girls in their single-garment

linen play-clothes, swinging their tanned bare legs and feet from the

railing of the porch. They returned this inspection in silence--on

Sylvia's part with the keen and welcoming interest she always felt in

new people who were well-dressed and physically attractive, but as for

Judith with a frankly hostile curiosity, as at some strange and quite

unattractive new animal.

The next morning, a still, oppressive day of brazen heat, it was

suggested that the children take their guest off to visit some of

their own favorite haunts to "get acquainted." This process began

somewhat violently by the instant halt of Arnold as soon as they were

out of sight of the house. "I'm going to take off these damn socks and

shoes," he announced, sitting down in the edge of a flower-bed.

"Oh, don't! You'll get your clean suit all dirty!" cried Sylvia,

springing forward to lift him out of the well-tilled black loam.

Arnold thrust her hand away and made a visible effort to increase his

specific gravity. "I hope to the Lord I _do_ get it dirty!" he said

bitterly.

"Isn't it your best?" asked Sylvia, aghast. "Have you another?" "I

haven't anything but!" said the boy savagely. "There's a whole trunk

full of them!" He was fumbling with a rough clumsiness at the lacing

of his shoes, but made no progress in loosening them, and now began

kicking at the grass. "I don't know how to get them off!" he cried,

his voice breaking nervously. Judith was down on her knees, inspecting

with a competent curiosity the fastenings, which were of a new

variety.

"It's _easy_!" she said. "You just lift this little catch up and turn

it back, and that lets you get at the knot." As she spoke, she acted,

her rough brown little fingers tugging at the silken laces. "How'd

you ever _get_ it fastened," she inquired, "if you don't know how to

unfasten it?"

"Oh, Pauline puts my shoes on for me," explained Arnold. "She dresses

and undresses me."

Judith stopped and looked up at him. "Who's Pauline?" she asked,

disapproving astonishment in her accent.

"Madrina's maid."

Judith pursued him further with her little black look of scorn. "Who's

Madrina?"

"Why--you know--your Aunt Victoria--my stepmother--she married my

father when I was a little baby--she doesn't want me to call her

'mother' so I call her Madrina.' That's Italian for--"

Judith had no interest in this phenomenon and no opinion about it.

She recalled the conversation to the point at issue with her usual

ruthless directness. "And you wouldn't know how to undress yourself

if somebody didn't help you!" She went on loosening the laces in a

contemptuous silence, during which the boy glowered resentfully at the

back of her shining black hair. Sylvia essayed a soothing remark

about what pretty shoes he had, but with small success. Already the

excursion was beginning to take on the color of its ending,--an

encounter between the personalities of Judith and Arnold, with Sylvia

and Lawrence left out. When the shoes finally came off, they revealed

white silk half-hose, which, discarded in their turn, showed a pair of

startlingly pale feet, on which the new boy now essayed wincingly to

walk. "Ouch! Ouch! OUCH!" he cried, holding up first one and then the

other from contact with the hot sharp-edged pebbles of the path, "How

do you _do it_?"

"Oh, it always hurts when you begin in the spring," said Judith

carelessly. "You have to get used to it. How old are you?"

"Ten, last May."

"Buddy here began going barefoot last summer and he's only four," she

stated briefly, proceeding towards the barn and chicken-house.

After that remark the new boy walked forward with no more articulate

complaints, though his face was drawn and he bit his lips. He was

shown the chicken-yard--full of gawky, half-grown chickens shedding

their down and growing their feathers--and forgot his feet in the

fascination of scattering grain to them and watching their fluttering

scrambles. He was shown the rabbit-house and allowed to take one of

the limp, unresponsive little bunches of fur in his arms, and feed

a lettuce-leaf into its twitching pink mouth. He was shown the

house-in-the-maple-tree, a rough floor fixed between two large

branches, with a canvas roof over it, ensconced in which retreat his

eyes shone with happy excitement. He was evidently about to make some

comment on it, but glanced at Judith's dark handsome little face,

unsmiling and suspicious, and remained silent. He tried the same

policy when being shown the children's own garden, but Judith tracked

him out of this attempt at self-protection with some direct and

searching questions, discovering in him such ignorance of the broadest

division-lines of the vegetable kingdom that she gave herself up

to open scorn, vainly frowned down by the more naturally civilized

Sylvia, who was by no means enjoying herself. The new boy was not

in the least what he had looked. She longed to return to the

contemplation of Aunt Victoria's perfections. Lawrence was, as usual,

deep in an unreal world of his own, where he carried forth some

enterprise which had nothing to do with any one about him. He was

frowning and waving his arms, and making stabbing gestures with his

fingers, and paid no attention to the conversation between Judith and

the new boy.

"What _can_ you do? What _do_ you know?" asked the former at last.

"I can ride horseback," said Arnold defiantly.

Judith put him to the test at once, leading the way to the stall which

was the abode of the little pinto broncho, left them, she explained,

as a trust by one of Father's students from the Far West, who was now

graduated and a civil engineer in Chicago, where it cost too much to

keep a horse. Arnold emerged from this encounter with the pony with

but little more credit than he had earned in the garden, showing an

ineptness about equine ways which led Judith through an unsparing

cross-examination to the information that the boy's experience of

handling a horse consisted in being ready in a riding-costume at a

certain hour every afternoon, and mounting a well-broken little

pony, all saddled and bridled, which was "brought round" to the

porte-cochère.

"What's a porte-cochère?" she asked, with her inimitable air of

despising it, whatever it might turn out to be.

Arnold stared with an attempt to copy her own frank scorn for

another's ignorance. "Huh! Don't you even know that much? It's the big

porch without any floor to it, where carriages drive up so you can get

in and out without getting wet if it rains. Every house that's good

for anything has one."

So far from being impressed or put down, Judith took her stand as

usual on the offensive. "'Fore I'd be afraid of a little rain!" she

said severely, an answer which caused Arnold to seem disconcerted, and

again to look at her hard with the startled expression of arrested

attention which from the first her remarks and strictures seemed to

cause in him.

They took the pinto out. Judith rode him bareback at a gallop down

to the swimming pool and dived from his back into the yellow water

shimmering hotly in the sun. This feat stung Arnold into a final fury.

Without an instant's pause he sprang in after her. As he came to the

top, swimming strongly with a lusty, regular stroke, and rapidly

overhauled the puffing Judith, his face shone brilliantly with relief.

He was another child. The petulant boy of a few moments before had

vanished. "Beat you to the springboard!" he sputtered joyously,

swimming low and spitting water as he slid easily through it at twice

Judith's speed. She set her teeth and drove her tough little body with

a fierce concentration of all her forces, but Arnold was sitting on

the springboard, dangling his red and swollen feet when she arrived.

She clambered out and sat down beside him, silent for an instant. Then

she said with a detached air, "You can swim better than any boy I ever

saw."

Arnold's open, blond face flushed scarlet at this statement. He looked

at the dripping little brown rat beside him, and returned impulsively,

"I'd rather play with you than any girl I ever saw."

They were immediately reduced to an awkward silence by these two

unpremeditated superlatives. Judith found nothing to say beyond a

"huh" in an uncertain accent, and they turned with relief to alarums

and excursions from the forgotten and abandoned Sylvia and Lawrence.

Sylvia was forcibly restraining her little brother from following

Judith into the water. "You _mustn't_, Buddy! You _know_ we aren't

allowed to go in till an hour after eating and you only had your

breakfast a little while ago!" She led him away bellowing.

Arnold, surprised, asked Judith, "'Cept for that, are you allowed to

go in whenever you want?"

"Sure! We're not to stay in more than ten minutes at a time, and then

get out and run around for half an hour in the sun. There's a clock

under a little roof-thing, nailed up to a tree over there, so's we can

tell."

"And don't you get what-for, if you go in with all your clothes on

this way?"

"I haven't any clothes _on_ but my rompers," said Judith. "They're

just the same as a bathing suit." She snatched back her prerogative of

asking questions. "Where _did_ you learn to swim so?"

"At the seashore! I get taken there a month every summer. It's the

most fun of any of the places I get taken. I've had lessons there from

the professor of swimming ever since I was six. Madrina doesn't know

what to do with me but have me take lessons. I like the swimming ones

the best. I hate dancing--and going to museums."

"What else can you do?" asked Judith with a noticeable abatement of

her previous disesteem.

Arnold hesitated, his own self-confidence as evidently dashed.

"Well--I can fence a little--and talk French; we are in Paris winters,

you know. We don't stay in Lydford for the winter. Nobody does."

"_Everybody_ goes away?" queried Judith. "What a funny town!"

"Oh, except the people who _live_ there--the Vermonters."

Judith was more and more at a loss. "Don't _you_ live there?"

"No, we don't _live_ anywhere. We just stay places for a while. Nobody

that we know lives anywhere." He interrupted a further question from

the astonished Judith to ask, "How'd you happen to have such a dandy

swimming-pool out of such a little brook?"

Judith, switched off upon a topic of recent and absorbing interest,

was diverted from investigation into the odd ways of people who

lived nowhere. "Isn't it great!" she said ardently. "It's new this

summer--that's why I don't swim so very well yet. Why, it was this

way. The creek ran through a corner of our land, and a lot of Father's

students that are engineers or something, wanted to do something

for Father when they graduated--lots of students do, you know--and

everybody said the creek didn't have water enough and they bet each

other it did, and after Commencement we had a kind of camp for

a week--tents and things all round here--and Mother cooked for

them--camp fires--oh, lots of fun!--and they let us children tag

around as much as we pleased--and they and Father dug, and fixed

concrete--say, did you ever get let to stir up concrete? It's great!"

Seeing in the boy's face a blankness as great as her own during his

chance revelations of life on another planet, she exclaimed, "Here,

come on, down to the other end, and I'll _show_ you how they made the

dam and all--they began over there with--" The two pattered along the

edge hand-in-hand, talking incessantly on a common topic at last,

interrupting each other, squatting down, peering into the water,

pointing, discussing, arguing, squeezing the deliciously soft mud up

and down between their toes, their heads close together--they might

for the moment have been brother and sister who had grown up together.

They were interrupted by voices, and turning flushed and candid faces

of animation towards the path, beheld Aunt Victoria, wonderful and

queen-like in a white dress, a parasol, like a great rose, over her

stately blond head, attended by Sylvia adoring; Mrs. Marshall quiet

and observant; Mr. Rollins, the tutor, thin, agitated, and unhappily

responsible; and Professor Marshall smiling delightedly at the

children.

"Why, Arnold _Smith_!" cried his tutor, too much overcome by the

situation to express himself more forcibly than by a repetition of the

boy's name. "Why, _Arnold_! Come here!"

The cloud descended upon the boy's face. "I _will_ not!" he said

insolently.

"But we were just _looking_ for you to start back to the hotel,"

argued Mr. Rollins.

"I don't care if you were!" said the boy in a sullen accent.

Sylvia and Judith looked on in amazement at this scene of

insubordination, as new to them as all the rest of the boy's actions.

He was standing still now, submitting in a gloomy silence to the

various comments on his appearance, which was incredibly different

from that with which he had started on his travels. The starch

remaining in a few places in his suit, now partly dried in the

hot sun, caused the linen to stand out grotesquely in peaks and

mud-streaked humps, his hair, still wet, hung in wisps about his very

dirty face, his bare, red feet and legs protruded from shapeless

knickerbockers. His stepmother looked at him with her usual

good-natured amused gaze. "It is customary, before going in swimming,

isn't it, Arnold, to take your watch out of your pocket and put your

cuff-links in a safe-place?" she suggested casually.

"Good Heavens! His watch!" cried Mr. Rollins, clutching at his own

sandy hair.

Professor Marshall clapped the boy encouragingly on the shoulder.

"Well, sir, you look more like a human being," he said heartily,

addressing himself, with defiance in his tone, to his sister.

She replied with a smile, "That rather depends, doesn't it, Elliott,

upon one's idea of what constitutes a human being?"

Something in her sweet voice roused Judith to an ugly wrath. She came

forward and took her place protectingly beside her new playmate,

scowling at her aunt. "We were having a _lovely_ time!" she said

challengingly.

Mrs. Marshall-Smith looked down at the grotesque little figure and

touched the brown cheek indulgently with her forefinger. "That too

rather depends upon one's definition of a lovely time," she replied,

turning away, leaving with the indifference of long practice the

unfortunate Mr. Rollins to the task of converting Arnold into a

product possible to transport through the streets of a civilized town.

Before they went away that day, Arnold managed to seek Judith out

alone, and with shamefaced clumsiness to slip his knife, quite new and

three-bladed, into her hand. She looked at it uncomprehendingly. "For

you--to keep," he said, flushing again, and looking hard into her

dark eyes, which in return lightened suddenly from their usual rather

somber seriousness into a smile, a real smile. Judith's smiles were

far from frequent, but the recipient of one did not forget it.

CHAPTER IV

EVERY ONE'S OPINION OF EVERY ONE ELSE

In this way, almost from the first, several distinct lines of cleavage

were established in the family party during the next fortnight. Arnold

imperiously demanded a complete vacation from "lessons," and when, it

was indolently granted, he spent it incessantly with Judith, the two

being always out of doors and usually joyously concocting what in any

but the easy-going, rustic plainness of the Marshall mode of life

would have been called mischief. Mrs. Marshall, aided by the others

in turn, toiled vigorously between the long rows of vegetables and

a little open shack near by, where, on a superannuated but still

serviceable cook-stove, she "put up," for winter use, an endless

supply of the golden abundance which, Ceres-like, she poured out every

year from the Horn of Plenty of her garden. Sylvia, in a state of

hypnotized enchantment, dogged her Aunt Victoria's graceful footsteps

and still more graceful, leisurely halts; Lawrence bustled about on

his own mysterious business in a solitary and apparently exciting

world of his own which was anywhere but in La Chance; and Professor

Marshall, in the intervals of committee work at the University, now

about to open, alternated between helping his wife, playing a great

deal of very noisy and very brilliant music on the piano, and

conversing in an unpleasant voice with his sister.

Mr. Rollins, for whom, naturally, Arnold's revolt meant unwonted

freedom, was for the most part invisible, "seeing the sights of La

Chance, I suppose," conjectured Aunt Victoria indifferently, in

her deliciously modulated voice, when asked what had become of the

sandy-haired tutor. And because, in the intense retirement and

rustication of this period, Mrs. Marshall-Smith needed little

attention paid to her toilets, Pauline also was apparently enjoying an

unusual vacation. A short time after making the conjecture about her

stepson's tutor, Aunt Victoria had added the suggestion, level-browed,

and serene as always, "Perhaps he and Pauline are seeing the sights

together."

Sylvia, curled on a little stool at her aunt's feet, turned an

artless, inquiring face up to her. "What _are_ the 'sights' of La

Chance, Auntie?" she asked.

Her father, who was sitting at the piano, his long fingers raised

as though about to play, whirled about and cut in quickly with an

unintelligible answer, "Your Aunt Victoria refers to non-existent

phenomena, my dear, in order to bring home to us the uncouth

provinciality in which we live."

Aunt Victoria, leaning back, exquisitely passive, in one of the big,

shabby arm-chairs, raised a protesting hand. "My dear Elliott,

you don't do your chosen abiding-place justice. There is the new

Court-House. Nobody can deny that that is a sight. I spent a long time

the other day contemplating it. That and the Masonic Building are a

_pair_ of sights. I conceive Rollins, who professes to be interested

in architecture, as constantly vibrating between the two."

To which handsome tribute to La Chance's high-lights, Professor

Marshall returned with bitterness, "Good Lord, Vic, why do you come,

then?"

She answered pleasantly, "I might ask in my turn why you stay." She

went on, "I might also remind you that you and your children are the

only human ties I have." She slipped a soft arm about Sylvia as she

spoke, and turned the vivid, flower-like little face to be kissed.

When Aunt Victoria kissed her, Sylvia always felt that she had, like

Diana in the story-book, stooped radiant from a shining cloud.

There was a pause in the conversation. Professor Marshall faced the

piano again and precipitated himself headlong into the diabolic

accelerandos of "The Hall of the Mountain-King." His sister listened

with extreme and admiring appreciation of his talent. "Upon my word,

Elliott," she said heartily, "under the circumstances it's incredible,

but it's true--your touch positively improves."

He stopped short, and addressed the air above the piano with

passionate conviction. "I stay because, thanks to my wife, I've

savored here fourteen years of more complete reconciliation with

life--I've been vouchsafed more usefulness--I've discovered more

substantial reasons for existing than I ever dreamed possible in the

old life--than any one in that world can conceive!"

Aunt Victoria looked down at her beautiful hands clasped in her lap.

"Yes, quite so," she breathed. "Any one who knows you well must agree

that whatever you are, or do, or find, nowadays, is certainly 'thanks

to your wife.'"

Her brother flashed a furious look at her, and was about to speak,

but catching sight of Sylvia's troubled little face turned to him

anxiously, gave only an impatient shake to his ruddy head--now graying

slightly. A little later he said: "Oh, we don't speak the same

language any more, Victoria. I couldn't make you understand--you don't

know--how should you? You can't conceive how, when one is really

_living_, nothing of all that matters. What does architecture matter,

for instance?"

"Some of it matters very little indeed," concurred his sister blandly.

This stirred him to an ungracious laugh. "As for keeping up only human

ties, isn't a fortnight once every five years rather slim rations?"

"Ah, there are difficulties--the Masonic Building--" murmured Aunt

Victoria, apparently at random. But then, it seemed to Sylvia that

they were always speaking at random. For all she could see, neither of

them ever answered what the other had said.

The best times were when she and Aunt Victoria were all alone

together--or with only the silent, swift-fingered, Pauline in

attendance during the wonderful processes of dressing or undressing

her mistress. These occasions seemed to please Aunt Victoria best

also. She showed herself then so winning and gracious and altogether

magical to the little girl that Sylvia forgot the uncomfortableness

which always happened when her aunt and her father were together. As

they came to be on more intimate terms, Sylvia was told a great many

details about Aunt Victoria's present and past life, in the form of

stories, especially about that early part of it which had been spent

with her brother. Mrs. Marshall-Smith took pains to talk to Sylvia

about her father as he had been when he was a brilliant dashing youth

in Paris at school, or as the acknowledged social leader of his class

in the famous Eastern college. "You see, Sylvia," she explained,

"having no father or mother or any near relatives, we saw more of

each other than a good many brothers and sisters do. We had nobody

else--except old Cousin Ellen, who kept house for us in the summers

in Lydford and traveled around with us," Lydford was another topic on

which, although it was already very familiar to her from her mother's

reminiscences of her childhood in Vermont, Aunt Victoria shed much

light for Sylvia. Aunt Victoria's Lydford was so different from

Mother's, it seemed scarcely possible they could be the same place.

Mother's talk was all about the mountains, the sunny upland pastures,

rocky and steep, such a contrast to the rich, level stretches of

country about La Chance; about the excursions through these slopes

of the mountains every afternoon, accompanied by a marvelously

intelligent collie dog, who helped find the cows; about the orchard

full of old trees more climbable than any others which have grown

since the world began; about the attic full of drying popcorn and

old hair-trunks and dusty files of the New York _Tribune_; about the

pantry with its cookie-jar, and the "back room" with its churn and

cheese-press.

Nothing of all this existed in the Lydford of which Aunt Victoria

spoke, although some of her recollections were also of childhood

hours. Once Sylvia asked her, "But if you were a little girl there,

and Mother was too,--then you and Father and she must have played

together sometimes?"

Aunt Victoria had replied with decision, "No, I never saw your mother,

and neither did your father--until a few months before they were

married."

"Well, wasn't that _queer_?" exclaimed Sylvia--"she _always_ lived in

Lydford except when she went away to college."

Aunt Victoria seemed to hesitate for words, something unusual with

her, and finally brought out, "Your mother lived on a farm, and we

lived in our summer house in the village." She added after a moment's

deliberation: "Her uncle, who kept the farm, furnished us with our

butter. Sometimes your mother used to deliver it at the kitchen door."

She looked hard at Sylvia as she spoke.

"Well, I should have thought you'd have seen her _there_!" said Sylvia

in surprise. Nothing came to the Marshalls' kitchen door which was not

in the children's field of consciousness.

"It was, in fact, there that your father met her," stated Aunt

Victoria briefly.

"Oh yes, I remember," said Sylvia, quoting fluently from an often

heard tale. "I've heard them tell about it lots of times. She was

earning money to pay for her last year in college, and dropped a

history book out of her basket as she started to get back in the

wagon, and Father picked it up and said, 'Why, good Lord! who in

Lydford reads Gibbon?' And Mother said it was hers, and they talked a

while, and then he got in and rode off with her."

"Yes," said Aunt Victoria, "that was how it happened.... Pauline, get

out the massage cream and do my face, will you?"

She did not talk any more for a time, but when she began, it was again

of Lydford that she spoke, running along in a murmured stream of

reminiscences breathed faintly between motionless lips that Pauline's

reverent ministrations might not be disturbed. Through the veil of

these half-understood recollections, Sylvia saw highly inaccurate

pictures of great magnificent rooms filled with heavy old mahogany

furniture, of riotously colored rose-gardens, terraced and

box-edged, inhabited by beautiful ladies always, like Aunt Victoria,

"dressed-up," who took tea under brightly striped, pagoda-shaped

tents, waited upon by slant-eyed Japanese (it seemed Aunt Victoria had

nothing but Japanese servants). The whole picture shimmered in the

confused imagination of the listening little girl, till it blended

indistinguishably with the enchantment of her fairy-stories. It all

seemed a background natural enough for Aunt Victoria, but Sylvia could

not fit her father into it.

"Ah, he's changed greatly--he's transformed--he is not the same

creature," Aunt Victoria told her gravely, speaking according to her

seductive habit with Sylvia, as though to an equal. "The year when

we lost our money and he married, altered all the world for us."

She linked the two events together, and was rewarded by seeing the

reference slide over Sylvia's head.

"Did you lose _your_ money, too?" asked Sylvia, astounded. It had

never occurred to her that Aunt Victoria might have been affected by

that event in her father's life, with which she was quite familiar

through his careless references to what he seemed to regard as an

interesting but negligible incident.

"All but the slightest portion of it, my dear--when I was twenty years

old. Your father was twenty-five."

Sylvia looked about her at the cut-glass and silver utensils on

the lace-covered dressing-table, at Aunt Victoria's pale lilac

crêpe-de-chine négligée, at the neat, pretty young maid deft-handedly

rubbing the perfumed cream into the other woman's well-preserved face,

impassive as an idol's. "Why--why, I thought--" she began and stopped,

a native delicacy making her hesitate as Judith never did.

Aunt Victoria understood. "Mr. Smith had money," she explained

briefly. "I married when I was twenty-one."

"Oh," said Sylvia. It seemed an easy way out of difficulties. She

had never before chanced to hear Aunt Victoria mention her long-dead

husband.

CHAPTER V

SOMETHING ABOUT HUSBANDS

She did not by any means always sit in the hotel and watch

Pauline care for different portions of Aunt Victoria's body. Mrs.

Marshall-Smith took, on principle, a drive every day, and Sylvia was

her favorite companion. At first they went generally over the asphalt

and in front of the costly and incredibly differing "mansions" of

the "residential portion" of town, but later their drives took them

principally along the winding roads and under the thrifty young trees

of the State University campus. They often made an excuse of fetching

Professor Marshall home from a committee meeting, and as the faculty

committees at that time of year were, for the most part, feverishly

occupied with the classification of the annual flood-tide of Freshmen,

he was nearly always late, and they were obliged to wait long

half-hours in front of the Main Building.

Sylvia's cup of satisfaction ran over as, dressed in her simple best,

which her mother without comment allowed her to put on every day now,

she sat in the well-appointed carriage beside her beautiful aunt, at

whom every one looked so hard and so admiringly. The University work

had not begun, but unresigned and harassed professors and assistants,

recalled from their vacations for various executive tasks, were

present in sufficient numbers to animate the front steps of the Main

Building with constantly gathering and dissolving little groups. These

called out greetings to each other, and exchanged dolorous mutual

condolences on their hard fate; all showing, with a helpless masculine

naïveté, their consciousness of the lovely, observant figure in the

carriage below them. Of a different sort were the professors' wives,

who occasionally drifted past on the path. Aunt Victoria might have

been a blue-uniformed messenger-boy for all that was betrayed by their

skilfully casual glance at her and then away, and the subsequent

directness of their forward gaze across the campus. Mrs.

Marshall-Smith had for both these manifestations of consciousness of

her presence the same imperturbable smile of amusement. "They are

delightful, these colleagues of your father's!" she told Sylvia.

Sylvia had hoped fervently that the stylish Mrs. Hubert might see

her in this brief apotheosis, and one day her prayer was answered.

Straight down the steps of the Main Building they came, Mrs. Hubert

glistening in shiny blue silk, extremely unaware of Aunt Victoria,

the two little girls looking to Sylvia like fairy princesses, with

pink-and-white, lace-trimmed dresses, and big pink hats with rose

wreaths. Even the silk laces in their low, white kid shoes were of

pink to match the ribbons, which gleamed at waist and throat and

elbow. Sylvia watched them in an utter admiration, and was beyond

measure shocked when Aunt Victoria said, after they had stepped

daintily past, "Heavens! What a horridly over-dressed family! Those

poor children look too absurd, tricked out like that. The one nearest

me had a sweet, appealing little face, too."

"That is Eleanor," said Sylvia, with a keen, painful recollection of

the scene a year ago. She added doubtfully, "Didn't you think their

dresses pretty, Aunt Victoria?"

"I thought they looked like pin-cushions on a kitchen-maid's

dressing-table," returned Aunt Victoria more forcibly than she usually

expressed herself. "You look vastly better with the straight lines

of your plain white dresses. You have a great deal of style, Sylvia.

Judith is handsomer than you, but she will never have any style." This

verdict, upon both the Huberts and herself, delivered with a serious

accent of mature deliberation, impressed Sylvia. It was one of the

speeches she was to ponder.

Although Professor Marshall showed himself noticeably negligent in the

matter of introducing his colleagues to his sister, it was only two

or three days before Aunt Victoria's half-hours of waiting before the

Main Building had other companionship than Sylvia's. This was due to

the decisive action of young Professor Saunders, just back from the

British Museum, where, at Professor Marshall's suggestion, he had been

digging up facts about the economic history of the twelfth century in

England. Without waiting for an invitation he walked straight up to

the carriage with the ostensible purpose of greeting Sylvia, who was a

great favorite of his, and who in her turn had a romantic admiration

for the tall young assistant. Of all the faculty people who frequented

the Marshall house, he and old Professor Kennedy were the only people

whom Sylvia considered "stylish," and Professor Kennedy, in spite of

his very high connection with the aristocracy of La Chance, was so

cross and depressed that really his "style" did not count. She was

now greatly pleased by the younger professor's public and cordial

recognition of her, and, with her precocious instinct for social ease,

managed to introduce him to her aunt, even adding quaintly a phrase

which she had heard her mother use in speaking of him, "My father

thinks Professor Saunders has a brilliant future before him."

This very complimentary reference had not the effect she hoped for,

since both the young man and Aunt Victoria laughed, exchanging glances

of understanding, and said to each other, "Isn't she delicious?" But

at least it effectually broke any ice of constraint, so that the

new-comer felt at once upon the most familiarly friendly terms with

the sister of his chief. Thereafter he came frequently to lean an arm

on the side of the carriage and talk with the "ladies-in-waiting,"

as he called the pretty woman and child. Once or twice Sylvia was

transferred to the front seat beside Peter, the negro driver, on the

ground that she could watch the horses better, and they took Professor

Saunders for a drive through the flat, fertile country, now beginning

to gleam ruddy with autumnal tints of bronze and scarlet and gold.

Although she greatly enjoyed the social brilliance of these occasions,

on which Aunt Victoria showed herself unexpectedly sprightly and

altogether enchanting, Sylvia felt a little guilty that they did not

return to pick up Professor Marshall, and she was relieved, when they

met at supper, that he made no reference to their defection.

He did not, in fact, mention his assistant's name at all, and yet he

did not seem surprised when Professor Saunders, coming to the Sunday

evening rehearsal of the quartet, needed no introduction to his

sister, but drew a chair up with the evident intention of devoting

all his conversation to her. For a time this overt intention was

frustrated by old Reinhardt, smitten with an admiration as unconcealed

for the beautiful stranger. In the interval before the arrival of the

later members of the quartet, he fluttered around her like an ungainly

old moth, racking his scant English for complimentary speeches. These

were received by Aunt Victoria with her best calm smile, and by

Professor Saunders with open impatience. His equanimity was not

restored by the fact that there chanced to be rather more general talk

than usual that evening, leaving him but small opportunity for his

tête-à-tête.

It began by the arrival of Professor Kennedy, a little late, delayed

at a reunion of the Kennedy family. He was always reduced to bilious

gloom by any close contact with that distinguished, wealthy, and much

looked-up-to group of citizens of La Chance, and this evening he

walked into the front door obviously even more depressed than usual.

The weather had turned cool, and his imposingly tall old person was

wrapped in a cape-overcoat. Sylvia had no fondness for Professor

Kennedy, but she greatly admired his looks and his clothes, and his

handsome, high-nosed old face. She watched him wrestle himself out of

his coat as though it were a grappling enemy, and was not surprised at

the irritability which sat visibly upon his arching white eyebrows.

He entered the room trailing his 'cello-bag beside him and plucking

peevishly at its drawstrings, and although Aunt Victoria quite roused

herself at the sight of him, he received his introduction to her with

reprehensible indifference. He sank into a chair and looked sadly at

the fire, taking the point of his white beard in his long, tapering

fingers. Professor Marshall turned from the piano, where he sat,

striking A for the conscientious Bauermeister to tune, and said

laughingly, "Hey there, Knight of the Dolorous Countenance, what

vulture is doing business at the old stand on your liver?"

Professor Kennedy crossed one long, elegantly slim leg over the other,

"I've been dining with the Kennedy family," he said, with a neat and

significant conciseness.

"Anything specially the matter with the predatory rich?" queried

Marshall, reaching for his viola-case.

Professor Kennedy shook his head. "Alas! there's never anything the

matter with them. _Comme le diable, ils se portent toujours bien_."

At the purity of accent with which this embittered remark was made,

Mrs. Marshall-Smith opened her eyes, and paid more attention as the

old professor went on.

"The last of my unmarried nieces has shown herself a true Kennedy by

providing herself with a dolichocephalic blond of a husband, like all

the others. The dinner was given in honor of the engagement."

Sylvia was accustomed to finding Professor Kennedy's remarks quite

unintelligible, and this one seemed no odder to her than the rest, so

that she was astonished that Aunt Victoria was not ashamed to confess

as blank an ignorance as the little girl's. The beautiful woman leaned

toward the morose old man with the suave self-confidence of one who

has never failed to charm, and drew his attention to her by a laugh

of amused perplexity. "May I ask," she inquired, "_what_ kind of a

husband is that? It is a new variety to me."

Professor Kennedy looked at her appraisingly. "It's the kind most

women aspire to," he answered enigmatically. He imparted to this

obscure remark the air of passing a sentence of condemnation.

Sylvia's mother stirred uneasily in her chair and looked at her

husband. He had begun to take his viola from the case, but now

returned it and stood looking quizzically from his sister to his

guest. "Professor Kennedy talks a special language, Vic," he said

lightly. "Some day he'll make a book of it and be famous. He divides

us all into two kinds: the ones that get what they want by taking it

away from other people--those are the dolichocephalic blonds--though

I believe it doesn't refer to the color of their hair. The other kind

are the white folks, the unpredatory ones who have scruples, and get

pushed to the wall for their pains."

Mrs. Marshall-Smith turned to the young man beside her. "It makes one

wonder, doesn't it," she conjectured pleasantly, "to which type one

belongs oneself?"

In this welcome shifting from the abstract to the understandably

personal, old Reinhardt saw his opportunity. "Ach, womens, beautifool

and goot womens!" he cried in his thick, kindly voice. "Dey are abofe

being types. To every good man, dey can be only wie eine blume, so

hold and schön--"

Professor Kennedy's acid voice broke in--"So you're still in the 1830

Romantische Schule period, are you, Reinhardt?" He went on to Mrs.

Marshall-Smith: "But there _is_ something in that sort of talk. Women,

especially those who consider themselves beautiful and good, escape

being _either_ kind of type, by the legerdemain with which they get

what they want, and yet don't soil their fingers with predatory acts."

Mrs. Marshall-Smith was, perhaps, a shade tardy in asking the question

which he had evidently cast his speech to extract from her, but after

an instant's pause she brought it out bravely. "How in the world do

you mean?" she asked, smiling, and received, with a quick flicker of

her eyelids, the old man's response of, "They buy a dolichocephalic

blond to do their dirty work for them and pay for him with their

persons."

"_Oh!_" cried Mrs. Marshall, checking herself in a sudden deprecatory

gesture of apology towards her sister-in-law. She looked at her

husband and gave him a silent, urgent message to break the awkward

pause, a message which he disregarded, continuing coolly to inspect

his fingernails with an abstracted air, contradicted by the half-smile

on his lips. Sylvia, listening to the talk, could make nothing out of

it, but miserably felt her little heart grow leaden as she looked from

one face to another. Judith and Lawrence, tired of waiting for the

music to begin, had dropped asleep among the pillows of the divan. Mr.

Bauermeister yawned, looked at the clock, and plucked at the strings

of his violin. He hated all talk as a waste of time. Old Reinhardt's

simple face looked as puzzled and uneasy as Sylvia's own. Young Mr.

Saunders seemed to have no idea that there was anything particularly

unsettling in the situation, but, disliking the caustic vehemence of

his old colleague's speech, inter-posed to turn it from the lady by

his side. "And you're the man who's opposed on principle to sweeping

generalizations!" he said in cheerful rebuke.

"Ah, I've just come from a gathering of the Clan Kennedy," repeated

the older man. "I defy anybody to produce a more successfully

predatory family than mine. The fortunes of the present generation of

Kennedys don't come from any white-livered subterfuge, like the rise

in the value of real estate, as my own ill-owned money does. No, sir;

the good, old, well-recognized, red-blooded method of going out and

taking it away from people not so smart as they are, is good enough

for them, if you please. And my woman relatives--" He swept them away

with a gesture. "When I--"

Mrs. Marshall cut him short resolutely. "Are you going to have any

music tonight, or aren't you?" she said.

He looked at her with a sudden, unexpected softening of his somber

eyes. "Do you know, Barbara Marshall, that there are times when you

keep one unhappy old misanthrope from despairing of his kind?"

She had at this unlooked-for speech only the most honest astonishment.

"I don't know what you're talking about," she said bluntly.

Judith stirred in her sleep and woke up blinking. When she saw that

Professor Kennedy had come in, she did what Sylvia would never have

dared do; she ran to him and climbed up on his knee, laying her

shining, dark head against his shoulder. The old man's arms closed

around her. "Well, spitfire," he said, "_comment ça roule_, eh?"

Judith did not trouble herself to answer. With a gesture of

tenderness, as unexpected as his speech to her mother, her old friend

laid his cheek against hers. "You're another, Judy, _You'll_ never

marry a dolichocephalic blond and make him pull the chestnuts out of

the fire for you, will you?" he said confidently.

Mrs. Marshall rose with the exasperated air of one whose patience is

gone. She made a step as though to shield her husband's sister from

the cantankerous old man. "If I hear another word of argument in this

house tonight--" she threatened. "Mr. Reinhardt, what are these people

_here for_?"

The musician awoke, with a sigh, from his dazzled contemplation of

his host's sister, and looked about him. "Ach, yes! Ach, yes!"

he admitted. With a glance of adoration at the visitor, he added

impressively what to his mind evidently signified some profoundly

significant tribute, "Dis night we shall blay only Schubert!"

Sylvia heaved a sigh of relief as the four gathered in front of the

music-racks at the other end of the room, tuning and scraping. Young

Mr. Saunders, evidently elated that his opportunity had come, leaned

toward Aunt Victoria and began talking in low tones. Once or twice

they laughed a little, looking towards Professor Kennedy.

Then old Reinhardt, gravely pontifical, rapped with his bow on his

rack, lifted his violin to his chin, and--an obliterating sponge was

passed over Sylvia's memory. All the queer, uncomfortable talk, the

unpleasant voices, the angry or malicious or uneasy eyes, the unkindly

smiling lips, all were washed away out of her mind. The smooth,

swelling current of the music was like oil on a wound. As she listened

and felt herself growing drowsy, it seemed to her that she was

being floated away, safely away from the low-ceilinged room where

personalities clashed, out to cool, star-lit spaces.

All that night in her dreams she heard only old Reinhardt's angel

voice proclaiming, amid the rich murmur of assent from the other

strings:

[Illustration]

CHAPTER VI

THE SIGHTS OF LA CHANCE

One day at the end of a fortnight, Aunt Victoria and Arnold were late

in their daily arrival at the Marshall house, and when the neat surrey

at last drove up, they both showed signs of discomposure. Discomposure

was no unusual condition for Arnold, who not infrequently made his

appearance red-faced and sullen, evidently fresh from angry revolt

against his tutor, but on that morning he was anything but red-faced,

and looked a little scared. His stepmother's fine complexion, on

the contrary, had more pink than usual in its pearly tones, and her

carriage had less than usual of sinuous grace. Sylvia and Judith ran

down the porch steps to meet them, but stopped, startled by their

aspect. Aunt Victoria descended, very straight, her head high-held,

and without giving Sylvia the kiss with which she usually marked her

preference for her older niece, walked at once into the house.

Although the impressionable Sylvia was so struck by these phenomena,

that, even after her aunt's disappearance, she remained daunted and

silent, Judith needed only the removal of the overpowering presence

to restore her coolness. She pounced on Arnold with questions. "What

_you_ been doing that's so awful bad? I bet _you_ caught it all

right!"

"'Tisn't me," said Arnold in a subdued voice. "It's Pauline and old

Rollins that caught it. They're the ones that ha' been bad."

Judith was at a loss, never having conceived that grown-ups might do

naughty things. Arnold went on, "If you'd ha' heard Madrina talking to

Pauline--say! Do you know what I did? I crawled under the bed--honest

I did. It didn't last but a minute, but it scared the liver out o'

me." This vigorous expression was a favorite of his.

Judith was somewhat impressed by his face and manner, but still

inclined to mock at a confession of fear. "Under the _bed_!" she

sneered.

Arnold evidently felt the horror of the recently enacted scene so

vividly that there was no room for shame in his mind. "You bet I did!

And so would you too, if you'd ha' been there. _Gee_!"

In spite of herself Judith looked somewhat startled by the vibration

of sincerity in his voice, and Sylvia, with her quick sympathy of

divination, had turned almost as pale as the little boy, who, all his

braggart turbulence gone, stood looking at them with a sick expression

in his eyes.

"Was it in your room?" asked Judith. "I thought Pauline's room was on

the top floor. What was she doing down there?"

"No, it was in old Rollins' room--next to mine. I don't know what

Pauline was doing there."

"What did Pauline do when Aunt Victoria scolded her?" asked Sylvia.

She had come to be fond of the pretty young maid with her fat, quick

hands and her bright, warm-hearted smile for her mistress' little

niece. One day, when Mrs. Marshall-Smith had, for a moment, chanced to

leave them alone, Pauline had given her a sudden embrace, and had told

her: "At 'ome zere are four leetle brozers and sisters. America is a

place mos' solitary!" "What did Pauline do?" asked Sylvia again as

Arnold did not answer.

The boy looked down. "Pauline just cried and cried," he said in a low

tone. "I _liked_ Pauline! She was awful good to me. I--I heard her

crying afterwards as she went away. Seemed to me I could hear her

crying all the way out here."

"Did she go away?" asked Judith, trying to make something coherent out

of the story. Arnold nodded.

"You bet she did. Madrina turned her right out--and old Rollins too."

"Was _he_ there? What was the matter anyhow?" Judith persisted.

Arnold twisted uncomfortably, loath to continue bringing up the scene.

"I d'n know what was the matter. Yes, old Rollins was there, all

right. He's gone away too, the doggoned old thing--for good. That's

_something_!" He added, "Aw, quit talkin' about it, can't you! Let's

play!"

"It's my turn to help Mother with the tomatoes," said Judith. "She's

doing the last of the canning this morning. Maybe she'd let you help."

Arnold brightened. "Maybe she would!" he said, adding eagerly, "Maybe

she'd tell us another of the stories about her grandmother."

Judith snatched at his hand and began racing down the path to the

garden. "Maybe she would!" she cried. They both called as they ran,

"Mother, _oh_, Mother!" and as they ran, they leaped and bounded into

the bright autumn air like a couple of puppies.

Sylvia's mental resiliency was not of such sturdily elastic stuff. She

stood still, thinking of Pauline crying, and crying--and started aside

when her aunt came out again on the porch.

"I don't find any one in the house, Sylvia dear," said Mrs.

Marshall-Smith quietly. Sylvia looked up into the clear, blue eyes, so

like her father's, and felt the usual magic spell lay hold on her. The

horrid impression made by Arnold's story dimmed and faded. Arnold was

always getting things twisted. She came up closer to her aunt's

side and took the soft, smooth fingers between her two little hard,

muscular hands. In her relief, she had forgotten to answer. Mrs.

Marshall-Smith said again, "Where are your parents, dear?"

"Oh," said Sylvia. "Oh yes--why, Father's at the University at a

committee meeting and Mother's out by the garden putting up tomatoes.

Judy and Arnold are helping her."

Mrs. Marshall-Smith hesitated, looked about her restlessly, and

finally raised her parasol, of a gold-colored silk, a lighter tone,

but the same shade as her rich plain broadcloth costume of tan. "Shall

we take a little walk, my dear?" she suggested. "I don't feel like

sitting still just now--nor"--she looked down into Sylvia's eyes--"nor

yet like canning tomatoes,"

That walk, the last one taken with Aunt Victoria, became one of

Sylvia's memories, although she never had a vivid recollection of what

they saw during their slow ramble. It was only Aunt Victoria whom the

little girl remembered--Aunt Victoria moving like a goddess over their

rough paths and under the changing glory of the autumn leaves. She

herself was a brighter glory, with her shining blond hair crowned by

a halo of feathery, gold-colored plumes, the soft, fine, supple

broadcloth of her garments gleaming in the sunshine with a sheen like

that of a well-kept animal's coat. There breathed from all her person

a faint odor of grace and violets and unhurried leisure.

Sylvia clung close to her side, taking in through all her pores this

lovely emanation, not noticing whether they were talking or not, not

heeding the direction of their steps. She was quite astonished to find

herself on the University campus, in front of the Main Building. Aunt

Victoria had never walked so far before. "Oh, did you want to see

Father?" she asked, coming a little to herself.

Mrs. Marshall-Smith said, as if in answer, "Just sit down here and

wait for me a minute, will you, Sylvia?" moving thereupon up the steps

and disappearing through the wide front door. Sylvia relapsed into

her day-dreams and, motionless in a pool of sunlight, waited, quite

unconscious of the passage of time.

This long reverie was at last broken by the return of Mrs.

Marshall-Smith. She was not alone, but the radiant young man who

walked beside her was not her brother, and nothing could have

differed more from the brilliantly hard gaze which Professor Marshall

habitually bent on his sister, than the soft intentness with which

young Mr. Saunders regarded the ripely beautiful woman. The dazzled

expression of his eyes was one of the remembered factors of the day

for Sylvia.

The two walked down the shaded steps, Sylvia watching them admiringly,

the scene forever printed on her memory, and emerged into the pool of

sunshine where she sat, swinging her legs from the bench. They stood

there for some minutes, talking together in low tones. Sylvia,

absorbed in watching the play of light on Aunt Victoria's smooth

cheek, heard but a few words of what passed between them. She had a

vague impression that Professor Saunders continually began sentences

starting firmly with "But" and ending somehow on quite another note.

She felt dimly that Aunt Victoria was less calmly passive than usual

in a conversation, that it was not only the enchanting rising and

falling inflections of her voice which talked, but her eyes, her arms,

her whole self. Once she laid her hand for an instant on Professor

Saunders' arm.

More than that Sylvia could not remember, even when she was asked

later to repeat as much as she could of what she had heard. She was

resolving when she was grown-up to have a ruffle of creamy lace

falling away from her neck and wrists as Aunt Victoria did. She had

not only forgotten Arnold's story, she had forgotten that such a boy

existed. She was living in a world all made up of radiance and bloom,

lace and sunshine and velvet, and bright hair and gleaming cloth and

smooth voices and the smell of violets.

After a time she was aware that Professor Saunders shook hands and

turned back up the steps. Aunt Victoria began to move with her slow

grace along the road towards home, and Sylvia to follow, soaking

herself in an impression of supreme suavity.

When, after the walk through the beech-woods, they reached the edge of

the Marshall field, they saw a stiff plume of blue smoke stand up over

the shack by the garden and, as they approached, heard a murmur of

voices. Mrs. Marshall-Smith stopped, furled her parasol, and surveyed

the scene within. Her sister-in-law, enveloped in a large blue apron,

by no means fresh, sat beside a roughly built table, peeling

tomatoes, her brown stained fingers moving with the rapidity of a

prestidigitator's. Judith stood beside her, also attacking the pile of

crimson fruit, endeavoring in vain to emulate her mother's speed. Over

the hot, rusty stove hung Arnold, red-faced and bright-eyed, armed

with a long, wooden spatula which he continually dug into the steaming

contents of an enormous white-lined kettle. As, at the arrival of

the new-comers, Mrs. Marshall's voice stopped, he looked around and

frowned impatiently at his stepmother. "She's just got to the excitin'

part," he said severely, and to the raconteur eagerly, "'N'_en_ what?"

Mrs. Marshall looked up at her husband's sister, smiled, and went

on,--Sylvia recognized the story as one of her own old favorites.

"Well, it was very early dawn when she had to go over to the

neighbor's to borrow some medicine for her father, who kept getting

sicker all the time. As she hurried along across the meadow towards

the stile, she kept wondering, in spite of herself, if there was any

truth in what Nat had said about having seen bear tracks near the

house the day before. When she got to the stile she ran up the

steps--and on the top one she stood still, for there--" She made

a dramatic pause and reached for another tray of tomatoes. Arnold

stopped stirring the pot and stood motionless, his eyes fixed on

the narrator, the spatula dripping tomato-juice all along his white

trousers. "There on the other side, looking up at her, was a bear--a

big black bear."

Arnold's mouth dropped open and his eyes widened.

"My grandmother was dreadfully frightened. She was only seventeen, and

she hadn't any kind of a weapon, not so much as a little stick with

her. Her first idea was to turn and run as fast as she could, back

home. But she remembered how sick her father was, and how much he

needed the medicine; and then besides, she used to say, all of a

sudden it made her angry, all over, to have that great stupid animal

get in her way. She always said that nothing 'got her mad up' like

feeling afraid. So what do you suppose she did?"

Arnold could only shake his head silently in an ecstasy of impatience

for the story to continue. Judith and Sylvia smiled at each other with

the insufferable complacence of auditors who know the end by heart.

"She just pointed her finger at the bear, and she said in a loud,

harsh voice: 'Shame! Shame! Shame on you! For sha-a-ame!' She'd taught

district school, you know, and had had lots of practice saying that

to children who had been bad. The bear looked up at her hard for

a minute, then dropped his head and began to walk slowly away.

Grandmother always said, 'The great lummox lumbered off into the

bushes like a gawk of a boy who's been caught in mischief,' She waited

just a minute and then ran like lightning along the path through the

woods to the neighbors and got the medicine."

The story was evidently over, the last tomato was peeled. Mrs.

Marshall rose, wiping her stained and dripping hands on her apron,

and went to the stove. Arnold started as if coming out of a dream

and looked about him with wondering eyes. "Well,

what-d'you-think-o'-_that?_" he commented, all in one breath. "Say,

Mother," he went on, looking up at her with trusting eyes, searching

the quiet face, "what do you suppose _made_ the bear go away? You

wouldn't think a little thing like that would scare a _bear_!"

Mrs. Marshall began dipping the hot, stewed tomatoes into the glass

jars ready in a big pan of boiling water on the back of the stove. The

steam rose up, like a cloud, into her face, which began to turn red

and to glisten with perspiration. "Oh, I don't suppose it really

frightened the bear," she said moderately, refraining from the

dramatic note of completeness which her husband, in spite of himself,

gave to everything he touched, and adding instead the pungent, homely

savor of reality, which none relished more than Sylvia and her father,

incapable themselves of achieving it. "'Most likely the bear would

have gone away of his own accord anyhow. They don't attack people

unless they're stirred up." Arnold bit deeply into the solidity of

this unexaggerated presentation, and was silent for a moment, saying

then: "Well, anyhow, she didn't _know_ he'd go away! She was a sport,

all right!"

"Oh yes, indeed," said Mrs. Marshall, dipping and steaming, and wiping

away the perspiration, which ran down in drops to the end of her

large, shapely nose. "Yes, my grandmother was a sport, all right." The

acrid smell of hot, cooking tomatoes filled the shed and spread to the

edge where Sylvia and her aunt stood, still a little aloof. Although

it bore no resemblance to the odor of violets, it could not be called

a disgusting smell: it was the sort of smell which is quite agreeable

when one is very hungry. But Sylvia was not hungry at all. She stepped

back involuntarily. Mrs. Marshall-Smith, on the contrary, advanced a

step or so, until she stood close to her sister-in-law. "Barbara, I'd

like to see you a few minutes without the children," she remarked in

the neutral tone she always had for her brother's wife. "A rather

unpleasant occurrence--I'm in something of a quandary."

Mrs. Marshall nodded. "All right," she agreed. "Scatter out of here,

you children! Go and let out the hens, and give them some water!"

Arnold needed no second bidding, reminded by his stepmother's words

of his experiences of the morning. He and Judith scampered away in

a suddenly improvised race to see who would reach the chicken-house

first. Sylvia went more slowly, looking back once or twice at the

picture made by the two women, so dramatically contrasted--her mother,

active, very upright, wrapped in a crumpled and stained apron, her

dark hair bound closely about her round head, her moist, red face and

steady eyes turned attentively upon the radiant creature beside her,

cool and detached, leaning willow-like on the slender wand of the

gold-colored parasol.

Professor Marshall chanced to be late that day in coming home for

luncheon, and Aunt Victoria and Arnold had returned to the hotel

without seeing him. His wife remarked that Victoria had asked her

to tell him something, but, acting on her inviolable principle that

nothing must interfere with the cheerful peace of mealtime, said

nothing more to him until after they had finished the big plate of

purple grapes from her garden, with which the meal ended.

Then Judith vanished out to the shop, where she was constructing a

rabbit-house for the latest family. Sylvia took Lawrence, yawning and

rubbing his eyes, but fighting desperately against his sleepiness,

upstairs for his nap. When this task fell to Judith's lot it was

despatched with business-like promptness, but Lawrence had early

discovered a temperamental difference between his two sisters, and

Sylvia was seldom allowed to leave the small bed until she had paid

tribute to her ever-present desire to please, in the shape of a story

or a song. On that day Buddy was more exacting than usual. Sylvia told

the story of Cinderella and sang, "A Frog He Would a-Wooing Go," twice

through, before the little boy's eyes began to droop. Even then, the

clutch of his warm, moist fingers about her hand did not relax. When

she tried to slip her fingers out of his, his eyelids fluttered open

and he tightened his grasp with a wilful frown. So she sat still on

the edge of his bed, waiting till he should be really asleep.

From the dining-room below her rose the sound of voices, or rather of

one voice--her father's. She wondered why it sounded so angry, and

then, mixed with some unintelligible phrases--"turned out on the

street, in trouble--in a foreign land--Good God!" she caught Pauline's

name. Oh yes, that must be the trouble. Mother was telling Father

about Pauline--whatever it was she had done--and he was as mad about

it as Aunt Victoria had been. If Aunt Victoria's voice had sounded

like that, she didn't wonder that Arnold had hidden under the bed. If

she could have moved, she, too, would have run away, although the

idea that she ought to do so did not occur to her. There had been no

secrets in that house. The talk had always been for all to hear who

would.

But when she tried again to slip her hand away from Buddy's the little

boy pulled at it hard, and half opening his eyes, said sleepily,

"Sylvie stay with Buddy--Sylvie stay--" Sylvia yielded weakly, said:

"Yes--sh! sh! Sister'll stay. Go to sleep, Buddy."

From below came the angry voice, quite loud now, so that she caught

every queer-sounding word--"righteous indignation indeed! What else

did _she_ do, I'd like to know, when she wanted money. The only

difference was that she was cold-blooded enough to extract a legal

status from the old reprobate she accosted."

Sylvia heard her mother's voice saying coldly, "You ought to be

ashamed to use such a word!" and her father retort, "It's the _only_

word that expresses it! You know as well as I do that she cared no

more for Ephraim Smith than for the first man she might have solicited

on the street--nor so much! God! It makes me sick to look at her and

think of the price she paid for her present damn Olympian serenity."

Sylvia heard her mother begin to clear off the table. There was a

rattle of dishes through which her voice rose impatiently. "Oh,

Elliott, why be so melodramatic always, and spoil so much good

language! She did only what every girl brought up as she was, would

have done. And, anyhow, are you so very sure that in your heart

you're not so awfully hard on her because you're envious of that very

prosperity?"

He admitted, with acrimony, the justice of this thrust. "Very likely.

Very likely!--everything base and mean in me, that you keep down,

springs to life in me at her touch. I dare say I do envy her--I'm

quite capable of that--am I not her brother, with the same--"

Mrs. Marshall said hastily: "Hush! Hush! Here's Judith. For Heaven's

sake don't let the child hear you!"

For the first time the idea penetrated Sylvia's head that she ought

not to have listened. Buddy was now soundly asleep: she detached her

hand from his, and went soberly along the hall into her own room. She

did not want to see her father just then.

A long time after, Mother called up to say that Aunt Victoria had come

for her afternoon drive, and to leave Arnold. Sylvia opened the door a

crack and asked, "Where's Father?"

"Oh, gone back to the University this long time," answered her mother

in her usual tone. Sylvia came down the stairs slowly and took her

seat in the carriage beside Aunt Victoria with none of her usual

demonstrative show of pleasure.

"Don't you like my dress?" asked Aunt Victoria, as they drove away.

"You don't even notice it, and I put it on 'specially to please

you--you're the one discriminating critic in this town!" As Sylvia

made no answer to this sally, she went on: "It's hard to get into

alone, too. I had to ask the hotel chambermaid to hook it up on the

shoulders."

Thus reminded of Pauline, Sylvia could have but inattentive eyes for

the creation of amber silk and lace, and brown fur, which seductively

clad the handsome body beside her.

Mrs. Marshall-Smith gave her favorite a penetrating look. "What's the

matter with you, Sylvia?" she asked in the peremptory note which her

sweet voice of many modulations could startlingly assume on occasion.

Sylvia had none of Judith's instant pugnacious antagonism to any

peremptory note. She answered in one imploring rush of a question,

"Aunt Victoria, why should _Father_ be so very mad at Pauline?"

Mrs. Marshall-Smith looked a little startled at this direct reference

to the veiled storm-center of the day, but not at all displeased. "Oh,

your mother told him? Was he so very angry?" she asked with a slight

smile.

"Oh, dreadfully!" returned Sylvia. "I didn't _mean_ to listen, but I

couldn't help it. Buddy wouldn't go to sleep and Father's voice was so

loud--and he got madder and madder at her." She went on with another

question, "Auntie, who was Ephraim Smith?"

Aunt Victoria turned upon her in astonishment, and did not, for a

moment, answer; then: "Why, that was the name of my husband, Sylvia.

What has that to do with anything?"

"Why didn't Pauline like him?" asked Sylvia.

Mrs. Marshall-Smith replied with a vivacity of surprise which carried

her out of her usual delicate leisure in speech. "_Pauline?_ Why, she

never saw him in her life! _What_ are you talking about, child?"

"But, Father said--I thought--he seemed to mean--" Sylvia halted, not

able to remember in her bewilderment what it had been that Father had

said. In a blur of doubt and clouded perceptions she lost all definite

impression of what she had heard. Evidently, as so often happened, she

had grown-ups' affairs all twisted up in her mind. Aunt Victoria was

touched with kindly amusement at the little girl's face of perplexity,

and told her, dismissing the subject: "Never mind, dear, you evidently

misunderstood something. But I wonder what your father could have said

to give you such a funny idea."

Sylvia gave it up, shaking her head. They turned into the main street

of La Chance, and Aunt Victoria directed the coachman to drive them to

"the" drug store of town, and offered Sylvia her choice of any soda

water confection she might select. This completed the "about-face" of

the mobile little mind. After several moments of blissful anguish of

indecision, Sylvia decided on a peach ice-cream soda, and thereafter

was nothing but sense of taste as she ecstatically drew through a

straw the syrupy, foamy draught of nectar. She took small sips at a

time and held them in the back of her mouth till every minute bubble

of gas had rendered up its delicious prickle to her tongue. Her

consciousness was filled to its uttermost limits with a voluptuous

sense of present physical delight.

And yet it was precisely at this moment that from her subconscious

mind, retracing with unaided travail a half-forgotten clue, there

sprang into her memory a complete phrase of what her father had said.

She gave one more suck to the straw and laid it aside for a moment

to say in quite a comfortable accent to her aunt: "Oh yes, now I

remember. He said she didn't care for him any more than for the first

man she might have solicited in the street." For an instant the words

came back as clearly as though they had just been uttered, and she

repeated them fluently, returning thereupon at once to the charms of

the tall, foam-filled frosted glass.

Evidently Aunt Victoria did not follow this sudden change of subject,

for she asked blankly, "_Who_? Who didn't care for who?"

"Why, I supposed, Pauline for Ephraim Smith. It was that that made

Father so mad," explained Sylvia, sucking dreamily, her eyes on

the little maelstrom created in the foaming liquid by the straw,

forgetting everything else. The luxurious leisure in which she

consumed her potation made it last a long time, and it was not until

her suction made only a sterile rattling in the straw that she looked

up at her aunt to thank her.

Mrs. Marshall-Smith's face was averted and she did not turn it back

as she said, "Just run along into the shop and leave your glass,

Sylvia--here is the money."

After Sylvia took her seat again in the carriage, the coachman turned

the horse's head back up the Main Street. "Aren't you going to the

campus?" asked Sylvia in surprise.

"No, we are going to the hotel," said Aunt Victoria. She spoke

quietly, and seemed to look as usual, but Sylvia's inner barometer

fell fast with a conviction of a change in the emotional atmosphere.

She sat as still as possible, and only once glanced up timidly at

her aunt's face. There was no answering glance. Aunt Victoria gazed

straight in front of her. Her face looked as it did when it was being

massaged--all smooth and empty. There was, however, one change. For

the first time that day, she looked a little pale.

As the carriage stopped in front of the onyx-lined, palm-decorated,

plate-glass-mirrored "entrance hall" of the expensive hotel, Aunt

Victoria descended, motioning to Sylvia not to follow her. "I haven't

time to drive any more this afternoon," she said. "Peter will take you

home. And have him bring Arnold back at once." She turned away and, as

Sylvia sat watching her, entered the squirrel-cage revolving door of

glass, which a little boy in livery spun about for her.

But after she was inside the entrance hall, she signified to him that

she had forgotten something, and came immediately out again. What

she had forgotten surprised Sylvia as much as it touched her. Aunt

Victoria came rapidly to the side of the carriage and put out her

arms. "Come here, dear," she said in a voice Sylvia had never

heard her use. It trembled a little, and broke. With her quick

responsiveness, Sylvia sprang into the outstretched arms, overcome by

the other's emotion. She hid her face against the soft, perfumed laces

and silk, and heard from beneath them the painful throb of a quickly

beating heart.

Mrs. Marshall-Smith held her niece for a long moment and then turned

the quivering little face up to her own grave eyes, in which Sylvia,

for all her inexperience, read a real suffering. Aunt Victoria looked

as though somebody were hurting her--hurting her awfully--Sylvia

pressed her cheek hard against her aunt's, and Mrs. Marshall-Smith

felt, soft and Warm and ardent on her lips, the indescribably fresh

kiss of a child's mouth. "Oh, little Sylvia!" she cried, in that

new, strange, uncertain voice which trembled and broke, "Oh, little

Sylvia!" She seemed to be about to say something more, said in fact in

a half-whisper,

"I hope--I hope--" but then shook her head, kissed Sylvia gently, put

her back in the carriage, and again disappeared through the revolving

door.

This time she did not turn back. She did not even look back. After a

moment's wait, Peter gathered up the reins and Sylvia, vaguely uneasy,

and much moved, drove home in a solitary state, which she forgot to

enjoy.

The next morning there was no arrival, even tardy, of the visitors

from the hotel. Instead came a letter, breaking the startling news

that Aunt Victoria had been called unexpectedly to the East, and had

left on the midnight train, taking Arnold with her, of course. Judith

burst into angry expressions of wrath over the incompleteness of the

cave which she and Arnold had been excavating together. The next day

was the beginning of school, she reminded her auditors, and she'd have

no time to get it done! Never! She characterized Aunt Victoria as a

mean old thing, an epithet for which she was not reproved, her mother

sitting quite absent and absorbed in the letter. She read it over

twice, with a very puzzled air, which gave an odd look to her usually

crystal-clear countenance. She asked her husband one question as he

went out of the door. "You didn't see Victoria yesterday--or say

anything to her?" to which he answered, with apparently uncalled-for

heat, "I did _not_! I thought it rather more to the purpose to try to

look up Pauline."

Mrs. Marshall sprang up and approached him with an anxious face. He

shook his head: "Too late. Disappeared. No trace."

She sat down again, looking sad and stern.

Professor Marshall put on his hat with violence, and went away.

When he came home to luncheon there was a fresh sensation, and again

a disagreeable one. He brought the astounding news that, at the very

beginning of the semester's work, he had been deserted by his most

valuable assistant, and abandoned, apparently forever, by his

most-loved disciple. Saunders had left word, a mere laconic note, that

he had accepted the position left vacant by the dismissal of Arnold's

tutor, and had entered at once upon the duties of his new position.

Professor Marshall detailed this information in a hard, level voice,

and without further comment handed his wife Saunders' note. She read

it rapidly, this time with no perplexity, and laid it down, saying to

her husband, briefly, "Will you kindly remember that the children are

here?"

Judith looked at Sylvia in astonishment, this being the first time

that that well-worn phrase, so familiar to most children, had ever

been heard in the Marshall house. Why shouldn't Father remember they

were there? Couldn't he _see_ them? Judith almost found the idea funny

enough to laugh at, although she had not at all in general Sylvia's

helpless response to the ridiculous. Sylvia did not laugh now. She

looked anxiously at her father's face, and was relieved when he only

answered her mother's exhortation by saying in a low tone: "Oh, I have

nothing to say. It's beyond words!"

Luncheon went on as usual, with much chatter among the children. Some

time later--in the midst of a long story from Lawrence, Mrs. Marshall

herself brought up the subject again. Buddy was beginning to struggle

with the narrative form of self-expression, and to trip his tongue

desperately over the tenses. He had just said, "And the rabbit _was_

naughty, didn't he was?" when his mother exclaimed, addressing her

husband's grim face, "Good Heavens, don't take it so hard, Elliott."

He raised an eyebrow, but did not look up from the pear he was

eating. "To be responsible, as I feel I am, for the pitching into a

_cul-de-sac_ of the most promising young--"

His wife broke in, "_Responsible_! How in the world are _you_

responsible!" she added quickly, as if at random, to prevent the reply

which her husband was evidently about to cast at her. "Besides, how do

_you_ know?--one never knows how things will turn out--she may--she

may marry him, and he may have a life which will give him more leisure

for investigation than if--"

Professor Marshall wiped his lips violently on his napkin and stood

up. "Nothing would induce her to marry him--or any one else. She's

extracted from marriage all she wants of it. No, she'll just keep him

trailing along, in an ambiguous position, sickened and tantalized and

fevered, till all the temper is drawn out of him--and then hell be

dropped,"

He turned away with an impatient fling of his head. His wife stood up

now and looked at him anxiously. "Go play us something on the piano,"

she urged. This was not a common exhortation from her. She cared very

little for music, and with her usual honesty she showed, as a rule, a

very passive attitude towards it.

Professor Marshall glanced at her with a flash of anger. "Sometimes

you count too much on my childishness, Barbara," he said resentfully,

and went out of the door without further words.

Decidedly the discomposing effect of Aunt Victoria's visit lasted even

after she had gone away. But the next day was the beginning of the

school term, the busy, regular routine was taken up, Sylvia was

promoted to the 5A grade, and at home Father let her begin to learn

the Pilgrim's Chorus, from Tannhauser.

Life for the eager little girl moved quickly forward at its usual

brisk pace, through several years to come.

CHAPTER VII

"WE HOLD THESE TRUTHS TO BE SELF-EVIDENT ..."

The public school to which the Marshall children went as soon as they

were old enough was like any one of ten thousand public schools--a

large, square, many-windowed, extravagantly ugly building, once red

brick, but long ago darkened almost to black by soft-coal smoke. About

it, shaded by three or four big cottonwood-trees, was an inclosed

space of perhaps two acres of ground, beaten perfectly smooth by

hundreds of trampling little feet, a hard, bare earthen floor, so

entirely subdued to its fate that even in the long summer vacation no

spear of grass could penetrate its crust to remind it that it was made

of common stuff with fields and meadows.

School began at nine o'clock in the morning and, as a rule,

three-fourths of the children had passed through the front gate twenty

or thirty minutes earlier. Nobody knew why it should be considered

such a hideous crime to be "tardy," but the fact was that not the most

reckless and insubordinate of the older boys cared to risk it. Any

one of the four hundred children in any public school in the city

preferred infinitely to be absent a day than to have the ghastly

experience of walking through deserted streets (that is, with no

children on them), across the empty playground frighteningly unlike

itself, into the long, desolate halls which, walk as cat-like as one

might, resounded to the guilty footsteps with accusing echoes. And

then the narrow cloakroom, haunted with limp, hanging coats and caps

and hats, and finally the entry into the schoolroom, seated rank on

rank with priggishly complacent schoolmates, looking up from their

books with unfriendly eyes of blame at the figure of the late-comer.

AH over that section of La Chance, during the hour between half-past

seven and half-past eight in the morning, the families of school

children were undergoing a most rigorous discipline in regularity

and promptness. No child was too small or too timid to refrain from

embittering his mother's life with clamorous upbraidings if breakfast

were late, or his school-outfit of clothes were not ready to the last

button, so that he could join the procession of schoolward-bound

children, already streaming past his door at a quarter past eight. The

most easy-going and self-indulgent mother learned to have at least one

meal a day on time; and the children themselves during those eight

years of their lives had imbedded in the tissue of their brains and

the marrow of their bones that unrebelling habit of bending

their backs daily to a regular burden of work not selected by

themselves--which, according to one's point of view, is either the

bane or the salvation of our modern industrial society.

The region where the school stood was inhabited, for the most part, by

American families or German and Irish ones so long established as to

be virtually American; a condition which was then not infrequent in

moderate-sized towns of the Middle West and which is still by no means

unknown there. The class-rolls were full of Taylors and Aliens and

Robinsons and Jacksons and Websters and Rawsons and Putnams, with

a scattering of Morrisseys and Crimminses and O'Hearns, and some

Schultzes and Brubackers and Helmeyers. There was not a Jew in the

school, because there were almost none in that quarter of town, and,

for quite another reason, not a single negro child. There were plenty

of them in the immediate neighborhood, swarming around the collection

of huts and shanties near the railroad tracks given over to negroes,

and known as Flytown. But they had their own school, which looked

externally quite like all the others in town, and their playground,

beaten bare like that of the Washington Street School, was filled

with laughing, shouting children, ranging from shoe-black through

coffee-color to those occasional tragic ones with white skin and blue

eyes, but with the telltale kink in the fair hair and the bluish

half-moon at the base of the finger-nails.

The four hundred children in the Washington Street School were,

therefore, a mass more homogeneous than alarmists would have us

believe it possible to find in this country. They were, for all

practical purposes, all American, and they were all roughly of one

class. Their families were neither rich nor poor (at least so far as

the children's standards went). Their fathers were grocers, small

clerks, merchants, two or three were truck-farmers, plumbers,

carpenters, accountants, employees of various big businesses in town.

It was into this undistinguished and plebeian mediocrity that the

Marshall children were introduced when they began going to school.

The interior of the school-building resembled the outside in being

precisely like that of ten thousand other graded schools in this

country. The halls were long and dark and dusty, and because the

building had been put up under contract at a period when public

contract-work was not so scrupulously honest as it notably is in our

present cleanly muck-raked era, the steps of the badly built staircase

creaked and groaned and sagged and gave forth clouds of dust under the

weight of the myriads of little feet which climbed up and clown those

steep ascents every day. Everything was of wood. The interior looked

like the realized dream of a professional incendiary.

The classrooms were high and well-lighted, with many large windows,

never either very clean or very dirty, which let in a flood of our

uncompromisingly brilliant American daylight upon the rows of little

seats and desks screwed, like those of an ocean liner, immovably to

the floor, as though at any moment the building was likely to embark

upon a cruise in stormy waters.

Outwardly the rows of clean-faced, comfortably dressed, well-shod

American children, sitting in chairs, bore no resemblance to

shaven-headed, barefooted little Arabian students, squatting on the

floor, gabbling loud uncomprehended texts from the Koran; but the

sight of Sylvia's companions bending over their school-books with

glazed, vacant eyes, rocking back and forth as a rhythmical aid to

memorizing, their lips moving silently as they repeated over and over,

gabblingly, the phrases of the printed page, might have inclined a

hypothetical visitor from Mars to share the bewildered amusement of

the American visitors to Moslem schools. Sylvia rocked and twisted a

favorite button, gabbled silently, and recited fluently with the rest,

being what was known as an apt and satisfactory pupil. In company with

the other children she thus learned to say, in answer to questions,

that seven times seven is forty-nine; that the climate of Brazil is

hot and moist; that the capital of Arkansas is Little Rock; and that

"through" is spelled with three misleading and superfluous letters.

What she really learned was, as with her mates, another matter--for,

of course, those devouringly active little minds did not spend six

hours a day in school without learning something incessantly. The few

rags and tatters of book-information they acquired were but the

merest fringes on the great garment of learning acquired by these

public-school children, which was to wrap them about all their lives.

What they learned during those eight years of sitting still and not

whispering had nothing to do with the books in their desks or the lore

in their teachers' brains. The great impression stamped upon the wax

of their minds, which became iron in after years, was democracy--a

crude, distorted, wavering image of democracy, like every image an

ideal in this imperfect world, but in its essence a reflection of the

ideal of their country. No European could have conceived how literally

it was true that the birth or wealth or social position of a child

made no difference in the estimation of his mates. There were no

exceptions to the custom of considering the individual on his own

merits. These merits were often queerly enough imagined, a faculty for

standing on his head redounding as much, or more, to a boy's credit as

the utmost brilliance in recitation, or generosity of temperament, but

at least he was valued for something he himself could do, and not for

any fortuitous incidents of birth and fortune.

Furthermore there lay back of these four hundred children, who shaped

their world to this rough-and-ready imitation of democracy, their

families, not so intimately known to each other, of course, as the

children themselves, but still by no means unknown in their general

characteristics; four hundred American families who were, on the

whole, industrious, law-abiding, who loved their children, who were

quite tasteless in matters of art, and quite sound though narrow in

matters of morals, utterly mediocre in intelligence and information,

with no breadth of outlook in any direction; but who somehow lived

their lives and faced and conquered all the incredible vicissitudes of

that Great Adventure, with an unconscious, cheerful fortitude which

many an acuter mind might have envied them.

It is possible that the personal knowledge of these four hundred

enduring family lives was, perhaps, the most important mental ballast

taken on by the children of the community during their eight years'

cruise at school. Certainly it was the most important for the

sensitive, complicated, impressionable little Sylvia Marshall, with

her latent distaste for whatever lacked distinction and external

grace, and her passion for sophistication and elegance, which was to

spring into such fierce life with the beginning of her adolescence.

She might renounce, as utterly as she pleased, the associates of her

early youth, but the knowledge of their existence, the acquaintance

with their deep humanity, the knowledge that they found life sweet and

worth living, all this was to be a part of the tissue of her brain

forever, and was to add one to the conflicting elements which battled

within her for the mastery during all the clouded, stormy radiance of

her youth.

The families which supplied the Washington Street School being quite

stationary in their self-owned houses, few new pupils entered during

the school-year. There was, consequently, quite a sensation on the day

in the middle of March when the two Fingál girls entered, Camilla in

the "Fifth A" grade, where Sylvia was, and Cécile in the third grade,

in the next seat to Judith's. The girls themselves were so different

from other children in school that their arrival would have excited

interest even at the beginning of the school-year. Coming, as they

did, at a time when everybody knew by heart every detail of every

one else's appearance from hair-ribbon to shoes, these two beautiful

exotics, in their rich, plain, mourning dresses were vastly stared at.

Sylvia's impressionable eyes were especially struck by the air of race

and breeding of the new-comer in her class. Everything about the other

child, from her heavy black hair, patrician nose, and large dark eyes

to her exquisitely formed hands, white and well-cared-for, seemed to

Sylvia perfection itself.

During recess she advanced to the new-comer, saying, with a bright

smile: "Aren't you thirsty? Don't you want me to show you where the

pump is?" She put out her hand as she spoke and took the slim white

fingers in her own rough little hand, leading her new schoolmate along

in silence, looking at her with an open interest.

She had confidently expected amicable responsiveness in the other

little girl, because her experience had been that her own frank

friendliness nearly always was reflected back to her from others; but

she had not expected, or indeed ever seen, such an ardent look of

gratitude as burned in the other's eyes. She stopped, startled,

uncomprehending, as though her companion had said something

unintelligible, and felt the slim fingers in her hand close about her

own in a tight clasp. "You are so very kind to show me this pump,"

breathed Camilla shyly. The faint flavor of a foreign accent which,

to Sylvia's ear, hung about these words, was the final touch of

fascination for her. That instant she decided in her impetuous,

enthusiastic heart that Camilla was the most beautiful, sweetest,

best-dressed, loveliest creature she had ever seen, or would ever see

in her life; and she bent her back joyfully in the service of her

ideal. She would not allow Camilla to pump for herself, but flew to

the handle with such energy that the white water gushed out in a

flood, overflowing Camilla's cup, spattering over on her fingers, and

sparkling on the sheer white of her hemstitched cuffs. This made them

both laugh, the delicious silly laugh of childhood.

Already they seemed like friends. "How do you pronounce your name?"

Sylvia asked familiarly.

"Cam-eela Fingál," said the other, looking up from her cup, her upper

lip red and moist. She accented the surname on the last syllable.

"What a perfectly lovely name!" cried Sylvia. "Mine is Sylvia

Marshall."

"That's a pretty name too," said Camilla, smiling. She spoke less

timidly now, but her fawn-like eyes still kept their curious

expression, half apprehension, half hope.

"How old are you?" asked Sylvia.

"Eleven, last November."

"Why, my birthday is in November, and I was eleven too!" cried Sylvia.

"I thought you must be older--you're so tall."

Camilla looked down and said nothing.

Sylvia went on: "I'm crazy about the way you do your hair, in those

twists over your ears. When I was studying my spelling lesson, I was

trying to figure out how you do it."

"Oh, I don't do it. Mattice does it for us--for Cécile and

me--Cécile's my sister. She's in the third grade."

"Why, I have a sister in the third grade too!" exclaimed Sylvia, much

struck by this second propitious coincidence. "Her name is Judith and

she's a darling. Wouldn't it be nice if she and Cécile should be

good friends _too_!" She put her arm about her new comrade's waist,

convinced that they were now intimates of long standing. They ran

together to take their places at the sound of the bell; all during

the rest of the morning session she smiled radiantly at the new-comer

whenever their eyes met.

She planned to walk part way home with her at noon, but she was

detained for a moment by the teacher, and when she reached the front

gate, where Judith was waiting for her, Camilla was nowhere in sight.

Judith explained with some disfavor that a surrey had been waiting for

the Fingál girls and they had been driven away.

Sylvia fell into a rhapsody over her new acquaintance and found to her

surprise (it was always a surprise to Sylvia that Judith's tastes and

judgments so frequently differed from hers) that Judith by no means

shared her enthusiasm. She admitted, but as if it were a matter of no

importance, that both Camilla and Cécile were pretty enough, but she

declared roundly that Cécile was a little sneak who had set out from

the first to be "Teacher's pet." This title, in the sturdy democracy

of the public schools, means about what "sycophantic lickspittle"

means in the vocabulary of adults, and carries with it a crushing

weight of odium which can hardly ever be lived down.

"_Judith_, what makes you think so?" cried Sylvia, horrified at the

epithet.

"The way she looks at Teacher--she never takes her eyes off her,

and just jumps to do whatever Teacher says. And then she looks at

everybody so kind o' scared--'s'if she thought she was goin' to be hit

over the head every minute and was so thankful to everybody for not

doing it. Makes me feel just _like_ doin' it!" declared Judith, the

Anglo-Saxon.

Sylvia recognized a scornful version of the appealing expression which

she had found so touching in Camilla.

"Why, I think it's sweet of them to look so! When they're so awfully

pretty, and have such good clothes--and a carriage--and everything!

They might be as stuck-up as anything! I think it's just _nice_ for

them to be so sweet!" persisted Sylvia.

"I don't call it bein' sweet," said Judith, "to watch Teacher every

minute and smile all over your face if she looks at you and hold on to

her hand when she's talkin' to you! It's silly!"

They argued all the way home, and the lunch hour was filled with

appeals to their parents to take sides. Professor and Mrs. Marshall,

always ready, although occasionally somewhat absent, listeners to

school news, professed themselves really interested in these new

scholars and quite perplexed by the phenomenon of two beautiful

dark-eyed children, called Camilla and Cécile Fingál. Judith refused

to twist her tongue to pronounce the last syllable accented, and her

version of the name made it sound Celtic. "Perhaps their father

is Irish and the mother Italian or Spanish," suggested Professor

Marshall.

Sylvia was delighted with this hypothesis, and cried out

enthusiastically, "Oh yes--Camilla _looks_ Italian--like an Italian

princess!"

Judith assumed an incredulous and derisive expression and remained

silent, an achievement of self-control which Sylvia was never able to

emulate.

The Fingál girls continued to occupy a large space in Sylvia's

thoughts and hours, and before long they held a unique position in

the opinion of the school, which was divided about evenly between the

extremes represented by Sylvia and Judith. The various accomplishments

of the new-comers were ground both for uneasy admiration and

suspicion. They could sing like birds, and, what seemed like

witchcraft to the unmusical little Americans about them, they could

sing in harmony as easily as they could carry an air. And they recited

with fire, ease, and evident enjoyment, instead of with the show of

groaning, unwilling submission to authority which it was etiquette

in the Washington Street School to show before beginning to "speak a

piece."

They were good at their books too, and altogether, with their quick

docility, picturesqueness, and eagerness to please, were the delight

of their teachers. In the fifth grade, Sylvia's example of intimate,

admiring friendship definitely threw popular favor on the side of

Camilla, who made every effort to disarm the hostility aroused by her

too-numerous gifts of nature. She was ready to be friends with the

poorest and dullest of the girls, never asked the important rôles in

any games, hid rather than put forward the high marks she received in

her studies, and was lavish with her invitations to her schoolmates to

visit her at home.

The outside of this house, which Mr. Fingál had rented a month or so

before when they first moved to La Chance, was like any one of many in

the region; but the interior differed notably from those to which the

other children were accustomed. For one thing there was no "lady of

the house," Mrs. Fingál having died a short time before. Camilla and

Cécile could do exactly as they pleased, and they gave the freedom of

the house and its contents lavishly to their little friends. In the

kitchen was an enormous old negro woman, always good-natured, always

smelling of whiskey. She kept on hand a supply of the most meltingly

delicious cakes and cookies, and her liberal motto, "Heah, chile,

put yo' han' in the cookie-jah and draw out what you lights on!" was

always flourished in the faces of the schoolmates of the two daughters

of the house.

In the rest of the house, filled with dark, heavy, dimly shining

furniture, reigned Mattice, another old negro woman, but, unlike the

jolly, fat cook, yellow and shriveled and silent. She it was who

arrayed Camille and Cécile with such unerring taste, and her skilful

old hands brushed and dressed their long black hair in artful twists

and coils.

Here, against their own background, the two girls seemed more at their

ease and showed more spontaneity than at school. They were fond of

"dressing up" and of organizing impromptu dramatizations of the

stories of familiar books, and showed a native ability for acting

which explained their success in recitations. Once when the fun was

very rollicking, Camilla brought out from a closet a banjo and,

thrumming on its strings with skilful fingers, played a tingling

accompaniment to one of her songs. The other little girls were

delighted and clamored for more, but she put it away quickly with

almost a frown on her sweet face, and for once in her life did not

yield to their demands.

"Well, I think more of her for that!" remarked Judith, when this

incident was repeated to her by Sylvia, who cried out, "Why, Judy, how

_hateful_ you are about poor Camilla!"

Nothing was learned about the past history of the Fingáls beyond the

fact, dropped once by the cook, that they had lived in Louisiana

before coming to La Chance, but there were rumors, based on nothing

at all, and everywhere credited, that their mother had been a

Spanish-American heiress, disinherited by her family for marrying a

Protestant. Such a romantic and picturesque element had never before

entered the lives of the Washington Street school-children. Once

a bold and insensitive little girl, itching to know more of this

story-book history, had broken the silence about Mrs. Fingál and had

asked Camilla bluntly, "Say, who _was_ your mother, anyway?" The

question had been received by Camilla with whitening lips and a

desperate silence--ended by a sudden loud burst of sobs, which tore

Sylvia's heart. "You mean, horrid thing!" she cried to the inquisitor.

"Her mother isn't dead a year yet! Camilla can't bear to talk about

her!"

Once in a great while Mr. Fingál was visible,--a bald, middle-aged man

with a white, sad face, and eyes that never smiled, although his lips

often did when he saw the clusters of admiring children hanging about

his daughters.

Judith held aloof from these gatherings at the Fingál house, her

prejudice against the girls never weakening, although Cécile as well

as Camilla had won over almost all the other girls of her grade.

Judith showed the self-contained indifference which it was her habit

to feel about matters which did not deeply stir her, and made no

further attempts to analyze or even to voice her animosity beyond

saying once, when asked to go with them on a drive, that she didn't

like their "meechin' ways,"--a vigorous New England phrase which she

had picked up from her mother.

* * * * *

About a month after the Fingál girls entered school, the project of a

picnic took form among the girls of the Fifth A grade. One of them had

an uncle who lived three or four miles from town on a farm which was

passed by the inter-urban trolley line, and he had sent word that

the children could, if they liked, picnic in his maple woods, which

overhung the brown waters of the Piquota river. There was to be no

recess that day in Five A, and the grade was to be dismissed half an

hour earlier than usual, so that the girls could go out on the trolley

in time to get the supper ready. The farmer was to bring them back by

moonlight in his hay-wagon.

The prospect seemed ideal. Five A hummed with excitement and

importance as the various provisions were allotted to the different

girls and the plans talked over. Sylvia was to bring bananas enough

for the crowd; one of the German-American girls, whose father kept a

grocery-store, promised pickles and olives; three or four together

were to make the sandwiches, and Camilla Fingál was to bring along a

big bag of the famous rich and be-raisined cookies that lived in

the "cookie-jah." Sylvia, who always enjoyed prodigiously both in

anticipation and in reality any social event, could scarcely contain

herself as the time drew near with every prospect of fair weather.

The morning of the day was clear and fine, a perfect example of early

spring, with silvery pearls showing on the tips of the red-twig

osiers, and pussy-willows gleaming gray along the margins of swampy

places. Sylvia and Judith felt themselves one with this upward surge

of new life. They ran to school together, laughing aloud for no

reason, racing and skipping like a couple of spring lambs, their minds

and hearts as crystal-clear of any shadow as the pale-blue, smiling

sky above them. The rising sap beat in their young bodies as well

as in the beech-trees through which they scampered, whirling their

school-books at the end of their straps, and shouting aloud to hear

the squirrel's petulant, chattering answer.

When they came within sight and hearing of the schoolhouse, their

practised ears detected (although with no hint of foreboding) that

something unusual had happened. The children were not running about

and screaming, but standing with their heads close together, talking,

and talking, and talking. As Judith and Sylvia came near, several ran

to meet them, hurling out at them like a hard-flung stone: "Say--what

d'ye think? Those Fingál girls are niggers!"

To the end of her life, Sylvia would never forget the rending shock

of disillusion brought her by these blunt words. She did not dream

of disbelieving them, or of underestimating their significance. A

thousand confirmatory details leaped into her mind: the rich, sweet

voices--the dramatic ability--the banjo--the deprecatory air of

timidity--the self-conscious unwillingness to take the leading

position to which their talents and beauty gave them a right. Yes,

of course it was true! In the space of a heartbeat, all her

romantic Italian imaginings vanished. She continued to walk forward

mechanically, in an utter confusion of mind.

She heard Judith asking in an astonished voice, "Why, what makes you

think so?" and she listened with a tortured attention to the statement

vouchsafed in an excited chorus by a great many shrill little voices

that the Fingáls' old cook had taken a little too much whiskey for

once and had fallen to babbling at the grocery-store before a highly

entertained audience of neighbors, about the endless peregrinations

of the Fingál family in search of a locality where the blood of the

children would not be suspected--"an' theah motheh, fo' all heh

good looks, second cousin to Mattice!" she had tittered foolishly,

gathering up her basket and rolling tipsily out of the store.

"_Well_--" said Judith, "did you ever!" She was evidently as much

amazed as her sister, but Sylvia felt with a sinking of the heart

that what seemed to her the real significance of the news had escaped

Judith.

The Five A girls came trooping up to Sylvia.--"Of course we can't

have Camilla at the picnic."--"My uncle wouldn't want a _nigger_

there."--"We'll have to tell her she can't come."

Sylvia heard from the other groups of children about them snatches

of similar talk.--"Anybody might ha' known it--singin' the way they

do--just like niggers' voices."--"They'll have to go to the _nigger_

school now."--"Huh! puttin' on airs with their carriage and their

black dresses--nothin' but niggers!" The air seemed full of that word.

Sylvia sickened and quailed.

Not so Judith! It had taken her a moment to understand the way in

which the news was being received. When she did, she turned very

pale, and broke out into a storm of anger. She stuttered and halted

as she always did when overmastered by feeling, but her words were

molten. She ignored the tacit separation between children of different

grades and, though but a third-grader, threw herself passionately

among the girls who were talking of the picnic, clawing at their arms,

forcing her way to the center, a raging, white-faced, hot-eyed little

thunderbolt. "You're the meanest low-down things I ever heard of!" she

told the astonished older girls, fairly spitting at them in her fury.

"You--you go and s-sponge off the Fingáls for c-c-cakes and rides and

s-s-soda water--and you think they're too l-l-lovely for w-words--and

you t-t-try to do your hair just the way C-C-Camilla does. They aren't

any different today f-f-from what they were yesterday--are they? You

make me sick--you m-m-make m-m-me--"

The big bell rang out its single deep brazen note for the formation of

lines, and the habit of unquestioning, instant obedience to its voice

sent the children all scurrying to their places, from which they

marched forward to their respective classrooms in their usual convict

silence. Just as the line ahead was disappearing into the open door,

the well-kept, shining surrey drove up in haste and Camilla and

Cécile, dazzling in fresh white dresses and white hair ribbons, ran

to their places. Evidently they had heard nothing. Camilla turned and

smiled brightly at her friend as she stepped along in front of her.

Sylvia experienced another giddy reaction of feeling. Up to that

moment, she had felt nothing but shocked and intensely self-centered

horror at the disagreeableness of what had happened, and a wild desire

to run away to some quiet spot where she would not have to think about

it, where it could not make her unhappy, where her heart would stop

beating so furiously. What had she ever done to have such a horrid

thing happen in her world! She had been as much repelled by Judith's

foaming violence as by any other element of the situation. If she

could only get away! Every sensitive nerve in her, tuned to a graceful

and comely order of life, was rasped to anguish by the ugliness of it

all. Up to the moment Camilla came running to her place--this had been

the dominant impulse in the extreme confusion of Sylvia's mind.

But at the sight of Camilla she felt bursting up through this

confusion of mind, and fiercely attacking her instinct of

self-preservation, a new force, unsuspected, terribly alive--sympathy

with Camilla--Camilla, with her dog-like, timid, loving eyes--Camilla,

who had done nothing to deserve unhappiness except to be

born--Camilla, always uneasy with tragic consciousness of the sword

over her head, and now smiling brightly with tragic unconsciousness

that it was about to fall. Sylvia's heart swelled almost unendurably.

She was feeling, for the first time in her life consciously, the two

natures under her skin, and this, their first open struggle for the

mastery of her, was like a knife in her side.

She sat during the morning session, her eyes on the clock, fearing

miserably the moment of dismissal at noon, when she must take some

action--she who only longed to run away from discord and dwell in

peace. Her mind swung, pendulum-like, from one extreme of feeling to

another. Every time that Camilla smiled at her across the heads of the

other children, sullenly oblivious of their former favorite, Sylvia

turned sick with shame and pity. But when her eyes rested on the hard,

hostile faces which made up her world, the world she had to live in,

the world which had been so full of sweet and innocent happiness for

her, the world which would now be ranged with her or against her

according to her decision at noon, she was overcome by a panic at the

very idea of throwing her single self against this many-headed tyrant.

With an unspeakable terror she longed to feel the safe walls of

conformity about her. There was a battle with drawn swords in the

heart of the little girl trying blindly to see where the _n_ came in

"pneumonia."

The clock crept on, past eleven, towards twelve. Sylvia had come to no

decision. She could come to no decision! She felt herself consciously

to be unable to cope with the crisis. She was too small, too weak, too

shrinking, to make herself iron, and resist an overwhelming force.

It was five minutes of twelve. The order was given to put away books

and pencils in the desks. Sylvia's hands trembled so that she could

hardly close the lid.

"Turn!" said the teacher, in her tired, mechanical voice. The children

turned their stubbed-toed shoes out into the aisle, their eyes

menacingly on Camilla.

"Rise!" Like a covey of partridge, they all stood up, stretching,

twisting their bodies, stiff and torpid after the long hours of

immobility.

"Pass!" Clattering feet all over the building began moving along the

aisles and out towards the cloakrooms. Every one seized his own wraps

with a practised snatch, and passed on, still in line, over the dusty

wooden floors of the hall, down the ill-built, resounding stairs, out

to the playground--out to Sylvia's ordeal.

As she came out blinkingly into the strong spring sunlight, she still

had reached no decision. Her impulse was to run, as fast as she could,

out to the gate and down the street--home! But another impulse held

her back. The lines were breaking up. Camilla was turning about with

a smile to speak to her. Malevolent eyes were fixed on them from all

sides. Sylvia felt her indecision mount in a cloud about her, like

blinding, scalding steam.

And then, there before her, stood Judith, her proud dark little face

set in an angry scowl, her arm about Cécile Fingál's neck.

Sylvia never could think what she would have done if Judith had not

been there; but then, Judith was one of the formative elements of her

life--as much as was the food she ate or the thoughts she had. What

she did was to turn as quickly and unhesitatingly as though she had

always meant to do it, put her arm through Camilla's and draw her

rapidly towards the gate where the surrey waited. Judith and Cécile

followed. The crowds of astonished, and for the moment silenced,

children fell back before them.

Once she had taken her action, Sylvia saw that it was the only one

possible. But she was upheld by none of the traditional pride in a

righteous action, nor by a raging single-mindedness like Judith's, who

stalked along, her little fists clenched, frowning blackly to right

and left on the other children, evidently far more angry with them

than sympathetic for Cécile. Sylvia did not feel angry with any one.

She was simply more acutely miserable than she had ever dreamed

possible. The distance to the surrey seemed endless to her.

Her sudden rush had taken Camilla so completely by surprise that

not until they were at the gate did she catch her breath to ask

laughingly: "What in the world's the _matter_ with you, Sylvia? You

act so queer!"

Sylvia did not answer, every nerve bent on getting Camilla into

safety, but a little red-headed boy from the second grade, who could

scarcely talk plainly, burst out chantingly, pointing his dirty

forefinger at Camilla:

"Nigger, nigger, never die,

Black face and shiny eye,

Curly hair and curly toes--

_That's_ the way the nigger goes!"

There was a loud laugh from the assembled children.

Camilla wavered as though she had been struck. Her lovely face turned

ashy-gray, and she looked at Sylvia with the eyes of one dying.

From the deepest of her nature, Sylvia responded to that look. She

forgot the crowd,--boldly, unafraid, beside herself with pity, she

flung her arms about her friend's neck, hiding the white face on her

shoulder. Judith ran up, blazing with rage, and pulled at Camilla's

arm. "Don't give in! Don't give in!" she screamed. "Don't cry! Don't

let 'em see you care! Sass 'em back, why don't you? Hit that little

boy over the head! Sass them back, why don't you?"

But Camilla only shook her head vehemently and shrank away into the

carriage, little Cécile stumbling after, the silent tears streaming

down her face. The two clasped each other, and the surrey drove

quickly away, leaving the Marshall girls standing on the curb.

Judith turned around and faced the crowds of enemies back of them.

"Nasty old things!" she cried, sticking out her tongue at them. She

was answered by a yell, at which she made another face and walked

away, pulling Sylvia with her. For a few steps they were followed by

some small boys who yelled in chorus:

"Judith's mad and I'm glad,

And I know what'll please her:

A bottle of wine to make her shine,

And two little niggers to squeeze her!"

They were beginning this immemorially old chant over again when Judith

turned and ran back towards them with a white, terrible face of wrath.

At the sight they scattered like scared chickens.

Judith was so angry that she was shivering all over her small body,

and she kept repeating at intervals, in a suffocated voice: "Nasty old

things! Just wait till I tell my father and mother!"

As they passed under the beech-trees, it seemed to Sylvia a physical

impossibility that only that morning they had raced and scampered

along, whirling their school-books and laughing.

They ran into the house, calling for their parents in excited voices,

and pouring out incoherent exclamations. Sylvia cried a little at

the comforting sight of her mother's face and was taken up on Mrs.

Marshall's lap and closely held. Judith never cried; she had not cried

even when she ran the sewing-machine needle through her thumb;

but when infuriated she could not talk, her stammering growing so

pronounced that she could not get out a word, and it was Sylvia who

told the facts. She was astonished to find them so few and so quickly

stated, having been under the impression that something of intense and

painful excitement had been happening every moment of the morning.

But the experience of her parents supplied the tragic background of

strange, passionate prejudice which Sylvia could not phrase, and which

gave its sinister meaning to her briefly told story: "--and so Judith

and I walked with them out to the gate, and then that little Jimmy

Cohalan yelled out, 'nigger--nigger'--_you_ know--"

Judith broke in, her nostrils distended, "And they never sassed back,

or hit anybody or anything--just crumpled up and cried!"

Sylvia was aghast with bewilderment. "Why, I thought you were on their

side!"

"Well, I _am_!" asserted Judith, beginning to stammer again. "But I

don't have to _like_ 'em any better, do I--because I get mad when

a l-l-lot of mean, n-nasty girls that have b-b-b-been s-s-spongin'

off--" She stopped, balked by her infirmity, and appealed to her

parents with a silent look of fury.

"What _shall_ we do, Mother?" asked Sylvia despairingly, looking up

into her mother's face from the comfortable shelter of her long,

strong arms. Mrs. Marshall looked down at her without speaking. It

occurred to Sylvia disquietingly that her mother's expression was a

little like Judith's. But when Mrs. Marshall spoke it was only to say

in her usual voice: "Well, the first thing to do is to have something

to eat. Whatever else you do, don't let a bad condition of your

body interfere with what's going on in your mind. Lunch is getting

cold--and don't talk about trouble while you're eating. After you're

through, Father'll tell you what to do."

Professor Marshall made a gesture of dismay. "Good Lord, Barbara,

don't put it off on me!"

His wife looked at him with smoldering eyes. "I certainly have nothing

to say that would be fit for children to hear!" she said in an

energetic tone, beginning to serve the baked beans, which were the

main dish for the day.

After the meal, always rather hasty because of the children's short

noon-hour, Sylvia and Judith went to sit on their father's knees,

while he put an arm about each and, looking from one serious expectant

face to the other, began his explanation. He cleared his throat, and

hesitated before beginning, and had none of his usual fluency as he

went on. What he finally said was: "Well, children, you've stumbled

into about the hardest problem there is in this country, and the

honest truth is that we don't any of us know what's right to do about

it. The sort of thing that's just happened in the Washington Street

School is likely to happen 'most anywhere, and it's no harder on these

poor little playmates of yours than on all colored people. But it's

awfully hard on them all. The best we can do is to hope that after a

great many people have lived and died, all trying to do their best,

maybe folks will have learned how to manage better. Of course, if

grown men and women don't know how to help matters, you little girls

can't expect to fix things either. All you can do is to go on being

nice to Camilla and--"

Judith broke in here hotly, "You don't mean we oughtn't to _do_

something about the girls being so mean to them--not letting Camilla

go to the picnic and--"

"What _could_ you do?" asked her father quietly, "that would make

things any better for Camilla? If you were forty times as strong as

you are, you couldn't make the other girls _want_ Camilla at the

picnic. It would only spoil the picnic and wouldn't help Camilla a

bit." Professor Marshall meditated a moment, and went on, "Of course

I'm proud of my little daughters for being kind to friends who are

unhappy through no fault of theirs" (Sylvia winced at this, and

thought of confessing that she was very near running away and leaving

Camilla to her fate), "and I hope you'll go on being as nice to your

unfortunate friends as ever--"

Judith said: "They aren't friends of mine! I don't like them!"

As not infrequently happened, something about Judith's attitude had

been irritating her father, and he now said with some severity, "Then

it's a case where Sylvia's loving heart can do more good than your

anger, though you evidently think it very fine of you to feel that!"

Judith looked down in a stubborn silence, and Sylvia drooped miserably

in the consciousness of receiving undeserved praise. She opened her

mouth to explain her vacillations of the morning, but her moral fiber

was not equal to the effort. She felt very unhappy to have Judith

blamed and herself praised when things ought to have been reversed,

but she could not bring herself to renounce her father's good opinion.

Professor Marshall gave them both a kiss and set them down. "It's

twenty minutes to one. You'd better run along, dears," he said.

After the children had gone out, his wife, who had preserved an

unbroken silence, remarked dryly, "So that's the stone we give them

when they ask for bread."

Professor Marshall made no attempt to defend himself. "My dim

generalities are pretty poor provender for honest children's minds, I

admit," he said humbly, "but what else have we to give them that isn't

directly contradicted by our lives? There's no use telling children

something that they never see put into practice."

"It's not impossible, I suppose, to change our lives," suggested his

wife uncompromisingly.

Professor Marshall drew a great breath of disheartenment. "As long as

I can live without thinking of that element in American life--it's all

right. But when anything brings it home--like this today--I feel that

the mean compromise we all make must be a disintegrating moral force

in the national character. I feel like gathering up all of you, and

going away--away from the intolerable question--to Europe--and earning

the family living by giving English lessons!"

Mrs. Marshall cried out, "It makes _me_ feel like going out right here

in La Chance with a bomb in one hand and a rifle in the other!"

From which difference of impression it may perhaps be seen that the

two disputants were respectively the father and mother of Sylvia and

Judith.

Mrs. Marshall rose and began clearing away the luncheon dishes. As she

disappeared into the kitchen, she paused a moment behind the door, a

grim, invisible voice, remarking, "And what we shall do is, of course,

simply nothing at all!"

CHAPTER VIII

SABOTAGE

Sylvia and Judith walked to school in a profound silence. Sylvia was

shrinking with every nerve from the ordeal of facing again those four

hundred hostile faces; from the new and painful relations with her

playmates which lay before her. She was now committed irrevocably to

the cause of the Fingáls, and she felt a terrified doubt of having

enough moral strength to stick to that position.

For the moment the problem was settled by their arriving at the

schoolhouse almost too late. The lines were just marching into the

building, and both girls barely slipped into their places in time.

Sylvia noticed with relief that Camilla was absent.

All the Five A girls had paper bags or pasteboard boxes, and in the

air of the Five A cloakroom was a strong smell of vinegar. Gretchen

Schmidt's pickles had begun to soak through the bag, and she borrowed

the cover of a box to set them in. These sounds and smells recalled

the picnic to Sylvia's mind, the picnic to which she had been looking

forward with such inexpressible pleasure. For an instant she was

aghast to think that she had forgotten her bananas, tied up all ready

at home on the sideboard. But the next instant she thought sadly that

she probably would not be welcome at the picnic. She went to her seat

and sat forlorn through the changing lessons of the afternoon.

The teacher ground out the half-hour lessons wearily, her eyes on the

clock, as unaware of the crisis in her class as though she were in

another planet. At four o'clock Sylvia filed out with the other

children to the cloakroom, but there was not the usual quick,

practised grab, each for his own belongings. The girls remained

behind, exclaiming and lamenting. Such a clamor arose that the teacher

came hurrying in, anxious for the reputation for good behavior of

her class. Good behavior in the Washington Street School, as in a

penitentiary, was gauged by the degree of silence and immobility

achieved by the inmates.

The girls ran to Miss Miller, crying out, "Somebody's stolen our

lunches,--we left them here--all our boxes and things--and they're all

gone--!"

Sylvia hung back in the door to the schoolroom, apart from the others,

half relieved by the unexpected event which diverted attention from

her.

One of the boys who had gone ahead in the line now came back, a large

cucumber stuck in the corner of his mouth like a fat, green cigar. He

announced with evident satisfaction in the girls' misfortune that the

steps were strewn with pickles. The bag must have burst entirely

as they were being carried downstairs. Gretchen Schmidt began to

weep,--"all them good pickles--!" One of the girls flew at the boy who

brought the bad news. "I just bet you did it yourself, Jimmy Weaver,

you an' Frank Kennedy. You boys were mad anyhow because we didn't ask

you to come to the picnic."

Jimmy's face assumed the most unmistakably genuine expression of

astonishment and aggrieved innocence. "Aw, you're off yer base! I

wouldn't ha' gone to your darned old picnic--an' wasn't I in the room

every minute this afternoon?"

"No, you weren't--you weren't!" More of the girls had come to the

attack, and now danced about the boy, hurling accusations at him. "You

got excused to get a drink of water! And so did Pete Roberts! You did

it then! You did it then! You did--"

"Hush, children! Not so loud!" said Miss Miller. "_You'll have the

Principal down here_!"

At this terrible threat the children, in spite of their heat, lowered

their voices. Jimmy was beginning an angry, half-alarmed protest--"Aw,

'twas a tramp must ha' got in an' saw--" when he was pushed out of the

way by a small, vigorous hand. Judith Marshall walked in, her face

very pale. She was breathing hard, and through her parted lips, as

though she had been running fast, her small white teeth showed like

those of an enraged squirrel. "I threw your picnic things in the

river," she said.

The older children recoiled from this announcement, and from the

small, tense figure. Even the teacher kept her distance, as though

Judith were some dangerous little animal,

"What in the world did you do that for?" she asked in a tone of

stupefaction.

"Because they are n-n-nasty, mean things," said Judith, "and if they

weren't going to let C-C-Camilla go to the picnic, I wasn't going to

let them _have_ any picnic!"

The teacher turned around to Sylvia, now almost as white as her

sister, and said helplessly, "Sylvia, do you know what she's talking

about?"

Sylvia went forward and took Judith's hand. She was horrified beyond

words by what Judith had done, but Judith was her little sister. "Yes,

ma'am," she said, to Miss Miller's question, speaking, for all her

agitation, quickly and fluently as was her habit, though not very

coherently. "Yes, ma'am, I know. Everybody was saying this morning

that the Fingáls' mother was a negro, and so the girls weren't going

to invite Camilla to the picnic, and it made Judith mad."

"Why, _she_ didn't know Camilla very well, did she?" asked the

teacher, astonished.

"No, ma'am," said Sylvia, still speaking quickly, although the tears

of fright were beginning to stand in her eyes. "It just made her mad

because the girls weren't going to invite her because she didn't think

it was anyhow her fault."

"_Whose_ fault!" cried the teacher, completely lost.

"Camilla's," quavered Sylvia, the tears beginning to fall.

There was a pause. "_Well_--I _never_!" exclaimed the teacher, whose

parents had come from New England. She was entirely at a loss to know

how to treat this unprecedented situation, and like other potentates

with a long habit of arbitrary authority, she covered her perplexity

with a smart show of decision. "You children go right straight home,

along out of the building this minute," she commanded. "You know

you're not allowed to loiter around after school-hours. Sylvia and

Judith, stay here. _I'm going to take you up to the Principal's

office_."

The girls and Jimmy Weaver ran clattering down the stairs, in an

agreeably breathless state of excitement. In their opinion the

awfulness of the situation had been adequately recognized by the

teacher and signaled by the equally awful expedient of a visit to

the Principal's office, the last resort in the case of the rarely

occurring insubordinate boy.

Because Miss Miller had not the least idea what to say in an event so

far out of the usual routine, she talked a great deal during the trip

through the empty halls and staircases up to the Principal's office

on the top floor; chiefly to the effect that as many years as she had

taught, never had she encountered such a bad little girl as Judith.

Judith received this in stony silence, but Sylvia's tears fell fast.

All the years of her docile school existence had trained her in the

habit of horror at insubordination above every other crime. She felt

as disgraced as though Judith had been caught stealing,--perhaps more

so.

Miss Miller knocked at the door; the Principal, stooping and

hollow-chested, opened it and stood confronting with tired, kind eyes

the trio before him--the severe woman, with her pathetic, prematurely

old face and starved flat body, the pretty little girl hanging down

her head and weeping, the smaller child who gave him one black defiant

look and then gazed past him out of the window.

"Well, Miss Miller--?" he asked.

"I've brought you a case that I don't know what to do with," she

began. "This is Judith Marshall, in the third grade, and she has just

done one of the naughtiest things I ever heard of--"

When she had finished her recital, "How do you know this child did

it?" asked Mr. Bristol, always his first question in cases between

teachers and pupils.

"She was so brazen as to come right back and tell us so," said Miss

Miller, her tone growing more and more condemnatory.

Judith's face, capable of such rare and positive beauty, had now shut

down into a hard, repellent little mask of hate. Mr. Bristol looked

at her for a moment in silence, and then at Sylvia, sobbing, her arm

crooked over her face, hiding everything but her shining curls. "And

what has this little girl to do with anything?" he asked.

"This is Sylvia Marshall, Judith's sister, and of course she feels

dreadfully about Judith's doing such a dreadful thing," explained Miss

Miller inelegantly.

Mr. Bristol walked back to his desk and sat down. "Well, I think I

needn't keep you any longer, Miss Miller," he said. "If you will just

leave the little girls here for a while perhaps I can decide what to

do about it."

Thus mildly but unmistakably dismissed, the teacher took her

departure, pushing Sylvia and Judith inside the door and shutting it

audibly after her. She was so tired as she walked down the stairs that

she ached, and she thought to herself, "As if things weren't hard

enough without their going and being naughty--!"

Inside the room there was a moment's silence, filled almost palpably

by Sylvia's quivering alarm, and by Judith's bitter mental resistance.

Mr. Bristol drew out a big book from the shelf over his desk and held

it out to Sylvia. "I guess you all got pretty excited about this,

didn't you?" he said, smiling wisely at the child. "You and your

sister sit down and look at the pictures in this for a while, till you

get cooled off, and then I'll hear all about it."

Sylvia took the book obediently, and drew Judith to a chair, opening

the pages, brushing away her tears, and trying to go through the form

of looking at the illustrations, which were of the birds native to the

region. In spite of her emotion, the large, brightly colored pictures

did force their way through her eye to her brain, instinct in every

fiber with the modern habit of taking in impressions from the printed

page; and for years afterwards she could have told the names of the

birds they saw during that long, still half-hour, broken by no sound

but the tap-tap-tap of Mr. Bristol's typewriter. He did not once look

towards them. This was partly a matter of policy, and partly because

he was trying desperately to get a paper written for the next

Convention of Public School Principals, which he was to address on

the "Study of Arithmetic in the Seventh Grade." He had very fixed and

burning ideas about the teaching of arithmetic in the seventh grade,

which he longed with a true believer's fervor to see adopted by all

the schools in the country. He often said that if they would only do

so, the study of arithmetic would be revolutionized in a decade.

Judith sat beside her sister, not pretending to look at the book,

although the rigidity of her face insensibly softened somewhat in the

contagious quiet of the room.

When they had turned over the last page and shut the book, Mr. Bristol

faced them again, leaning back in his swivel-chair, and said: "Now,

children--all quiet? One of you begin at the beginning and tell me how

it happened." Judith's lips shut together in a hard line, so Sylvia

began, surprised to find her nerves steadied and calmed by the silent

half-hour of inaction back of her. She told how they were met that

morning by the news, how the children shouted after Camilla as she got

into the carriage, how the Five A girls had decided to exclude her

from the picnic, how angry Judith had been, and then--then--she knew

no more to tell beyond the bare fact of Judith's passionate misdeed.

Mr. Bristol began to cross-examine Judith in short, quiet sentences.

"What made you think of throwing the things into the river?"

"I was afraid they'd get them back somehow if I didn't," said Judith,

as if stating a self-evident argument.

"Where did you go to throw them in? To the Monroe Street bridge?"

"No, I didn't have time to go so far. I just went down through

Randolph Street to the bank and there was a boat there tied to a tree,

and I got in and pushed it out as far as the rope would go and dropped

the things in from the other end."

Sylvia caught her breath in terror at this recital. The Piquota river

ran swift and turbid and deep between high banks at that point.

"Weren't you afraid to venture out in a boat all by yourself?" asked

the man, looking at Judith's diminutive person.

"Yes, I was," said Judith unexpectedly.

Mr. Bristol said "Oh--" and stood in thought for a moment. Some one

knocked on the door, and he turned to open it. At the sight of the

tall figure standing there in his pepper-and-salt suit, Sylvia's

heart gave a great bound of incredulous rapture. The appearance of

a merciful mediator on the Day of Judgment could not have given her

keener or more poignant relief. She and Judith both ran headlong to

their father, catching his hands in theirs, clinging to his arms and

pressing their little bodies against his. The comfort Sylvia felt in

his mere physical presence was inexpressible. It is one of the pure

golden emotions of childhood, which no adult can ever recover, save

perhaps a mystic in a moment of ecstatic contemplation of the power

and loving-kindness of his God.

Professor Marshall put out his hand to the Principal, introducing

himself, and explained that he and his wife had been a little uneasy

when the children had not returned from school. Mr. Bristol shook the

other's hand, saying that he knew of him through mutual acquaintances

and assuring him that he could not have come at a more opportune

moment. "Your little daughter has given me a hard nut to crack. I need

advice."

Both men sat down, Sylvia and Judith still close to their father's

side, and Mr. Bristol told what had happened in a concise, colorless

narration, ending with Judith's exploit with the boat. "Now what would

_you_ do in _my_ place?" he said, like one proposing an insoluble

riddle.

Sylvia, seeing the discussion going on in such a quiet, conversational

tone, ventured in a small voice the suggestion that Judith had done

well to confess, since that had saved others from suspicion. "The

girls were sure that Jimmy Weaver had done it."

"Was that why you came back and told?" asked Professor Marshall.

"No," said Judith bluntly, "I never thought of that. I wanted to be

sure they knew why it happened."

The two men exchanged glances. Professor Marshall said: "Didn't you

understand me when I told you at noon that even if you could make the

girls let Camilla go to the picnic, she wouldn't have a good time? You

couldn't make them like to have her?"

"Yes, I understood all right," said Judith, looking straight at her

father, "but if she couldn't have a good time--and no fault of hers--I

wasn't going to let _them_ have a good time either. I wasn't trying to

make them want her. I was trying to get even with them!"

Professor Marshall looked stern. "That is just what I feared, Judith,

and that hateful spirit is the bad thing about the whole business." He

turned to the Principal: "How many girls were going to the picnic?"

The other, with a wide gesture, disavowed any knowledge of the matter.

"Good Heavens! how should I know?"

Sylvia counted rapidly. "Fourteen," she said.

"Well, Mr. Bristol, how would this do for a punishment? Judith has

worked in various ways, digging up dandelions from the lawn, weeding

flower-beds, running errands--you know--all the things children

do--and she has a little more than five dollars in her iron

savings-bank, that she has been saving for more than a year to buy a

collie puppy. Would you be satisfied if she took that money, divided

it into fourteen parts, and took it herself in person to each of the

girls?"

During this proposal Judith's face had taken on an expression of utter

dismay. She looked more childlike, more like her years than at any

moment during the interview. "Oh, _Father_!" she implored him, with a

deep note of entreaty.

He did not look at her, but over her head at the Principal, who was

rising from his chair with every indication of relief on his face."

Nothing could be better," he said. "That will be just right--every one

will be satisfied. And I'll just say for the sake of discipline

that little Judith shan't come back to school till she has done her

penance. Of course she can get it all done before supper-time tonight.

All our families live in the vicinity of the school." He was shaking

Professor Marshall's hand again and edging him towards the door, his

mind once more on his paper, hoping that he might really finish it

before night--if only there were no more interruptions!

His achievement in divining the mental processes of two children

hysterical with excitement, his magnetic taming of those fluttering

little hearts, his inspired avoidance of a fatal false step at

a critical point in the moral life of two human beings in the

making--all this seemed as nothing to him--an incident of the day's

routine already forgotten. He conceived that his real usefulness to

society lay in the reform of arithmetic-teaching in the seventh grade,

and he turned back to his arguments with the ardor of the great

landscape painter who aspires to be a champion at billiards.

Professor Marshall walked home in silence with his two daughters,

explained the matter to his wife, and said that he and Sylvia would

go with Judith on her uncomfortable errand. Mrs. Marshall listened

in silence and went herself to get the little bank stuffed full of

painfully earned pennies and nickels. Then she bade them into the

kitchen and gave Judith and Sylvia each a cookie and a glass of milk.

She made no comment whatever on the story, or on her husband's

sentence for the culprit, but just as the three, were going out of the

door, she ran after them, caught Judith in her arms, and gave her a

passionate kiss.

* * * * *

The next day was Saturday, and it was suggested that Judith and Sylvia

carry on their campaign by going to see the Fingáls and spending the

morning playing with them as though nothing had happened.

As they approached the house, somewhat perturbed by the prospect, they

saw with surprise that the windows were bare of the heavy yellow lace

curtains which had hung in the parlor, darkening that handsomely

furnished room to a rich twilight. They went up on the porch, and

Judith rang the bell resolutely, while Sylvia hung a little back of

her. From this position she could see into the parlor, and exclaimed,

"Why, Judy, this isn't the right house--nobody lives here!" The big

room was quite empty, the floors bare of the large soft rugs, and as

the children pressed their faces to the pane, they could see through

an open door into a bedroom also dismantled and deserted.

They ran around the house to the back door and knocked on it. There

was no answer. Judith turned the knob, the door opened, and they stood

in what had been unmistakably the Fingáls' kitchen. Evidence of wild

haste and confusion was everywhere about them--the floor was littered

with excelsior, the shelves half cleared and half occupied still with

cooking supplies, a packing-box partly filled with kitchenware which

at the last moment the fugitives had evidently decided to abandon.

The little girls stood in this silent desolation, looking about them

with startled eyes. A lean mother-cat came and rubbed her thin,

pendent flanks against their legs, purring and whining. Three kittens

skirmished joyfully in the excelsior, waylaying one another in ambush

and springing out with bits of the yellow fibers clinging to their

woolly soft fur.

"They've _gone_!" breathed Sylvia. "They've gone away for good!"

Judith nodded, even her bold and unimaginative spirit somewhat

daunted by the ghostly silence of the house. Sylvia tiptoed to the

swinging-door and pushed it open. Yes, there was the pantry, like the

kitchen, in chaotic disorder, tissue paper and excelsior thick on the

floor, and entangled with it the indescribable jumble of worthless,

disconnected objects always tumbled together by a domestic crisis

like a fire or a removal--old gloves, whisk-brooms, hat-forms, lamps,

magazines, tarnished desk-fittings. The sight was so eloquent of panic

haste that Sylvia let the door swing shut, and ran back into the

kitchen.

Judith was pointing silently to a big paper bag on the shelf. It had

been tossed there with some violence evidently, for the paper had

burst and the contents had cascaded out on the shelf and on the

floor--the rich, be-raisined cookies which Camilla was to have taken

to the picnic. Sylvia felt the tears stinging her eyelids, and pulled

Judith out of the tragic house. They stood for a moment in the yard,

beside a bed of flowering crocuses, brilliant in the sun. The forsaken

house looked down severely at them from its blank windows. Judith was

almost instantly relieved of mental tension by the outdoor air, and

stooped down unconcernedly to tie her shoe. She broke the lacing and

had to sit down, take it out of the shoe, tie it, and put it back

again. The operation took some time, during which Sylvia stood still,

her mind whirling.

For the first time in her steadily forward-going life there was a

sharp, irrevocable break. Something which had been yesterday was now

no more. She would never see Camilla again, she who recalled Camilla's

look of anguish as though they still stood side by side. Her heart

filled with unspeakable thankfulness that she had put her arms around

Camilla's neck at that supreme last moment. That had not been Judith's

doing. That had come from her own heart. Unconsciously she had laid

the first stone in the wall of self-respect which might in the future

fortify her against her weaknesses.

She stood looking up blindly at the house, shivering again at the

recollection of its echoing, empty silence. The moment was one she

never forgot. Standing there in that commonplace backyard, staring up

at a house like any one of forty near her, she felt her heart grow

larger. In that moment, tragedy, mystery, awe, and pity laid their

shadowy fingers on her shining head.

CHAPTER IX

THE END OF CHILDHOOD

That afternoon a couple of children who came to play in the Marshall

orchard brought news that public opinion, after the fashion of that

unstable weathercock, was veering rapidly, and blowing from a wholly

unexpected quarter. "My papa says," reported Gretchen Schmidt, who

never could keep anything to herself, even though it might be by no

means to her advantage to proclaim it--"my papa says that he thinks

the way American people treats colored peoples is just fierce; and he

says if he'd ha' known about our not letting Camilla go to the picnic,

he'd ha' taken the trouble to me '_mit der flachen Hand schlagen._'

That means he'd have spanked me good and plenty."

Maria Perkins, from the limb where she hung by her knees, responded,

"Yup, my Uncle Eben says he likes Judy's spunk."

"I guess he wouldn't have, if it'd ha' been his pickles!" Gretchen

made a last stand against the notorious injustice of fickle adult

prejudices.

But the tide had begun to turn. On Monday morning Sylvia and Judith

found themselves far from ostracized, rather the center of much

respectful finger-pointing on the part of children from the other

grades who had never paid the least attention to them before. And

finally when the Principal, passing majestically from room to room in

his daily tour of inspection, paused in his awful progress and spoke

to Judith by name, asking her quite familiarly and condescendingly

what cities you would pass through if you went from Chicago to New

Orleans, the current set once and for all in the other direction. No

mention was ever made of the disappearance of the Fingáls, and the

Marshall children found their old places waiting for them.

It was not long before Judith had all but forgotten the episode; but

Sylvia, older and infinitely more impressionable, found it burned

irrevocably into her memory. For many and many a week, she did not

fall asleep without seeing Camilla's ashy face of wretchedness. And it

was years before she could walk past the house where the Fingáls had

lived, without feeling sick.

Her life was, however, brimming with active interests which occupied

her, mind and body. There was rarely a day when a troop of children

did not swarm over the Marshall house and barn, playing and playing

and playing with that indomitable zest in life which is the birthright

of humanity before the fevers and chills of adolescence begin. Sylvia

and Judith, moreover, were required to assume more and more of the

responsibility of the housework, while their mother extracted from the

Marshall five acres an ever increasing largesse of succulent food.

Sylvia's séances with old Reinhardt and the piano were becoming

serious affairs: for it was now tentatively decided that she was to

earn her living by teaching music. There were many expeditions on foot

with their mother, for Mrs. Marshall had become, little by little,

chief nurse and adviser to all the families of the neighborhood; and

on her errands of service one of her daughters was needed to carry

supplies and act as assistant. And finally, as the children grew

older, and the family tradition of bookishness took hold of

them, there were shelves and shelves to be devoured, a strange

mixture--Thackeray, Maeterlinck, Fielding, Hakluyt, Ibsen, Dickens,

Ruskin, Shaw, Austen, Molière, Defoe, Cervantes, Shakespeare,--the

children dipped, or tasted or swallowed whole, according to their

temperaments and the books they happened on.

When Sylvia was thirteen, almost fourteen years old, she "graduated"

from the eighth grade of the public schools and was ready to enter the

High School. But after a good many family councils, in most of which,

after the unreticent Marshall manner, she herself was allowed to be

present, it was decided not to send her to the huge new Central High

School, which had cost La Chance such a big slice of its taxes, but to

prepare her at home for her course at the State University. She had

been growing very fast, was a little thin and white, and had been

outgrowing her strength. This at least was the reason given out to

inquirers. In reality her father's prejudice against High School

life for adolescents was the determining cause. In the course of his

University work he was obliged to visit a good many High Schools, and

had acquired a violent prejudice against the stirring social life

characteristic of those institutions.

Sylvia's feelings about this step aside from the beaten track were,

like many of Sylvia's feelings, decidedly mixed. She was drawn towards

the High School by the suction of the customary. A large number of her

classmates expected as a matter of course to pass on in the usual way;

but, with an uneasy qualm, half pride and half apprehension, Sylvia

was beginning to feel her difference from ordinary children. She was

not altogether sorry to say good-bye to her playmates, with whom she

no longer had much in common. She would miss the fun of class-life, of

course; but there was a certain distinction involved in being educated

"differently." She might be queer, but since she was apparently fated

to be queer, she might as well not be "common" as well. Finally,

because she was still, at fourteen, very much of a child, the scale

was tipped by her thinking what fun it would be to go down-town on

errands in school hours. Charles Lamb, lost in painful wonder at his

own leisure after thirty-six years of incessant office-hours, could

savor no more acutely than an American school-child the exquisite

flavor of freedom at an hour formerly dedicated to imprisonment.

As a matter of fact, during the next three years Sylvia's time was

more constantly occupied than when there was a fixed time-limit to her

studies. Her teachers were always about her, and lightly as the new

yoke pressed, she wore it practically without intermission. Her

immersion in the ideals, the standards, the concepts of her parents

was complete, engulfing. Somebody was nearly always teaching her

something. She studied history and Latin with her father; mathematics

with her mother. She learned to swim, to play tennis, to ride in the

summer-time, and to skate on the frozen swimming-pool in winter, all

without stirring from home. Old Reinhardt was supposed to come twice

a week to give her a piano-lesson, but actually he dropped in almost

every day to smoke meditatively and keep a watchful ear on her

practising.

Although during those years she was almost literally rooted to the

Marshall soil, watered by Marshall convictions, and fed by Marshall

information, the usual miracle of irresistibly individual growth went

silently and unconsciously forward in her. She was growing up to be

herself, and not her mother or her father, little as any one in her

world suspected the presence of this unceasingly recurrent phenomenon

of growth. She was alive to all the impressions reflected so

insistently upon her, but she transmuted them into products which

would immensely have surprised her parents, they being under the

usual parental delusion that they knew every corner of her heart. Her

budding aversions, convictions, ambitions were not in the least the

aversions, convictions, and ambitions so loudly voiced about her; and

a good deal of her energy was taken up in a more or less conscious

reaction from the family catchwords, with especial emphasis laid on an

objection to the family habit of taking their convictions with great

seriousness.

Her father would have been aghast if he could have felt the slightest

reflection from the heat of her detestation of his favorite,

Emersonian motto, which, now that he had reached five and forty, he

was apt to repeat with the iteration natural to his age, rousing in

Sylvia the rebellious exasperation felt by _her_ age for over-emphatic

moralizings.

On the occasion of one of the annual gatherings at the Marshall house

of the Seniors in her father's classes, she remarked fiercely to

Judith, "If Father gets off that old Emerson, 'What will you have,

quoth God. Take it and pay for it,' again tonight in his speech, I'm

going to get right up and scream."

Judith stared. The girls were in the kitchen, large aprons over their

best dresses, setting out rows of plates for the chicken salad which

was to come after the music. "I don't see anything to scream about in

that!" said Judith with a wondering contempt for Sylvia's notions.

"I'm so _sick_ of it!" cried Sylvia, tearing the lettuce-leaves apart

with venom. "Father never gets through any sort of a speech that he

doesn't work it in--and I hate it, anyhow! It makes me feel as though

somebody had banged a big door in my face and shut me up in prison."

"Well, for goodness' sakes!" cried Judith, who, at this period of

their lives, had remained rather more than her three years behind

Sylvia's intelligence. "How do you get all that out of _that_!"

"You haven't sense enough to know what it means, that's all!" retorted

Sylvia. "It means something perfectly hateful, the way Father uses it.

It means you've got to pay for every single thing you do or get in

this world! It's somebody tagging you round with an account-book,

seeing how big a bill you're running up. It's the perfectly horrid way

Father and Mother make us do, of _always_ washing up the dishes we

dirty, and _always_ picking up the things we drop. Seems as though I'd

die happy, if I could just step out of my nightgown in the morning and

_leave_ it there, and know that it would get hung up without my doing

it."

"Well, if that's all you want, to die happy," said Judith, the

literal-minded, "I will do that much for you!"

"Oh gracious, no! That wouldn't do any good! You know I couldn't take

any satisfaction letting _you_ do that!" objected Sylvia, peevishly,

fuming and fumbling helplessly before the baffling quality of her

desires. "I don't want just somebody to pick it up for me. I want it

picked up by somebody that I don't care about, that I don't see, that

I'd just as soon have do the tiresome things as not. I want somebody

to do it, and me to feel all right about _having_ them do it!"

"Well, for goodness' sakes!" Judith was reduced again to mere wonder.

Professor and Mrs. Marshall stepped into the kitchen for a moment to

see that everything was progressing smoothly. The professor had his

viola in his hand and was plucking softly at the strings, a pleasant,

tranquil anticipation of harmony on his face. He looked affectionately

at his daughters and thought what dear good children they were. Judith

appealed to her parents: "Sylvia's as crazy as a loon. She says she

wants somebody to do her work for her, and yet she wants to feel all

right about shirking it!"

Mrs. Marshall did not follow, and did not care. "What?" she said

indifferently, tasting the chicken-salad in the big yellow bowl, and,

with an expression of serious consideration, adding a little more salt

to it.

But Sylvia's father understood, "What you want to remember, daughter,"

he said, addressing himself to his oldest child with a fond certainty

of her quick apprehension, "is that fine saying of Emerson, 'What will

you have, quoth--'" A raw-boned assistant appeared in the doorway.

"Everybody here, I guess, Perfesser," he said.

When the girls were alone again, Sylvia stole a look at Judith and

broke into noiseless giggles. She laughed till the tears ran down her

cheeks and she had to stop work and go to the kitchen sink to wash

her face and take a drink of water. "You never do what you say you're

going to," said Judith, as gravely alien to this mood as to the other.

"I thought you said you'd scream."

"I _am_ screaming," said Sylvia, wiping her eyes again.

They were very familiar with the work of preparing the simple

"refreshments" for University gatherings. Their mother always

provided exactly the same viands, and long practice had made them

letter-perfect in the moves to be made. When they had finished

portioning off the lettuce-leaves and salad on the plates, they

swiftly set each one on a fresh crêpe-paper napkin. Sylvia professed

an undying hatred for paper napkins. "I don't see why," said Judith.

"They're so much less bother than the other kind when you're only

going to use them once, this way." "That's it," asserted Sylvia;

"that's the very stingy, economical thing about them I hate, their

_not_ being a bother! I'd like to use big, fine-damask ones, all

shiny, that somebody had ironed twenty minutes, every one, like those

we had at Eleanor Hubert's birthday party. And then I'd scrunch them

up and throw them in the laundry if there was the least speck on

them."

"I wouldn't like the job of doing them up," said Judith.

"Neither would I. I'd hate it! And I wouldn't," continued Sylvia,

roaming at will in her enchanted garden; "I'd hire somebody to take

all the bother of buying them and hemming them and doing them up and

putting them on the table. All I'd do, would be to shake them out and

lay them across my lap," she went through a dainty-fingered pantomime,

"and never think a thing about how they got there. That's all _I_ want

to do with napkins. But I do love 'em big and glossy. I could _kiss_

them!"

Judith was almost alarmed at the wildness of Sylvia's imaginings.

"Why, you talk as though you didn't have good sense tonight, Sylvie.

It's the party. You always get so excited over parties." Judith

considered it a "come-down" to get excited over anything.

"Great Scotland! I guess I don't get excited over one of these

_student_ parties!" Sylvia repudiated the idea. "All Father's

'favorite students' are such rough-necks. And it makes me tired to

have all our freaks come out of their holes when we have company--Miss

Lindström and Mr. Hecht and Cousin Parnelia and all."

"The President comes," advanced Judith.

Sylvia was sweeping in her iconoclasm. "What if he does--old

fish-mouth! _He's_ nobody--he's a rough-neck himself. He used to be a

Baptist minister. He's only President because he can talk the hayseeds

in the Legislature into giving the University big appropriations. And

anyhow, he only comes here because he _has_ to--part of his job. He

doesn't like the freaks any better than I do. The last time he

was here, I heard Cousin Parnelia trying to persuade him to have

planchette write him a message from Abraham Lincoln. Isn't she the

limit, anyhow!"

The girls put off their aprons and slipped into the big, low-ceilinged

living-room, singing like a great sea-shell with thrilling

violin-tones. Old Reinhardt was playing the Kreutzer, with Professor

Marshall at the piano. Judith went quietly to sit near Professor

Kennedy, and Sylvia sat down near a window, leaning her head against

the pane as she listened, her eyes fixed on the blackness outside.

Her face cleared and brightened, like a cloudy liquor settling to

limpidity in a crystal vase. Her lips parted a little, her eyes were

fixed on a point incalculably distant. Her mind emptied itself of

everything but her joy in the glorious cadences....

If she had been asked what she and Judith had been talking of, she

could not have told; but when, after the second movement was finished,

old Reinhardt put down his violin and began to loosen his bow (he

never played the presto finale), it all came back to the girl as she

looked around her at her father's guests. She hated the way the young

men's Adam's apples showed through their too-widely opened collars,

and she loathed the way the thin brown hair of one of the co-eds

was strained back from her temples. She received the President's

condescending, oleaginous hand-shake with a qualm at his loud

oratorical voice and plebeian accent, and she headed Cousin Parnelia

off from a second mediumistic attack, hating her badly adjusted

false-front of hair as intensely as ever Loyola hated a heretic. And

this, although uncontrollably driven by her desire to please, to

please even a roomful of such mediocrities, she bore to the outward

eyes the most gracious aspect of friendly, smiling courtesy. Professor

Marshall looked at her several times, as she moved with her slim young

grace among his students and friends, and thought how fortunate he was

in his children.

After the chicken-salad and coffee had been successfully served and

eaten, one of the Seniors stepped forward with an awkward crudeness

and presented Professor Marshall with a silver-mounted blotting-pad.

The house was littered with such testimonials to the influence of the

Professor on the young minds under his care, testimonials which his

children took as absolutely for granted as they did everything else in

the home life. On this occasion Sylvia was so afflicted because the

young rustic appointed to make the presentation speech, forgot most of

what he had planned to say, that she felt nothing but the liveliest

impatience with the whole proceeding. But her father's quick heart was

touched, and more than half of his usual little speech of farewell

to his Seniors was an expression of thanks to them. Before he had

finished the last part, which consisted of eloquent exhortations

to the higher life, none the less sincerely heartfelt for being

remarkably like similar speeches he had made during the last twenty

years, he had quoted his favorite saying from Emerson. Judith looked

apprehensively at Sylvia; but she was not laughing. She evidently was

not hearing a word her father said, being lost in the contemplation

of the perfect evening costume of the newest assistant in Professor

Marshall's department. He was a young man from Massachusetts, fresh

from Harvard, who had come West to begin his teaching that year. His

was certainly the most modern dress-suit in the University faculty;

and he wore it with a supercilious disregard for its perfections which

greatly impressed Sylvia.

After these usual formalities were thus safely past, some one

suggested a game of charades to end the evening. Amid great laughter

and joking from the few professors present and delighted response

from the students who found it immensely entertaining to be on such

familiar terms with their instructors, two leaders began to "choose

sides." The young assistant from Harvard said in a low tone to his

friend, not noticing Professor Marshall's young daughter near them:

"They won't really go on and _do_ this fool, undignified, backwoods

stunt, will they? They don't expect us to join _in_!"

"Oh yes, they will," answered his friend, catching up his tone of

sophisticated scorn. He too was from Harvard, from an earlier class.

"You'll be lucky if they don't have a spelling-down match, later on."

"Good Lord!" groaned the first young man.

"Oh, you mustn't think all of the University society is like _this_!"

protested the second. "And anyhow, we can slope now, without being

noticed,"

Sylvia understood the accent and tone of this passage more than the

exact words, but it summed up and brought home to her in a cruelly

clarified form her own groping impressions. The moment was a terribly

painful one for her. Her heart swelled, the tears came to her eyes,

she clenched her fists. Her fine, lovely, and sensitive face darkened

to a tragic intensity of resolve. She might have been the young

Hannibal, vowing to avenge Carthage. What she was saying to herself

passionately was, "When _I_ get into the University, I will _not_ be a

jay!"

It was under these conditions that Sylvia passed from childhood,

and emerged into the pains and delights and responsibilities of

self-consciousness.

BOOK II

_A FALSE START TO ATHENS_

CHAPTER X

SYLVIA'S FIRST GLIMPSE OF MODERN CIVILIZATION

Although there was not the slightest actual connection between

the two, the trip to Chicago was always in Sylvia's mind like the

beginning of her University course. It is true that the journey,

practically the first in Sylvia's life, was undertaken shortly before

her matriculation as a Freshman, but this fortuitous chronological

connection could not account for Sylvia's sense of a deeper unity

between the two experiences. The days in Chicago, few as they were,

were as charged with significance for her as the successive acts in a

drama, and that significance was of the substance and marrow of the

following and longer passage in her life.

The fact that her father and her mother disagreed about the

advisability of the trip was one of the salient points in the

beginning. When Aunt Victoria, breaking a long silence with one of her

infrequent letters, wrote to say that she was to be in Chicago "on

business" during the last week of September, and would be very glad

to have her sister-in-law bring her two nieces to see her there,

Professor Marshall said, with his usual snort: "Business nothing! She

never has any business. She won't come to see them _here_, that's all.

The idea's preposterous." But Mrs. Marshall, breaking a long silence

of her own, said vigorously: "She is your sister, and you and your

family are the only blood-kin she has in the world. I've a notion--I

have had for some time--that she was somehow terribly hurt on that

last visit here. It would be ungenerous not to go half-way to meet her

now."

Sylvia, anxiously hanging on her father's response, was surprised

when he made no protest beyond, "Well, do as you please. I can keep

Lawrence all right. She only speaks of seeing you and the girls." It

did not occur to Sylvia, astonished at this sudden capitulation, that

there might be a discrepancy between her father's habit of vehement

speech and his real feeling in this instance.

It was enough for her, however, that they were going to take a long

journey on the train overnight, that they were going to see a great

city, that they were going to see Aunt Victoria, about whom her

imagination had always hovered with a constancy enhanced by the odd

silence concerning her which was the rule in the Marshall house.

She was immensely stirred by the prospect. She made herself, in the

brief interval between the decision and the beginning of the journey,

a new shirt-waist of handkerchief linen. It took the last cent of

her allowance to buy the material, and she was obliged, by a secret

arrangement with her father, to discount the future, in order to have

some spending-money in the city.

Mrs. Marshall was quite disappointed by the dullness of Sylvia's

perceptions during that momentous first trip, which she had looked

forward to as an occasion for widening the girls' horizon to new

interests. Oddly enough it was Judith, usually so much less quick than

Sylvia, who asked the intelligent questions and listened attentively

to her mother's explanations about the working of the air-brakes, and

the switching systems in railroad yards, and the harvesting of the

crops in the flat, rich country gliding past the windows. It was

quite evident that not a word of this highly instructive talk

reached Sylvia, sitting motionless, absorbing every detail of her

fellow-passengers' aspect, in a sort of trance of receptivity. She

scarcely glanced out of the windows, except when the train stopped at

the station in a large town, when she transferred her steady gaze to

the people coming and going from the train. "Just look, Sylvia, at

those blast-furnaces!" cried her mother as they passed through the

outskirts of an industrial town. "They have to keep them going, you

know, night and day."

"Oh, do they? What for?" asked Judith, craning her neck to watch the

splendid leap of the flames into the darkness.

"Because they can't allow the ore to become--" Mrs. Marshall wondered

why, during her conscientious explanation of blast-furnaces, Sylvia

kept her eyes dully fixed on her hands on her lap. Sylvia was, as a

matter of fact, trying imaginary bracelets on her slim, smooth, white

wrists. The woman opposite her wore bracelets.

"Isn't it fine," remarked the civic-minded Mrs. Marshall, "to see all

these little prairie towns so splendidly lighted?"

"I hadn't noticed them," said Sylvia, her gaze turned on the elegant

nonchalance of a handsome, elderly woman ahead of her. Her mother

looked at her askance, and thought that children are unaccountable.

There were four of the Chicago days, and such important events marked

them that each one had for all time a physiognomy of its own. Years

afterwards when their travels had far outrun that first journey,

Sylvia and Judith could have told exactly what occurred on any given

day of that sojourn, as "on the third day we were in Chicago."

The event of the first day was, of course, the meeting with Aunt

Victoria. They went to see her in a wonderful hotel, entering through

a classic court, with a silver-plashing fountain in the middle, and

slim Ionic pillars standing up white and glorious out of masses of

palms. This dreamlike spot of beauty was occupied by an incessantly

restless throng of lean, sallow-faced men in sack-coats, with hats on

the backs of their heads and cigars in the corners of their mouths.

The air was full of tobacco smoke and the click of heels on the marble

pavement. At one side was a great onyx-and-marble desk, looking like

a soda-water fountain without the silver faucets, and it was the

thin-cheeked, elegant young-old man behind this structure who gave

instructions whereby Mrs. Marshall and her two daughters found their

way to Aunt Victoria's immense and luxurious room. She was very glad

to see them, shaking hands with her sister-in-law in the respectful

manner which that lady always seemed to inspire in her, and embracing

her two tall young nieces with a fervor which melted Sylvia's heart

back to her old childish adoration.

"What _beautiful_ children you have, Barbara!" cried Mrs.

Marshall-Smith, holding Judith off at arm's length and looking from

her to Sylvia; "although I suppose I ought not to tell them that!" She

looked at Sylvia with an affectionate laugh. "Will you be spoiled if I

tell you you are very pretty?" she asked.

"I can't think of anything but how pretty _you_ are!" said Sylvia,

voicing honestly what was in her mind.

This answer caused her aunt to cry out: "Oh! Oh! And tact too! She's

meant for social success!" She left this note to vibrate in Sylvia's

ears and turned again to her sister-in-law with hospitable remarks

about the removing of wraps. As this was being done, she took

advantage of the little bustle to remark from the other side of the

room, "I rather hoped Elliott would come with you." She spoke lightly,

but there was the tremor of feeling in her sweet voice which Sylvia

found she remembered as though it had been but yesterday she had heard

it last.

"You didn't ask him," said Mrs. Marshall, with her usual directness.

Mrs. Marshall-Smith arched her eyebrows, dropped her eyelids, and

shook her head. "No, I didn't ask him," she admitted, and then with a

little wry twist of her lips, "But I rather hoped he might feel like

coming." She looked down at her hands.

Mrs. Marshall surprised her daughters very much by going across the

room and kissing her husband's sister. Mrs. Marshall-Smith took the

other's strong, hard hand between her soft fingers. "That's generous

in you, Barbara," she said, looking intently into the pitying dark

eyes, "I'm human, you know,"

"Yes, I know you're human," said Mrs. Marshall, looking down at her

gravely. "So are we all of us. So's Elliott. Don't forget that." With

which obscure reference, entirely unintelligible to the two girls, the

matter was forever dropped.

The two ladies thereupon embarked upon the difficult business of

laying out to the best advantage the few days before them so that

every hour might be utilized for the twofold purpose of seeing each

other and having the girls see the sights. Judith went to the window

during this conversation, and looked down into the crowded street, the

first city street she had ever seen. Sylvia sat quietly and imprinted

upon her memory every item in the appearance of the two women before

her, not the first time she had compared them. Mrs. Marshall was

dressed in a dark-blue, well-preserved, ready-made suit, dating from

the year before. It was in perfect condition and quite near enough

the style of the moment to pass unnoticed. Sylvia saw nothing to be

ashamed of in her mother's unaccented and neutral costume, but there

was no denying that she looked exactly like any one else. What was

most apparent to the discerning eye was that her garb had been

organized in every detail so as to consume as little thought and

effort as possible. Whereas Aunt Victoria--Sylvia's earnest and

thoughtful efforts at home-dressmaking had fitted her, if for nothing

else, for a full appreciation of Mrs. Marshall-Smith's costume. She

had struggled with cloth enough to bow her head in respect and awe

before the masterly tailoring of the rich, smooth broadcloth dress.

She knew from her own experience that the perfection of those welted

seams could not be accomplished by even the most intense temporary

concentration of amateur forces. No such trifling fire of twigs

lighted the way to that pinnacle. The workman who had achieved that

skill had cut down the whole tree of his life and thrown it into the

flame.

Like a self-taught fiddler at the concert of a master, Sylvia's

failures had taught her the meaning of success. Although her

inexperience kept her from making at all a close estimate of the

literal cost of the toilet, her shrewdness made her divine the truth,

which was that Mrs. Marshall-Smith, in spite of the plainness of her

attire, could have clad herself in cloth-of-gold at a scarcely greater

expenditure of the efforts and lives of others. Sylvia felt that her

aunt was the most entirely enviable person in the world, and would

gladly have changed places with her in a moment.

That was, on the whole, the note of the Chicago trip, all the dazzling

lights and reflections of which focused, for Sylvia, upon Aunt

Victoria's radiant person. At times, the resultant beam was almost too

much for the young eyes; as, for example, on the next day when the

two made a momentous shopping expedition to the largest and finest

department store in the city. "I've a curiosity to see," Aunt Victoria

had declared carelessly, "what sort of things are sold in a big

Western shop, and besides I've some purchases to make for the Lydford

house. Things needs freshening up there. I've thought of wicker and

chintz for the living-room. It would be a change from what I've had.

Perhaps it would amuse the children to go along?"

At this, Judith, who had a boy's detestation of shopping, looked so

miserable that Aunt Victoria had laughed out, her frank, amused laugh,

and said, "Well, Sylvia and I alone, then!"

"Judith and I'll go to Lincoln Park to take a walk by the lake," said

Mrs. Marshall. "Our inland young folks have never seen so much water

all at once."

Sylvia had been, of course, in the two substantial and well-run

department stores of La Chance, when she went with her mother to make

their carefully considered purchases. They always went directly to

the department in question, where Mrs. Marshall's concise formula ran

usually along such lines as, "I would like to look at misses' coats,

size 16, blue or brown serge, moderate style, price somewhere between

ten and fifteen dollars." And then they looked at misses' coats, size

16, blue or brown serge, of the specified price; and picked out

one. Sylvia's mother was under the impression that she allowed her

daughters to select their own clothes because, after all these

defining and limiting preliminaries, she always, with a very genuine

indifference, abandoned them to their own choice between the four or

five garments offered.

Even when Sylvia, as she grew older, went by herself to make a small

purchase or two, she was so deeply under the influence of her mother's

example that she felt it unbecoming to loiter, or to examine anything

she knew she could not buy. Besides, nearly all the salespeople, who,

for the most part, had been at their posts for many years, knew her

from childhood, and if she stopped to look at a show-case of new

collars, or jabots, they always came pleasantly to pass the time of

day, and ask how her little brother was, and how she liked studying at

home. She was ashamed to show in their presence anything but a casual,

dignified interest in the goods they handled.

After these feeble and diluted tipplings, her day with Aunt Victoria

was like a huge draught of raw spirits. That much-experienced shopper

led her a leisurely course up one dazzling aisle and down another,

pausing ruthlessly to look and to handle and to comment, even if she

had not the least intention of buying. With an inimitable ease

of manner she examined whatever took her fancy, and the languid,

fashionably dressed salesladies, all in aristocratic black, showed to

these whims a smiling deference, which Sylvia knew could come

from nothing but the exquisite tailoring of Aunt Victoria's blue

broadcloth. This perception did not in the least lower her opinion of

the value of the deference. It heightened her opinion of the value of

tailoring.

They stood by glass tables piled high with filmy and costly underwear,

such underwear as Sylvia had never dreamed could exist, and Aunt

Victoria looked casually at the cobweb tissues which the saleswoman

held up, herself hankering in a hungry adoration of the luxury she

would never touch in any other way. Without apology or explanation,

other than Aunt Victoria's gracious nod of dismissal, they moved on

to the enchanted cave where, under the stare of innumerable electric

lights, evening wraps were exhibited. The young woman who served them

held the expensive, fragile chiffon of the garments up in front of her

black uniform, her eyes wistful and unsatisfied. Her instant of glory

was over when Aunt Victoria bought one of these, exclaiming humorously

about the quaintness of going from Paris to Chicago to shop. It was of

silver tissue over white brocade, with a collar of fur, and the price

was a hundred and thirty-seven dollars. Sylvia's allowance for all her

personal expenses for a whole year was a hundred and twenty. To

reach the furniture, they passed by, with an ignoring contempt, huge

counters heaped with hundreds and hundreds of shirt-waists, any one of

which was better than the one Sylvia had made with so much care and

interest before leaving home.

Among the furniture they made a long stay. Aunt Victoria was

unexpectedly pleased by the design of the wicker pieces, and

bought and bought and bought; till Sylvia turned her head away in

bewilderment. She looked down a long perspective of glittering

show-cases filled with the minor luxuries of the toilet, the ruffs,

the collars, the slipper-rosettes, the embroidered belts, the hair

ornaments, the chiffon scarves, all objects diverse, innumerable,

perishable as mist in tree-branches, all costly in exact ratio to

their fragility. Back of her were the children's dresses, fairy-like,

simple with an extravagantly costly simplicity. It occurred to Sylvia

as little as to many others of the crowd of half-hypnotized women,

wandering about with burning eyes and watering mouths through the

shrewdly designed shop, that the great closets back of these adroitly

displayed fineries might be full of wearable, firm-textured little

dresses, such as she herself had always worn. It required an effort of

the will to remember that, and wills weak, or not yet formed, wavered

and bent before the lust of the eye, so cunningly inflamed. Any sense

of values, of proportion, in Sylvia was dumfounded by the lavishness,

the enormous quantities, the immense varieties of the goods displayed.

She ached with covetousness....

When they joined the others at the hotel her mother, after commenting

that she looked rather flushed and tired, happened to ask, "Oh, by the

way, Sylvia, did you happen to come across anything in serge suits

that would be suitable for school-wear?"

Sylvia quivered, cried out explosively, "_No!_" and turned away,

feeling a hot pulse beating through her body. But Aunt Victoria

happened to divert attention at that moment. She had been reading,

with a very serious and somewhat annoyed expression, a long telegram

just handed her, and now in answer to Mrs. Marshall's expression of

concern, said hastily, "Oh, it's Arnold again.... It's always Arnold!"

She moved to a desk and wrote a brief telegram which she handed to

the waiting man-servant. Sylvia noticed it was addressed to Mr. A.H.

Saunders, a name which set dimly ringing in her head recollections now

muffled and obscured.

Aunt Victoria went on to Mrs. Marshall: "Arnold hates this school so.

He always hates his schools."

"Oh, he is at school now?" asked Mrs. Marshall. "You haven't a tutor

for him?"

"Oh yes, Mr. Saunders is still with him--in the summers and during

holidays." Mrs. Marshall-Smith explained further: "To keep him up in

his _studies_. He doesn't learn anything in his school, you know. They

never do. It's only for the atmosphere--the sports; you know, they

play cricket where he is now--and the desirable class of boys he

meets.... _All_ the boys have tutors in vacation times to coach them

for the college-entrance examinations."

The face of the college professor's wife continued immovably grave

during this brief summary of an educational system. She inquired, "How

old is Arnold now?" learned that he was seventeen, remembered that, oh

yes, he was a year older than Sylvia, and allowed the subject to drop

into one of the abysmal silences for which she alone had the courage.

Her husband's sister was as little proof against it as her husband. As

it continued, Mrs. Marshall-Smith went through the manoeuvers which in

a less perfectly bred person would have been fidgeting....

No one paid any attention to Sylvia, who sat confronting herself in a

long mirror and despising every garment she wore.

CHAPTER XI

ARNOLD'S FUTURE IS CASUALLY DECIDED

The next day was to have been given up to really improving pursuits.

The morning in the Art Institute came off as planned. The girls were

marshaled through the sculpture and paintings and various art objects

with about the result which might have been expected. As blankly

inexperienced of painting and sculpture as any Bushmen, they

received this sudden enormous dose of those arts with an instant,

self-preservatory incapacity to swallow even a small amount of them.

It is true that the very first exhibits they saw, the lions outside

the building, the first paintings they encountered, made an

appreciable impression on them; but after this they followed their

elders through the interminable crowded halls of the museum, their

legs aching with the effort to keep their balance on the polished

floors, their eyes increasingly glazed and dull. For a time a few

eccentric faces or dresses among the other sightseers penetrated

through this merciful insensibility, but by noon the capacity for even

so much observation as this had left them. They set one foot before

the other, they directed their eyes upon the multitudinous objects

exhibited, they nodded their heads to comments made by the others, but

if asked suddenly what they had just seen in the room last visited,

neither of them could have made the faintest guess.

At half-past twelve, their aunt and mother, highly self-congratulatory

over the educational morning, voted that enough was as good as a

feast, and led their stunned and stupefied charges away to Aunt

Victoria's hotel for lunch.

It was while they were consuming this exceedingly appetizing meal that

Sylvia saw, threading his way towards them between the other tables, a

tall, weedy, expensively dressed young man, with a pale freckled face

and light-brown hair. When he saw her eyes on him he waved his hand,

a largely knuckled hand, and grinned. Then she saw that it was not a

young man, but a tall boy, and that the boy was Arnold. The quality of

the grin reminded her that she had always liked Arnold.

His arrival, though obviously unexpected to the last degree, caused

less of a commotion than might have seemed natural. It was as if

this were for Aunt Victoria only an unexpected incident in a general

development, quite resignedly anticipated. After he had shaken hands

with everybody, and had sat down and ordered his own luncheon very

capably, his stepmother remarked in a tolerant tone, "You didn't get

my telegram, then?" He shook his head: "I started an hour or so after

I wired you. We'd gone down to the town with one of the masters for a

game with Concord. There was a train just pulling out as we went by

the station, and I ran and jumped on."

"How'd you know where it was going?" challenged Judith.

"I didn't," he explained lightly. He looked at her with the teasing,

provocative look of masculine seventeen for feminine thirteen. "Same

old spitfire, I see, Miss Judy," he said, his command of unhackneyed

phrases by no means commensurate with his desire to be facetious.

Judith frowned and went on eating her éclair in silence. It was the

first éclair she had ever eaten, and she was more concerned with it

than with the new arrival.

Nobody made any comment on Arnold's method of beginning journeys until

Mrs. Marshall asked, "What did you do it for?" She put the question

with an evident seriousness of inquiry, not at all with the rhetorical

reproach usually conveyed in the formula she used.

Arnold looked up from the huge, costly, bloody beefsteak he was eating

and, after an instant's survey of the grave, kind, face opposite him,

answered with a seriousness like her own, "Because I wanted to get

away." He added after a moment, laughing and looking again at the

younger girl, "I wanted to come out and pull Judy's hair again!" He

spoke with his mouth full, and this made him entirely a boy and not at

all the young man his well-cut clothes made him appear.

Without speaking, Judith pulled her long, smooth braid around over her

shoulder where she could protect the end of it. Her mouth was also

full, bulgingly, of the last of her éclair. They might have been

brother and sister in a common nursery.

"My! Aren't you pretty, Sylvia!" was Arnold's next remark. "You're a

regular peach; do you know it?" He turned to the others: "Say, let's

go to a show this afternoon," he proposed. "Tling-Tling's in town. I

saw it in the papers as I came in. The original company's singing.

Did you ever hear them?" he asked Sylvia. "They beat the other road

companies all hollow."

Sylvia shook her head. She had never heard the name before, the

Broadway brand of comic opera being outside her experience to a degree

which would have been inconceivable to Arnold.

There was some discussion over the matter, but in the end, apparently

because there was nothing else to do with Arnold, they all did go

to the "show," Arnold engineering the expedition with a trained

expertness in the matter of ticket-sellers, cabs, and ushers which was

in odd contrast to his gawky physical immaturity. At all the stages

of the process where it was possible, he smoked cigarettes, producing

them in rapid succession out of a case studded with little pearls. His

stepmother looked on at this, her beautiful manner of wise tolerance

tightening up a little, and after dinner, as they sat in a glittering

corridor of the hotel to talk, she addressed him suddenly in a quite

different tone. "I don't want you to do that so much, Arnold," she

said. His hand was fumbling for his case again. "You're too young to

smoke at all," she said definitely. He went on with his automatic

movements, opening the case, taking out a cigarette and tapping it on

the cover. "Oh, all the fellows do," he said rebelliously, and struck

a match.

Mrs. Marshall-Smith aroused herself to a sudden, low-toned, iron

masterfulness of voice and manner which, for all its quietness, had

the quality of a pistol shot in the family group. She said only, "Put

away that cigarette"; but by one effort of her will she massed against

the rebellion of his disorganized adolescence her mature, well-ripened

capacity to get her own way. She held him with her eyes as an

animal-trainer is supposed to cow his snarling, yellow-fanged

captives, and in a moment Arnold, with a pettish gesture, blew out the

match and shut the cigarette case with a snap. Mrs. Marshall-Smith

forbore to over-emphasize her victory by a feather-weight of gloating,

and turned to her sister-in-law with a whimsical remark about the

preposterousness of one of the costumes passing. Arnold sulked

in silence until Judith, emerging from her usual self-contained

reticence, made her first advance to him. "Let's us all go there

by the railing where we can look down into the central court," she

suggested, and having a nodded permission from their elders, the three

children walked away.

They looked down into the great marble court, far below them, now

fairy-like with carefully arranged electric lights, gleaming through

the palms. The busily trampling cohorts in sack-coats and derby hats

were, from here, subdued by distance to an aesthetic inoffensiveness

of mere ant-like comings and goings.

"Not so bad," said Arnold, with a kindly willingness to be pleased,

looking about him discriminatingly at one detail after another of

the interior, the heavy velvet and gold bullion of the curtains, the

polished marble of the paneling, the silk brocade of the upholstery,

the heavy gilding of the chairs.... Everything in sight exhaled an

intense consciousness of high cost, which was heavy on the air like a

musky odor, suggesting to a sensitive nose, as does the odor of musk,

another smell, obscured but rancidly perceptible--the unwashed smell,

floating up from the paupers' cellars which support Aladdin's palaces

of luxury.

But the three adolescents, hanging over the well-designed solid

mahogany railing, had not noses sensitive to this peculiar, very

common blending of odors. Judith, in fact, was entirely unconscious

even of the more obvious of the two. She was as insensitive to all

about her as to the too-abundant pictures of the morning. She might

have been leaning over a picket fence. "I wouldn't give in to Her!"

she said to Arnold, staring squarely at him.

Arnold looked nettled. "Oh, I don't! I don't pay any attention to what

she says, except when she's around where I am, and that's not so often

you could notice it much! _Saunders_ isn't that kind! Saunders is a

gay old bird, I tell you! We have some times together when we get

going!"

It dawned on Sylvia that he was speaking of the man who, five years

before, had been their young Professor Saunders. She found that she

remembered vividly his keen, handsome face, softened by music to quiet

peace. She wondered what Arnold meant by saying he was a gay old bird.

Arnold went on, shaking his head sagely: "But it's my belief that

Saunders is beginning to take to dope ... bad business! Bad business!

He's in love with Madrina, you know, and has to drown his sorrows some

way."

Even Judith, for all her Sioux desire to avoid seeming surprised or

impressed, could not restrain a rather startled look at this lordly

knowledge of the world. Sylvia, although she had scarcely taken in the

significance of Arnold's words, dropped her eyes and blushed. Arnold

surveyed them with the indulgent look of a rakish but good-hearted man

of the world patting two pretty children on the head.

Judith upset his pose by bringing the talk abruptly back to where she

had begun it. "But you _did_ give in to her! You pretend you didn't

because you are ashamed. She just looked you down. I wouldn't let

_any_body look me down; I wouldn't give in to anybody!"

Under this attack, the man of the world collapsed into an awkward

overgrown boy, ill at ease, with red lids to his eyes and premature

yellow stains on two fingers of his left hand. He shifted his feet and

said defensively: "Aw, she's a woman. A fellow can't knock her down. I

wouldn't let a man do it." He retreated still further, through another

phase, and became a little boy, heated and recriminatory: "I'd like

to know who _you_ are to talk! You give in to _your_ mother all the

time!"

"I don't give in to my mother; I _mind_ her," said Judith, drawing a

distinction which Arnold could not follow but which he was not acute

enough to attack other than by a jeering, "Oh, what a crawl! What's

the diff?"

"And I mind her whether she's there or not! _I_ do!" continued Judith,

pressing what she seemed, inexplicably to Arnold, to consider her

advantage.

Sylvia was vexed with them for talking so loudly and getting so

red-faced and being so generally out of key with the booming note of

luxury resounding about them. "Hush! hush!" she said; "don't be so

silly. We ought to be going back."

Arnold took her rebuke without protest. Either something in this

passage-at-arms had perversely brought a sudden impulse to his mind,

or he had all along a purpose in his fantastic trip West. As they

reached the two ladies, he burst out, "Say, Madrina, why couldn't I go

on to La Chance and go to school there, and live with the Marshalls?"

Four amazed faces were turned on him. His stepmother evidently thought

him stricken with sudden insanity and strove distractedly to select,

from the heaped pile of her reasons for so thinking, some few which

might be cited without too great offense to her brother's mode of

life: "Why, what a strange idea, Arnold! What ever made you think of

such a thing? _You_ wouldn't like it!" She was going on, as in decency

bound, to add that it would be also rather a large order for the

Marshalls to adopt a notably "difficult" boy, when Judith broke in

with a blunt divination of what was in her aunt's mind. "You'd have

to wash dishes if you came to our house," she said, "and help peel

potatoes, and weed the celery bed."

"I'd like it!" declared Arnold. "We'd have lots of fun."

"I _bet_ we would!" said Judith, with an unexpected assent.

Mrs. Marshall-Smith laughed gently. "You don't know what you're

talking about, you silly boy. You never did an hour's work in your

life!"

Arnold sat down by Mrs. Marshall. "I wouldn't be in the way, _would_

I?" he said, with a clumsy pleading. He hesitated obviously over the

"Mother" which had risen to his lips, the name he had had for her

during the momentous visit of five years before, and finally,

blushing, could not bring it out. "I'd like it like anything! _I_

wouldn't be ... I'd be _different_! Sylvie and Judy seem like little

sisters to me." The red on his face deepened. "It's--it's good for a

fellow to have sisters, and a home," he said in a low tone not audible

to his stepmother's ears.

Mrs. Marshall put out a large, strong hand and took his slack,

big-knuckled fingers into a tight clasp. Mrs. Marshall-Smith evidently

thought a light tone best now, as always, to take. "I tell you,

Barbara"--she suggested laughingly, "we'll exchange. You give me

Sylvia, and take Arnold."

Mrs. Marshall ignored this as pure facetiousness, and said seriously:

"Why really, Victoria, it might not be a bad thing for Arnold to come

to us. I know Elliott would be glad to have him, and so would I."

For an instant Arnold's life hung in the balance. Mrs. Marshall-Smith,

gleaming gold and ivory in her evening-dress of amber satin, sat

silent, startled by the suddenness with which the whole astonishing

question had come up. There was in her face more than one hint that

the proposition opened a welcome door of escape to her....

And then Arnold himself, with the tragic haste of youth, sent one

end of the scales down, weighted so heavily that the sight of his

stepmother's eyes and mouth told him it could never rise again. In the

little, pregnant pause, he cried out joyfully, "Oh, Mother! Mother!"

and flung his arms around Mrs. Marshall's neck. It was the only time

he had shown the slightest emotion over anything. It burst from him

with surprising effect.

Mrs. Marshall-Smith was, as she had said, only human, and at this

she rose, her delicate face quiet and impassive, and shook out the

shimmering folds of her beautiful dress. She said casually, picking

up her fan and evidently preparing for some sort of adjournment: "Oh,

Arnold, don't be so absurd. Of course you can't foist yourself off

on a family that's no relation to you, that way. And in any case,

it wouldn't do for you to graduate from a co-educational State

University. Not a person you know would have heard of it. You know

you're due at Harvard next fall." With adroit fingers, she plucked the

string sure to vibrate in Arnold's nature. "Do go and order a table

for us in the Rose-Room, there's a good boy. And be sure to have the

waiter give you one where we can see the dancing."

The matter was settled.

CHAPTER XII

ONE MAN'S MEAT ...

That night after the Marshalls had gone back to their somewhat shabby

boarding-house, "things" happened to the two people they had left in

the great hotel. Sylvia and Judith never knew the details, but it was

apparent that something portentous had occurred, from the number of

telegrams Aunt Victoria had managed to receive and send between the

hour when they left her in the evening, and eleven o'clock the next

morning, when they found her, hatted and veiled, with an array of

strapped baggage around her.

"It's Arnold again!" she told them, with a resigned gesture. She laid

down the time-table she had been consulting and drew Mrs. Marshall to

the window for a low-voiced explanation. When she came back, "I'm so

sorry, dears, to cut short even by a single day this charming time

together," she told the girls. "But the news I've been getting from

Arnold's school--there's nothing for me to do but to stop everything

and take him back there to see what can be done to patch things

up." She spoke with the patient air of one inured to the sacrifices

involved in the upbringing of children. "We leave on the

eleven-forty--oh, I _am_ so sorry! But it would have been only one day

more. I meant to get you both a dress--I've 'phoned to have them sent

to you."

The rest was only the dreary, bustling futility of the last moments

before train-time--kisses, remarks about writing more often; a promise

from Aunt Victoria to send Sylvia from time to time a box of old

dresses and fineries as material for her niece's dressmaking

skill;--from Arnold, appearing at the last minute, a good deal of

rather flat, well-meant chaffing, proffered with the most entire

unconcern as to the expressed purpose of their journey; and then the

descent through long, mirrored, softly carpeted corridors to the

classic beauty of the Grecian temple where the busy men, with tired

eyes, came and went hurriedly, treading heavily on their heels.

Outside was the cab, Arnold extremely efficient in browbeating the

driver as to the stowing away of bags, more kisses, in the general

cloud of which Arnold pecked shyly at Sylvia's ear and Judith's chin;

then the retreating vehicle with Arnold standing up, a tall, ungainly

figure, waving a much-jointed hand.

After it was out of sight the three watchers looked at each other in a

stale moment of anticlimax.

"Arnold's horrid, isn't he?" said Judith thoughtfully.

"Why, I _like_ him!" opposed Sylvia.

"Oh, I _like_ him, all right," said Judith.

Then both girls looked at their mother. What next ...? They were not

to have gone back to La Chance until the next night. Would this change

of plans alter their schedule? Mrs. Marshall saw no reason why it

should. She proposed a sightseeing expedition to a hospital. Miss

Lindström, the elderly Swedish woman who worked among the destitute

negroes of La Chance, had a sister who was head-nurse in the biggest

and newest hospital in Chicago, and she had written very cordially

that if her sister's friends cared to inspect such an institution, she

was at their service. Neither of the girls having the slightest idea

of what a hospital was like, nor of any other of the sights in the

city which they might see instead, no objection was made to this plan.

They made inquiries of a near-by policeman and found that they could

reach it by the elevated. Their encounter with this metropolitan

facility for transportation turned out to be among the most memorable

bits of sightseeing of their trip. Neither of the girls had ever

imagined anything so lurid as the Saturday noon jam, the dense, packed

throngs waiting on the platforms and bursting out through the opened

doors like beans from a split bag, their places instantly taken by

an even greater crowd, perspiring, fighting grimly for foot-room and

expecting and receiving no other kind. Judith was fired contagiously

with the spirit about her, set her teeth, thrust out her elbows,

shoved, pushed, grunted, fought, all with a fresh zest in the

performance which gave her an immense advantage over the fatigued

city-dwellers, who assaulted their fellow-citizens with only a

preoccupied desire for an approach to a breathing space, and, that

attained, subsided into lurching, strap-hanging quiescence. Judith

secured with ease, on all the public vehicles they utilized that day,

a place on the outside edge of a platform, where she had fresh air

in abundance and could hang over the grating to watch with extreme

interest the intimate bits of tenement-house life which flashed

jerkily by.

But Sylvia, a shuddering chip on the torrent, always found herself

in the exact middle of the most crowded spot, feeling her body

horrifyingly pressed upon by various invisible ones behind her and

several only too visible ones in front, breathing down the back of

somebody's neck, often a dirty and sweaty one, with somebody breathing

hotly down the back of her own. Once as a very fat and perspiring

German-American began to fight the crowd in the endeavor to turn

around and leave the car, his slowly revolving bulbous bulk pushed her

so smotheringly into the broad back of a negro ahead of her that she

felt faint. As they left the car, she said vehemently: "Oh, Mother,

this makes me sick! Why couldn't we have taken a cab? Aunt Victoria

always does!"

Her mother laughed. "You little country girl! A cab for as far as this

would cost almost as much as the ticket back to La Chance."

"I don't see why we came, then!" cried Sylvia. "It's simply awful! And

this is a _horrid_ part of town!" She suddenly observed that they were

walking through a very poor, thickly inhabited street, such as she

had never seen before. As she looked about her, her mother stopped

laughing and watched her face with a painful attention. Sylvia looked

at the tall, dingy houses, the frowzy little shops, the swarms of

dirty-nosed children, shrill-voiced, with matted hair, running and

whooping in the street, at the slatternly women yelling unobeyed

orders to them out of half-glimpsed, cheerless interiors, smelling of

cabbage and dishwater. It was Sylvia's first sight of the life of city

poor, and upon her face of disgust and revulsion her mother bent a

stern and anxious eye.

"See here, Sylvia!" she said abruptly, "do you know what _I_ was

thinking about back there in the crowd on the elevated? I was thinking

that lots of girls, no older than _my_ girl, have to stand that twice

a day, going to earn their livings."

Sylvia chafed under the obviously admonitory tone of this. "I don't

see that that makes it any easier for us if they _do!_" she said in a

recalcitrant voice. She stepped wide to avoid a pile of filth on the

sidewalk, and clutched at her skirt. She had a sudden vision of the

white-tiled, velvet-carpeted florist's shop in a corner of Aunt

Victoria's hotel where, behind spotless panes of shining plate-glass,

the great clusters of cut-flowers dreamed away an enchanted

life--roses, violets, lilies of the valley, orchids....

"Here we are at the hospital," said Mrs. Marshall, a perplexed line

of worry between her brows. But at once she was swept out of herself,

forgot her seriously taken responsibility of being the mother of a

girl like Sylvia. She was only Barbara Marshall, thrilled by a noble

spectacle. She looked up at the great, clean, many-windowed façade

above them, towering, even above the huge bulk of the gas-tanks across

the street, and her dark eyes kindled. "A hospital is one of the most

wonderful places in the world!" she cried, in a voice of emotion. "All

this--to help people get well!"

They passed into a wide, bare hall, where a busy young woman at a desk

nodded on hearing their names, and spoke into a telephone. There

was an odd smell in the air, not exactly disagreeable, yet rather

uncomfortably pungent. "Oh, iodoform," remarked the young woman at the

desk, hearing them comment on it. "Do you get it? We don't notice it

_here_ at all."

Then came Miss Lindström's sister, powerfully built, gaunt, gray, with

a professional, impersonal cheerfulness. The expedition began. "I'll

take you to the children's ward first," said Miss Lindström; "that

always interests visitors so much...."

Rows on rows of little white beds and white, bloodless faces with an

awful patience on them, and little white hands lying in unchildlike

quiet on the white spreads; rows on rows of hollow eyes turned in

listless interest on the visitors; nurses in white, stepping briskly

about, bending over the beds, lifting a little emaciated form, deftly

unrolling a bandage; heat; a stifling smell of iodoform; a sharp

sudden cry of pain from a distant corner; somewhere a dully beating

pulse of low, suppressed sobs....

They were out of the children's ward now, walking along a clean bare

corridor. Sylvia swallowed hard. Her eyes felt burning. Judith held

her mother's hand tightly. Miss Lindström was explaining to Mrs.

Marshall a new system of ventilation.

"This is one of the women's wards," said their leader, opening another

swinging door, from which rushed forth a fresh blast of iodoform. More

rows of white beds, each with its mound of suffering, each with its

haggard face of pain. More nurses, bearing basins of curious shape,

bandages, hot-water bottles, rubber tubes. There was more restlessness

here than in the children's ward, less helpless prostration before the

Juggernaut of disease ... fretfulness, moans, tossing heads, wretched

eyes which stared at the visitors in a hostile indifference.

"Oh, they are just putting the dressing on such an _interesting_

case!" said Miss Lindström's voice coming to Sylvia from a great

distance. She spoke with the glow of professional enthusiasm, with

that certainty, peculiar to sincere doctors and nurses, that a

complicated wound is a fascinating object.

In spite of herself Sylvia had one glimpse of horribly lacerated red

tissues.... She gripped her hands together after this and looked

fixedly at a button on her glove, until Miss Lindström's voice

announced: "It's the Embury stitch that makes that possible: we've

just worked out the application of it to skin-graft cases. Two years

ago she'd have lost her leg. Isn't it simply splendid!"

She said cordially as they moved forward: "Sister Selma said to treat

you as though you were the Queen of Sweden, and I am! You're seeing

things that visitors are _never_ allowed to see."

They walked on and on interminably, past innumerable sick souls,

each whirling alone in a self-centered storm of suffering; and then,

somehow, they were in a laboratory, where an immensely stout and

immensely jovial doctor in white linen got down from a high stool to

shake hands with them and profess an immense willingness to entertain

them. "... but I haven't got anything much today," he said, with a

disparaging wave of his hand towards his test-tubes. "Not a single

death-warrant. Oh yes, I have too, one brought in yesterday." He

brought them a test-tube, stoppered with cotton, and bade them note

a tiny bluish patch on the clear gelatine at the bottom. "That means

he's a dead one, as much as if he faced the electric chair," he

explained. To the nurse he added, "A fellow in the men's ward,

Pavilion G. Very interesting culture ... first of that kind I've had

since I've been here." As he spoke he was looking at Sylvia with an

open admiration, bold, intrusive, flippant.

They were passing along another corridor, hot, silent, their footsteps

falling dully on a long runner of corrugated rubber, with red borders

which drew together in the distance like the rails streaming away from

a train. Behind a closed door there suddenly rose, and as quickly died

away, a scream of pain. With an effort Sylvia resisted the impulse to

clap her hands over her ears.

"Here we are, at the minor operating-room," said Miss Lindström,

pausing. "It's against the rules, but if you want to look from across

the room--just to say you've been there--" She held the door open a

little, a suffocating odor of anaesthetics blew out in their faces,

like a breath from a dragon's cave. Mrs. Marshall and Judith stepped

forward. But Sylvia clutched at her mother's arm and whispered:

"Mother! Mother! I don't think I'll go on. I feel--I feel--I'll go

back down to the entrance hall to wait."

Mrs. Marshall nodded a preoccupied assent, and Sylvia fled away down

the endless corridor, looking neither to the right nor the left, down

repeated flights of scrubbed and sterilized marble stairs, into the

entrance hall, and, like a bolt from a bow, out of it on the other

side, out into the street, into the sunshine, the heat, the clatter,

the blessed, blessed smell of cabbage and dish-water....

After a time she went to sit down on the top step of the hospital

entrance to wait. She contemplated with exquisite enjoyment the

vigorous, profane, hair-pulling quarrel between two dirty little

savages across the street. She could have kissed her hand to the

loud-voiced woman who came scuffling to the window to scold them,

clutching a dirty kimono together over a Hogarth-like expanse of

bosom. They were well, these people, blood ran in their veins, their

skin was whole, they breathed air, not iodoform! Her mother had pulled

the string too tight, and Sylvia's ears were full of the ugly twang of

its snapping.

When, at last, Judith and Mrs. Marshall came out, hand-in-hand, Sylvia

sprang up to say: "What an _awful_ place! I hope I'll never have to

set foot in one again!" But quick as was her impulse to speech, her

perceptions were quicker, and before the pale exaltation of the other

two, she fell silent, irritated, rebellious, thoroughly alien. They

walked along in silence. Then Judith said, stammering a little with

emotion, "M-M-Mother, I want to b-b-b-be a trained n-n-nurse when I

grow up."

CHAPTER XIII

AN INSTRUMENT IN TUNE

As they drew near to their boarding-house late that afternoon, very

hot, very crumpled, very solemn, and very much out of tune with one

another, they were astonished to see a little eager-faced boy dash out

of the house and run wildly to meet them, shouting as he came.

"Why, Lawrence _Marshall_!" cried his mother, picking him up in strong

arms; "how ever in the world did you get here!"

"Father brungded me," cried the child, clasping her tightly around the

neck. "We got so lonesome for Mother we couldn't wait."

And then Sylvia had stamped on her mind a picture which was to come

back later--her father's face and eyes as he ran down the steps to

meet his wife. For he looked at his daughters only afterwards, as they

were all walking along together, much excited, everybody talking at

once, and hanging on everybody's arm."... Yes, Buddy's right! We

found we missed you so, we decided life wasn't worth it. You don't

know, Barbara, what it's like without you--you don't _know_!"

Her father's voice sounded to Sylvia so loud, so gay, so vital, so

inexpressibly welcome.... She leaped up at his face like a young

dog, for another kiss. "Oh, I'm _awfully_ glad you came!" she cried,

wondering a little herself at the immensity of her relief. She thought

that she must get him by himself quickly and tell him her side of that

hospital story, before her mother and Judith began on any virtuous

raptures over it.

But there was no consecutive talk about anything after they all were

joyfully gathered in their ugly, commonplace boarding-house bedroom.

They loosened collars and belts, washed their perspiring and dusty

faces, and brushed hair, to the tune of a magpie chatter. Sylvia did

not realize that she and her father were the main sources of this

volubility, she did not realize how she had missed his exuberance, she

only knew that she felt a weight lifted from her heart. She had been

telling him with great enjoyment of the comic opera they had seen, as

she finished putting the hairpins into her freshly smoothed hair, and

turned, a pin still in her mouth, in time to be almost abashed by the

expression in his eyes as he suddenly drew his wife to him.

"Jove! Barbara!" he cried, half laughing, but with a quiver in his

voice, "it's hell to be happily married! A separation is--well, never

mind about it. I came along anyhow! And now I'm here I'll go to see

Vic of course."

"No, you won't," said Judith promptly. "She's gone back. To get Arnold

out of a scrape."

Mrs. Marshall explained further, and incidentally touched upon her

sister-in-law's views of the relation between expensive boys' schools

and private tutors. Her dryly humorous version of this set her husband

off in a great mirthful roar, to which Sylvia, after a moment of

blankness, suddenly joined a burst of her own clear laughter. At the

time she had seen nothing funny in Aunt Victoria's statement, but

she was now immensely tickled to remember Aunt Victoria's Olympian

certainty of herself and her mother's grave mask of serious

consideration of the idea. Long after her father had stopped laughing,

she still went on, breaking out into delighted giggles. Her new

understanding of the satire back of her mother's quiet eyes, lent to

Aunt Victoria's golden calm the quaint touch of caricature which made

it self-deceived complacency. At the recollection she sent up rocket

after rocket of schoolgirl laughter.

Her mother, absorbed in conscientious anxiety about Sylvia's

development, and deeply disappointed by the result of the visit to the

hospital, ignored this laughter, nor did Sylvia at all guess that she

was laughing away half the spell which Aunt Victoria had cast about

her. When they went down to their supper of watery creamed potatoes,

and stewed apricots in thick saucers, she was in such good humor that

she ate this unappetizing fare with no protest.

"Now, folks," said Professor Marshall, after supper, "we have to go

home tomorrow early, so we ought to have one more fling tonight. While

I was waiting for you to come back this afternoon, I looked up what

Chicago has to offer in the way of flings, and this is what I found.

Here, Barbara," he took a tiny envelope out of his upper waistcoat

pocket, "are two tickets for the symphony orchestra. By the greatest

of luck they're giving a special concert for some charity or other, a

beautiful program; a sort of musical requiem. Sylvia mustn't miss it;

you take her. And here," he spun round to face Judith and Lawrence,

producing another slim, tiny envelope from the other upper waistcoat

pocket, "since symphony concerts are rather solid meat for milk teeth,

and since they last till way after bedtime, I have provided another

sort of entertainment; to wit: three seats for moving pictures of

the only real and authentic Cheyenne Bill's Congress of the World's

Frontiersmen. All in favor of going there with me, say 'Aye.'"

"Aye!" screamed Judith and Lawrence. Everybody laughed in pleased

excitement and everybody seemed satisfied except Mrs. Marshall, who

insisted that she should go to the moving pictures while the Professor

took Sylvia to the concert.

Then followed the most amiable, generous wrangle as to which of the

parents should enjoy the adult form of amusement. But while the

Professor grew more and more half-hearted in his protestations that

he really didn't care where he went, Mrs. Marshall grew more and

more positive that he must not be allowed to miss the music, finally

silencing his last weak proffer of self-abnegation by saying

peremptorily: "No, no, Elliott; go on in to your debauch of emotion.

I'll take the children. Don't miss your chance. You know it means ten

times as much to you as to me. You haven't heard a good orchestra in

years."

Sylvia had never been in such a huge hall as the one where they

presently sat, high, giddily high in the eyrie of a top gallery. They

looked down into yawning space. The vast size of the auditorium so

dwarfed the people now taking their innumerable seats, that even after

the immense audience was assembled the great semicircular enclosure

seemed empty and blank. It received those thousands of souls into its

maw, and made no sign; awaiting some visitation worthy of its bulk.

The orchestra, an army of ants, straggled out on the stage. Sylvia was

astonished at their numbers--sixteen first violins, she saw by the

program! She commented to her father on the difficulty of keeping

them all in tune. He smiled at her absently, bade her, with an air

of suppressed excitement, wait until she had heard them, and fell

to biting his nails nervously. She re-read the program and all the

advertisements, hypnotized, like every one else in the audience, by

the sight of printed matter. She noticed that the first number of this

memorial concert was the funeral march from the Götterdämmerung, which

she knew very well from having heard a good many times a rather thin

version of it for four strings and a piano.

The conductor, a solitary ant, made his toilsome way across the great

front of the stage, evoking a burst of applause, which resounded

hollowly in the inhuman spaces of the building. He mounted a step,

waved his antennae, there was a great indrawn breath of silence,

and then Sylvia, waiting with agreeable curiosity to hear how a big

orchestra would really sound, gasped and held her breath. The cup of

that vast building suddenly brimmed with a magical flood of pure tone,

coming from everywhere, from nowhere, from her own heart as well as

from outside her body. The immense hall rang to the glorious quality

of this sound as a violin-back vibrates to the drawn bow. It rained

down on her, it surged up to her, she could not believe that she

really heard it.

She looked quickly at her father. His arms were folded tightly across

his chest. He was looking frowningly at the back of the chair in front

of him. It was evident that Sylvia did not exist for him. She was

detached from her wonder at his pale sternness by the assault on her

nerves made by the first of those barbaric outcries of woe, that

sudden, brief clamor of grief, the shouts of despair, the beating upon

shields. Her heart stood still--There rose, singing like an archangel,

the mystic call of the Volsung, then the yearning melody of love; such

glory, such longing for beauty, for life--and then brusquely, again

and again, the screaming, sobbing recollection of the fact of

death....

When it was over, Sylvia's breath was still coming pantingly. "Oh,

Father! How--how wonderful--how--" she murmured.

He looked at her, as though he were angry with her, and yet scarcely

seeming to know her, and spoke in a hard, bitter tone: "And it is

_years_ since I have heard one!" He seemed to cry out upon her for the

conditions of his life.

She had no key for these words, could not imagine a meaning for them,

and, chilled and repelled, wondered if she had heard him rightly.

The funeral march from the Eroica began, and her father's face

softened. The swelling volume of tone rose like a flood-tide. The

great hall, the thousands of human hearts, all beat solemnly in the

grave and hopeless pulsations of the measured chords. The air

was thick with sorrow, with quiet despair. No outcries here, no

screams--the modern soul advancing somberly with a pale composure to

the grave of its love, aware that during all the centuries since the

dead Siegfried was lifted high on the shoulders of his warriors not a

word of explanation, of consolation has been found; that the modern,

barren self-control means only what the barbarian yells out in his

open abandonment to sorrow--and yet such beauty, such beauty in that

singing thread of melody--"_durch Leiden, Freude!_"

Not even the shadow of death had ever fallen across Sylvia's life, or

that of her father, to explain the premonitory emotion which now drew

them together like two frightened children. Sylvia felt the inexorable

music beating in her own veins, and when she took her father's hand

it seemed to her that its strong pulses throbbed to the same rhythm;

beauty, and despair ... hope ... life ... death.

At the end, "Oh, Father--oh, Father!" she said under her breath,

imploringly, struggling to free herself from the muffling, enveloping

sense of imminent disaster. He pressed her hand hard and smiled at

her. It was his own old smile, the father-look which had been her

heart's home all her life--but it was infinitely sweeter to her now

than ever before. She had never felt closer to him. There was a pause

during which they did not speak, and then there burst upon them the

splendid tumult of "Death and Transfiguration," which, like a great

wind, swept Sylvia out of herself. She could not follow the music--she

had never heard of it before. She was beaten down, overwhelmed, freed,

as though the transfiguration were her own, from the pitiful barriers

of consciousness....

"Was the concert good?" asked Mrs. Marshall, yawning, and reaching out

of bed to kiss Sylvia sleepily. She laughed a little at their faces.

"Oh, music _is_ a madness! To spend a cheerful evening listening to

death-music, and then come back looking like Moses before the Burning

Bush!"

"Say, you ought to have seen the stunt they did with their lassos,"

cried Judith, waking in the bed on the other side of the room, and

sitting up with her black hair tousled about her face. "I'm going to

try it with the pinto when we get home."

"I _bet_ you'll do it, too," came from Lawrence the loyal, always sure

of Judith's strength, Judith's skill.

Sylvia looked at her father over their heads and smiled faintly. It

was a good smile, from a full heart.

"Aunt Victoria sent our dresses," said Judith, dropping back on the

pillow. "That big box over there. Mine has pink ribbons, and yours are

blue."

Mrs. Marshall looked at the big box with disfavor, and then at Sylvia,

now sunk in a chair, her hands clasped behind her head, her eyes

dreamy and half closed. Across the room the long pasteboard box

displayed a frothy mass of white lace and pale shining ribbons. Sylvia

looked at it absently and made no move to examine it. She closed her

eyes again and beat an inaudible rhythm with her raised fingers. All

through her was ringing the upward-surging tide of sound at the end of

"Death and Transfiguration."

"Oh, go to bed, Sylvia; don't sit there maundering over the concert,"

said her mother, with a good-natured asperity. But there was relief in

her voice.

CHAPTER XIV

HIGHER EDUCATION

To any one who is familiar with State University life, the color

of Sylvia's Freshman year will be vividly conveyed by the simple

statement that she was not invited to join a fraternity. To any one

who does not know State University life, no description can convey

anything approaching an adequate notion of the terribly determinative

significance of that fact.

The statement that she was invited to join no sorority is not

literally true, for in the second semester when it was apparent that

none of the three leading fraternities intended to take her in, there

came a late "bid" from one of the third-rate sororities, of recent

date, composed of girls like Sylvia who had not been included in the

membership of the older, socially distinguished organizations. Cut to

the quick by her exclusion from the others, Sylvia refused this tardy

invitation with remorseless ingratitude. If she were not to form one

of the "swell" set of college, at least she would not proclaim herself

one of the "jays," the "grinds," the queer girls, who wore their hair

straight back from their foreheads, who invariably carried off Phi

Beta Kappa, whose skirts hung badly, whose shoe-heels turned over as

they walked, who stood first in their classes, whose belts behind made

a practice of revealing large white safety-pins; and whose hats, even

disassociated from their dowdy wearers, and hanging in the cloakroom,

were of an almost British eccentricity.

Nothing of this sort could be alleged against Sylvia's appearance,

which she felt, as she arrayed herself every morning, to be all that

the most swagger frat could ask of a member. Aunt Victoria's boxes

of clothing, her own nimble fingers and passionate attention to the

subject, combined to turn her out a copy, not to be distinguished from

the original, of the daughter of a man with an income five times that

of her father. As she consulted her mirror, it occurred to her also,

as but an honest recognition of a conspicuous fact, that her suitable

and harmonious toilets adorned a person as pleasing to the eye as any

of her classmates.

During the last year of her life at home she had shot up very fast,

and she was now a tall, slender presence, preserved from even the

usual touching and delightful awkwardness of seventeen by the trained

dexterity and strength with which she handled her body, as muscular,

for all its rounded slimness, as a boy's. Her hair was beautiful, a

bright chestnut brown with a good deal of red, its brilliant gloss

broken into innumerable high-lights by the ripple of its waviness; and

she had one other positive beauty, the clearly penciled line of her

long, dark eyebrows, which ran up a trifle at the outer ends with a

little quirk, giving an indescribable air of alertness and vivacity to

her expression. Otherwise she was not at that age, nor did she ever

become, so explicitly handsome as her sister Judith, who had at every

period of her life a head as beautiful as that on a Greek coin.

But when the two were together, although the perfectly adjusted

proportions of Judith's proud, dark face brought out the

irregularities of Sylvia's, disclosed the tilt of her small nose, made

more apparent the disproportionate width between her eyes, and showed

her chin to be of no mold in particular, yet a modern eye rested with

far more pleasure on the older sister's face. A bright, quivering

mobility like sunshine on water, gave it a charm which was not

dependent on the more obvious prettinesses of a fine-grained, white

skin, extremely clear brown eyes, and a mouth quick to laugh and

quiver, with pure, sharply cut outline and deeply sunk corners. Even

in repose, Sylvia's face made Judith's seem unresponsive, and when

it lighted up in talk and laughter, it seemed to give out a visible

light. In contrast Judith's beautiful countenance seemed carved out of

some very hard and indestructible stone.

And yet, in spite of this undeniably satisfactory physical outfit, and

pre-eminent ability in athletics, Sylvia was not invited to join any

of the best fraternities. It is not surprising that there was

mingled with her bitterness on the subject a justifiable amount of

bewilderment. What _did_ they want? They recruited, from her very side

in classes, girls without half her looks or cleverness. What _was_ the

matter with her? She would not for her life have given a sign to her

family of her mental sufferings as, during that first autumn, day

after day went by with no sign of welcome from the social leaders of

her new world; but a mark was left on her character by her affronted

recognition of her total lack of success in this, her first appearance

outside the sheltering walls of her home; her first trial by the real

standards of the actual world of real people.

The fact, which would have been balm to Sylvia's vanity, had she ever

had the least knowledge of it, was that upon her appearance in the

Freshman class she had been the occasion of violent discussion and

almost of dissension in the councils of the two "best" fraternities.

Her beauty, her charm, and the rumors of her excellence in tennis had

made a flutter in the first fraternity meetings after the opening of

the autumn term. The younger members of both Sigma Beta and Alpha

Kappa counseled early and enthusiastic "rushing" of the new prize, but

the Juniors and Seniors, wise in their day and generation, brought

out a number of damning facts which would need to be taken into

consideration if Sylvia wore their pin.

There were, in both fraternities, daughters of other faculty families,

who were naturally called upon to furnish inside information. They

had been brought up from childhood on the tradition of the Marshalls'

hopeless queerness, and their collective statement of the Marshalls'

position ran somewhat as follows: "The only professors who have

anything to do with them are some of the jay young profs from the

West, with no families; the funny old La Rues--you know what a

hopeless dowd Madame La Rue is--and Professor Kennedy, and though he

comes from a swell family he's an awful freak himself. They live on a

farm, like farmers, at the ends of the earth from anybody that anybody

knows. They are never asked to be patrons of any swell college

functions. None of the faculty ladies with any social position ever

call on Mrs. Marshall--and no wonder. She doesn't keep any help, and

when the doorbell rings she's as apt to come running in from the

chicken house with rubber boots on, and a basket of eggs--and the

_queerest_ clothes! Like a costume out of a book; and they never have

anybody to wait on the table, just jump up and down themselves--you

can imagine what kind of a frat tea or banquet Sylvia would give in

such a home--and of course if we took her in, we couldn't very

well _tell_ her her family's so impossible we wouldn't want their

connection with the frat known--and the students who go there are a

perfect collection of all the jays and grinds and freaks in college.

It's enough to mark you one to be seen there--you meet all the crazy

guys you see in classes and never anywhere else--and of course that

wouldn't stop when Sylvia's frat sisters began going there. And their

house wouldn't do at _all_ to entertain in--it's queer--no rugs--dingy

old furniture--nothing but books everywhere, even in their substitute

for a parlor--and you're likely to meet not only college freaks, but

worse ones from goodness knows where. There's a beer-drinking old

monster who goes there every Sunday to play the fiddle that you

wouldn't have speak to you on the street for anything in the world.

And the way they entertain! My, in such a countrified way! Some of the

company go out into the kitchen to help Mrs. Marshall serve up the

refreshments--and everything homemade--and they play charades, and

nobody knows what else--bean-bag, or spelling-down maybe--"

This appalling picture, which in justice to the young delineators must

be conceded to be not in the least overdrawn, was quite enough to give

pause to those impetuous and immature young Sophomores who had lacked

the philosophical breadth of vision to see that Sylvia was not an

isolated phenomenon, but (since her family live in La Chance) an

inseparable part of her background. After all, the sororities made no

claim to be anything but social organizations. Their standing in the

college world depended upon their social background, and of course

this could only be made up of a composite mingling of those of their

individual members.

Fraternities did not wish to number more than sixteen or eighteen

undergraduates. That meant only four or five to be chosen from each

Freshman class, and that number of "nice" girls was not hard to find,

girls who were not only well dressed, and lively and agreeable in

themselves, but who came from large, well-kept, well-furnished houses

on the right streets of La Chance; with presentable, card-playing,

call-paying, reception-giving mothers, who hired caterers for their

entertainments; and respectably absentee fathers with sizable

pocketbooks and a habit of cash liberality. The social standing of the

co-eds in State Universities was already precarious enough, without

running the risk of acquiring dubious social connections.

If Sylvia had been a boy, it is almost certain that the deficiencies

of her family would have been overlooked in consideration of her

potentialities in the athletic world. Success in athletics was to the

men's fraternities what social standing was to the girls'. It must be

remarked parenthetically that neither class of these organizations

had the slightest prejudice against high scholastic standing. On the

contrary it was regarded very kindly by fraternity members, as a

desirable though not indispensable addition to social standing and

physical prowess.

But Sylvia was not a boy, and her fine, promising game of tennis, her

excellence in the swimming-pool, and her success on the gymnasium

floor and on the flying rings, served no purpose but to bring to her

the admiration of the duffers among the girls, whom she despised,

and the unspoken envy of the fraternity girls, whose overtures at

superficial friendliness she constantly rebuffed with stern, wounded

pride.

The sharpest stab to her pride came from the inevitable publicity of

her ordeal. For, though her family knew nothing of what that first

year out in the world meant to her, she had not the consolation of

hoping that her condition was not perfectly apparent to every one else

in the college world. At the first of the year, all gatherings of

undergraduates not in fraternities hummed and buzzed with speculations

about who would or would not be "taken" by the leading fraternities.

For every girl who was at all possible, each day was a long suspense,

beginning in hope and ending in listlessness; and for Sylvia in an

added shrinking from the eyes of her mates, which were, she knew,

fixed on her with a relentless curiosity which was torture to one

of her temperament. She had been considered almost sure to be early

invited to join Alpha Kappa, the frat to which most of the faculty

daughters belonged, and all during the autumn she was aware that when

she took off her jacket in the cloakroom, a hundred glances swept her

to see if she wore at last the coveted emblem of the "pledged" girl;

and when an Alpha Kappa girl chanced to come near her with a casual

remark, she seemed to hear a significant hush among the other girls,

followed by an equally significant buzz of whispered comment when the

fraternity member moved away again. This atmosphere would have made

no impression on a nature either more sturdily philosophic, or more

unimaginative than Sylvia's (Judith, for instance, was not in the

least affected by the experience), but it came to be a morbid

obsession of this strong, healthy, active-minded young creature.

It tinged with bitterness and blackness what should have been the

crystal-clear cup holding her youth and intelligence and health. She

fancied that every one despised her. She imagined that people who were

in reality quite unaware of her existence were looking at her and

whispering together a wondering discussion as to why she was not "in

the swim" as such a girl ought to be--all girls worth their salt were.

Above all she was stung into a sort of speechless rage by her

impotence to do anything to regain the decent minimum of personal

dignity which she felt was stripped from her by this constant play of

bald speculation about whether she would or would not be considered

"good enough" to be invited into a sorority. If only something

definite would happen! If there were only an occasion on which

she might in some way proudly proclaim her utter indifference to

fraternities and their actions! If only the miserable business were

not so endlessly drawn out! She threw herself with a passionate

absorption into her studies, her music, and her gymnasium work,

cut off both from the "elect" and from the multitude, a proudly

self-acknowledged maverick. She never lacked admiring followers among

less brilliant girls who would have been adorers if she had not held

them off at arm's length, but her vanity, far from being omnivorous,

required more delicate food. She wished to be able to cry aloud to her

world that she thought nothing and cared nothing about fraternities,

and by incessant inner absorption in this conception she did to

a considerable extent impose it upon the collective mind of her

contemporaries. She, the yearningly friendly, sympathetic, sensitive,

praise-craving Sylvia, came to be known, half respected and half

disliked, as proud and clever, and "high-brow," and offish, and

conceited, and so "queer" that she cared nothing for the ordinary

pleasures of ordinary girls.

This reputation for a high-browed indifference to commonplace mortals

was naturally not a recommendation to the masculine undergraduates of

the University. These young men, under the influence of reports

of what was done at Cornell and other more eastern co-educational

institutions, were already strongly inclined to ignore the co-eds as

much as possible. The tradition was growing rapidly that the proper

thing was to invite the "town-girls" to the college proms and dances,

and to sit beside them in the grandstand during football games. As

yet, however, this tendency had not gone so far but that those

co-eds who were members of a socially recognized fraternity were

automatically saved from the neglect which enveloped all other but

exceptionally flirtatious and undiscriminating girls. Each girls'

fraternity, like the masculine organizations, gave one big hop in

the course of the season and several smaller dances, as well as

lawn-parties and teas and stage-coach parties to the football games.

The young men naturally wished to be invited to these functions,

the increasing elaborateness of which kept pace with the increasing

sophistication of life in La Chance and the increasing cost of which

made the parents of the girls groan. Consequently each masculine

fraternity took care that it did not incur the enmity of the organized

and socially powerful sororities. But Sylvia was not protected by this

aegis. She was not invited during her Freshman year to the dances

given by either the sororities or the fraternities; and the large

scattering crowd of masculine undergraduates were frightened away from

the handsome girl by her supposed haughty intellectual tastes.

Here again her isolation was partly the result of her own wish. The

raw-boned, badly dressed farmers' lads, with red hands and rough hair,

she quite as snobbishly ignored as she was ignored in her turn by the

well-set-up, fashionably dressed young swells of the University, with

their white hands, with their thin, gaudy socks tautly pulled over

their ankle-bones, and their shining hair glistening like lacquer on

their skulls (that being the desideratum in youthful masculine society

of the place and time). Sylvia snubbed the masculine jays of college

partly because it was a breath of life to her battered vanity to be

able to snub some one, and partly because they seemed to her, in

comparison with the smart set, seen from afar, quite and utterly

undesirable. She would rather have no masculine attentions at all than

such poor provender for her feminine desire to conquer.

Thus she trod the leafy walks of the beautiful campus alone, ignoring

and ignored, keenly alive under her shell of indifference to the

brilliant young men and their chosen few feminine companions.

CHAPTER XV

MRS. DRAPER BLOWS THE COALS

The most brilliant of these couples were Jermain Fiske, Jr.,

and Eleanor Hubert. The first was the son of the well-known and

distinguished Colonel Jermain Fiske, one of the trustees of the

University, ex-Senator from the State. He belonged to the old,

free-handed, speech-making type of American statesmen, and, with his

florid good looks, his great stature, his loud, resonant, challenging

voice, and his picturesque reputation for highly successful

double-dealing, he was one of the most talked-of men in the State,

despite his advanced years. His enemies, who were not few, said that

the shrewdest action of his surpassingly shrewd life had been his

voluntary retirement from the Senate and from political activities at

the first low murmur heralding the muck-raking cyclone which was to

devastate public life as men of his type understood it. But every

inhabitant of the State, including his enemies, took an odd pride in

his fiercely debonair defiance to old age, in his grandiloquent, too

fluent public addresses, and in the manner in which, despite his

dubious private reputation, he held open to him, by sheer will-power,

sanctimonious doors which were closed to other less robust bad

examples to youth.

This typical specimen of an American class now passing away, had sent

his son to the State University instead of to an expensive Eastern

college because of his carefully avowed attitude of bluff acceptance

of a place among the plain people of the region. The presence of

Jermain, Jr., in the classrooms of the State University had been

capital for many a swelling phrase on his father's part--"What's good

enough for the farmers' boys of my State is good enough for my boy,"

etc., etc.

As far as the young man in question was concerned, he certainly showed

no signs whatever of feeling himself sacrificed for his father's

advantage, and apparently considered that a leisurely sojourn for

seven years (he took both the B.A. and the three-year Law course) in a

city the size of La Chance was by no means a hardship for a young man

in the best of health, provided with ample funds, and never questioned

as to the disposition of his time. He had had at first a reputation

for dissipation which, together with his prowess on the football

field, had made him as much talked of on the campus as his father in

the State; but during his later years, those spent in the Law School,

he had, as the college phrase ran, "taken it out in being swagger,"

had discarded his former shady associates, had two rooms in the finest

frat house on the campus, and was the only student of the University

to drive two horses tandem to a high, red-wheeled dog-cart. His fine

physique and reputation for quick assertion of his rights saved him

from the occasional taunt of dandyism which would have been flung at

any other student indulging in so unusual a freak of fashion.

During Sylvia's Freshman year there usually sat beside him, on the

lofty seat of this equipage, a sweet-faced, gentle-browed young

lady, the lovely flower blooming out of the little girl who had so

innocently asked her mother some ten years ago what was a drunken

reinhardt. The oldest daughter of the professor of European History

was almost precisely Sylvia's age, but now, when Sylvia was laboring

over her books in the very beginning of her college life, Eleanor

Hubert was a finished product, a graduate of an exclusive, expensive

girls' boarding-school in New York, and a that-year's débutante in La

Chance society. Her name was constantly in the items of the society

columns, she wore the most profusely varied costumes, and she

drove about the campus swaying like a lily beside the wealthiest

undergraduate. Sylvia's mind was naturally too alert and vigorous, and

now too thoroughly awakened to intellectual interests, not to seize

with interest on the subjects she studied that year; but enjoy as much

as she tried to do, and did, this tonic mental discipline, there were

many moments when the sight of Eleanor Hubert made her wonder if after

all higher mathematics and history were of any real value.

During this wretched year of stifled unhappiness, she not only studied

with extreme concentration, but, with a healthy instinct, spent a

great deal of time in the gymnasium. It was a delight to her to be

able to swim in the winter-time, she organized the first water-polo

team among the co-eds, and she began to learn fencing from the

Commandant of the University Battalion. He had been a crack with the

foils at West Point, and never ceased trying to arouse an interest in

what seemed to him the only rational form of exercise; but fencing at

that time had no intercollegiate vogue, and of all the young men and

women at the State University, Sylvia alone took up his standing offer

of free instruction to any one who cared to give the time to learn;

and even Sylvia took up fencing primarily because it promised to give

her one more occupation, left her less time for loneliness. As it

turned out, however, these lessons proved far more to her than a

temporary anodyne: they brought her a positive pleasure. She delighted

the dumpy little captain with her aptness, and he took the greatest

pains in his instruction. Before the end of her Freshman year she

twice succeeded in getting through his guard and landing a thrust on

his well-rounded figure; and though to keep down her conceit he told

her that he must be losing, along with his slenderness, some of his

youthful agility, he confessed to his wife that teaching Miss Marshall

was the best fun he had had in years. The girl was as quick as a cat,

and had a natural-born fencer's wrist.

During the summer vacation she kept up her practice with her father,

who remembered enough of his early training in Paris to be more than a

match for her, and in the autumn of her Sophomore year, at the annual

Gymnasium exhibition, she gave with the Commandant a public bout with

the foils in which she notably distinguished herself. The astonished

and long-continued applause for this new feature of the exhibition

was a draught of nectar to her embittered young heart, but she

acknowledged it with not the smallest sign of pleasure, showing an

impassive face as she stood by the portly captain, slim and tall and

young and haughty, joining him in a sweeping, ceremonious salute with

her foil to the enthusiastic audience, and turning on her heel with

a brusqueness as military as his own, to march firmly with high-held

head beside him back to the ranks of blue-bloomered girls who stood

watching her.

The younger girls in Alpha Kappa and Sigma Beta were seizing this

opportunity to renew an old quarrel with their elders in the

fraternities and were acrimoniously hoping that the older ones

were quite satisfied with their loss of a brilliant member. These

accusations met with no ready answer from the somewhat crestfallen

elders, whose only defense was the entire unexpectedness of the way in

which Sylvia was distinguishing herself. Who ever heard before of a

girl doing anything remarkable in athletics? And anyhow, now in her

Sophomore year it was too late to do anything. A girl so notoriously

proud would certainly not consider a tardy invitation, and it would

not do to run the risk of being refused. It is not too much to say

that to have overheard a conversation like this would have changed the

course of Sylvia's development, but of such colloquies she could know

nothing, attributing to the fraternities, with all an outsider's

resentful overestimation of their importance, an arrogant solidarity

of opinion and firmness of purpose which they were very far from

possessing.

Professor and Mrs. Marshall and Lawrence and Judith, up in the front

row of chairs set for the audience about the running track, followed

this exploit of Sylvia's with naïvely open pride and sympathy,

applauding even more heartily than did their neighbors. Lawrence, as

usual, began to compose a poem, the first line of which ran,

"Splendid, she wields her gleaming sword--"

The most immediate result of this first public success of Sylvia's was

the call paid to Mrs. Marshall on the day following by Mrs. Draper,

the wife of the professor of Greek. Although there had never been any

formal social intercourse between the two ladies, they had for a good

many years met each other casually on the campus, and Mrs. Draper,

with the extremely graceful manner of assurance which was her especial

accomplishment, made it seem quite natural that she should call to

congratulate Sylvia's mother on the girl's skill and beauty as shown

in her prowess on the evening before. Mrs. Marshall prided herself on

her undeceived view of life, but she was as ready to hear praise of

her spirited and talented daughter as any other mother, and quite

melted to Mrs. Draper, although her observations from afar of the

other woman's career in La Chance had never before inclined her to

tolerance. So that when Mrs. Draper rose to go and asked casually if

Sylvia couldn't run in at five that afternoon to have a cup of tea at

her house with a very few of her favorites among the young people,

Mrs. Marshall, rather inflexible by nature and quite unused to the

subtleties of social intercourse, found herself unable to retreat

quickly enough from her reflected tone of cordiality to refuse the

invitation for her daughter.

When Sylvia came back to lunch she was vastly fluttered and pleased

by the invitation, and as she ate, her mind leaped from one possible

sartorial combination to another. Whatever she wore must be exactly

right to be worthy of such a hostess: for Mrs. Draper was a

conspicuous figure in faculty society. She had acquired, through

years of extremely intelligent manoeuvering, a reputation for choice

exclusiveness which was accepted even in the most venerable of the old

families of La Chance, those whose founders had built their log huts

there as long as fifty years before. In faculty circles she occupied

a unique position, envied and feared and admired and distrusted and

copiously gossiped about by the faculty ladies, who accepted with

eagerness any invitations to entertainments in her small, aesthetic,

and perfectly appointed house. She was envied even by women with

much more than her income:--for of course Professor Draper had an

independent income; it was hardly possible to be anybody unless one

belonged to that minority of the faculty families with resources

beyond the salary granted by the State.

Faculty ladies were, however, not favored with a great number of

invitations to Mrs. Draper's select and amusing teas and dinners,

as that lady had a great fancy for surrounding herself with youth,

meaning, for the most part, naturally enough, masculine youth. With

an unerring and practised eye she picked out from each class the few

young men who were to her purpose, and proclaiming with the most

express lack of reticence the forty-three years which she by no means

looked, she took these chosen few under a wing frankly maternal,

giving them, in the course of an intimate acquaintance with her and

the dim and twilight ways of her house and life, an enlightening

experience of a civilization which she herself said, with a humorous

appreciation of her own value, quite made over the young, unlicked

cubs. This statement of her influence on most of the young men drawn

into her circle was perhaps not much exaggerated.

From time to time she also admitted into this charmed circle a young

girl or two, though almost never one of the University girls, of whom

she made the jolliest possible fun. Her favorites were the daughters

of good La Chance families who at seventeen had "finished" at Miss

Home's Select School for Young Ladies, and who came out in society not

later than eighteen. She seemed able, as long as she cared to do it,

to exercise as irresistible a fascination over these youthful members

of her own sex as over the older masculine undergraduates of the

University. They copied their friend's hats and neckwear and shoes and

her mannerisms of speech, were miserable if she neglected them for a

day, furiously jealous of each other, and raised to the seventh

heaven by attention from her. Just at present the only girl admitted

frequently to Mrs. Draper's intimacy was Eleanor Hubert.

On the day following the Gymnasium exhibition, when Sylvia, promptly

at five, entered the picturesque vine-covered Draper house, she

found it occupied by none of the usual habitués of the place. The

white-capped, black-garbed maid who opened the door to the girl held

aside for her a pair of heavy brown-velvet portières which veiled

the entrance to the drawing-room. The utter silence of this servitor

seemed portentous and inhuman to the young guest, unused to the polite

convention that servants cast no shadow and do not exist save when

serving their superiors.

She found herself in a room as unlike any she had ever seen as though

she had stepped into a new planet. The light here was as yellow

as gold, and came from a great many candles which, in sconces and

candelabra, stood about the room, their oblong yellow flame as steady

in the breathless quiet of the air as though they burned in a vault

underground. There was not a book in the room, except one in a yellow

cover lying beside a box of candy on the mantelpiece, but every ledge,

table, projection, or shelf was covered with small, queerly fashioned,

dully gleaming objects of ivory, or silver, or brass, or carved wood,

or porcelain.

The mistress of the room now came in. She was in a loose garment of

smoke-brown chiffon, held in place occasionally about her luxuriously

rounded figure by a heavy cord of brown silk. She advanced to Sylvia

with both hands outstretched, and took the girl's slim, rather hard

young fingers in the softest of melting palms. "Aren't you a _dear_,

to be so exactly on time!" she exclaimed.

Sylvia was a little surprised. She had thought it axiomatic that

people kept their appointments promptly. "Oh, I'm always on time," she

answered simply.

Mrs. Draper laughed and pulled her down on the sofa. "You clear-eyed

young Diana, you won't allow me even an instant's illusion that you

were eager to come to see _me_!"

"Oh yes, I _was_!" said Sylvia hastily, fearing that she might have

said something rude.

Mrs. Draper laughed again and gave the hand she still held a squeeze.

"You're adorable, that's what _you_ are!" She exploded this pointblank

charge in Sylvia's face with nonchalant ease, and went on with

another. "Jerry Fiske is quite right about you. I suppose you know

that you're here today so that Jerry can meet you."

As there was obviously not the faintest possibility of Sylvia's having

heard this save through her present informant, she could only

look what she felt, very much at a loss, and rather blank, with a

heightened color. Mrs. Draper eyed her with an intentness at variance

with the lightness of her tone, as she continued: "I do think Jerry'd

have burned up in one flare, like a torch, if he couldn't have seen

you at once! After you'd fenced and disappeared again into that stupid

crowd of graceless girls, he kept track of you every minute with his

opera-glasses, and kept saying: 'She's a goddess! Good Lord! how she

carries herself!' It was rather hard on poor Eleanor right there

beside him, but I don't blame him. Eleanor's a sweet thing, but she'd

be sugar and water compared to champagne if she stood up by you."

For a good many months Sylvia had been craving praise with a starved

appetite, and although she found this downpour of it rather drenching,

she could not sufficiently collect herself to make the conventional

decent pretense that it was unwelcome. She flushed deeply and looked

at her hostess with dazzled eyes. Mrs. Draper affected to see in her

silence a blankness as to the subject of the talk, and interrupted

the flow of personalities to cry out, with a pretense of horror, "You

don't mean to say you don't know who Jerry Fiske _is_!"

Sylvia, as unused as her mother to conversational traps, fell into

this one with an eager promptness. "Oh yes, indeed; I know him

by sight very well," she said and stopped, flushing again at a

significant laugh from Mrs. Draper. "I mean," she went on

with dignity, "that Mr. Fiske has always been so prominent in

college--football and all, you know--and his father being one of our

State Senators so long--I suppose everybody on the campus knows him by

sight." Mrs. Draper patted the girl's shoulder propitiatingly. "Yes,

yes, of course," she assented. She added, "He's ever so good-looking,

don't you think--like a great Viking with his yellow hair and bright

blue eyes?"

"I never noticed his eyes," said Sylvia stiffly, suspicious of

ridicule in the air.

"Well, you'll have a chance to this afternoon," answered her hostess,

"for he's the only other person who's to be admitted to the house. I

had a great time excusing myself to Eleanor--she was coming to take me

out driving--but of course it wouldn't do--for her own sake--the poor

darling--to have her here today!"

Sylvia thought she could not have rightly understood the significance

of this speech, and looked uncomfortable. Mrs. Draper said: "Oh, you

needn't mind cutting Eleanor out--she's only a dear baby who can't

feel anything very deeply. It's Mamma Hubert who's so mad about

catching Jerry. Since she's heard he's to have the Fiske estate at

Mercerton as soon as he graduates from Law School, she's like a wild

creature! If Eleanor weren't the most unconscious little bait that

ever hung on a hook Jerry'd have turned away in disgust long ago. He

may not be so very acute, but Mamma Hubert and her manoeuvers are not

millstones for seeing through!"

The doorbell rang, one long and one short tap. "That's Jerry's ring,"

said Mrs. Draper composedly, as though she had been speaking of her

husband. In an instant the heavy portières were flung back by a

vigorous arm, and a very tall, broad-shouldered, clean-shaven young

man, in a well-tailored brown suit, stepped in. He accosted his

hostess with easy assurance, but went through his introduction to

Sylvia in a rather awkward silence.

"Now we'll have tea," said Mrs. Draper at once, pressing a button. In

a moment a maid brought in a tray shining with silver and porcelain,

set it down on the table in front of Mrs. Draper, and then wheeled in

a little circular table with shelves, a glorified edition in gleaming

mahogany of the homely, white-painted wheeled-tray of Sylvia's home.

On the shelves was a large assortment of delicate, small cakes and

paper-thin sandwiches. While she poured out the amber-colored tea into

the translucent cups, Mrs. Draper kept up with the new-comer a lively

monologue of personalities, in which Sylvia, for very ignorance of the

people involved, could take no part. She sat silent, watching with

concentration the two people before her, the singularly handsome man,

certainly the handsomest man she had ever seen, and the far from

handsome but singularly alluring woman who faced him, making such a

display of her two good points, her rich figure and her fine dark

eyes, that for an instant the rest of her person seemed non-existent.

"How do you like your tea, dear?" The mistress of the house brought

her stranded guest back into the current of talk with this well-worn

hook.

"Oh, it doesn't make any difference," said Sylvia, who, as it

happened, did not like the taste of tea.

"You really ought to have it nectar; with whipped ambrosia on top."

Mrs. Draper troweled this statement on with a dashing smear, saving

Sylvia from being forced to answer, by adding lightly to the man, "Is

ambrosia anything that will whip, do you suppose?"

"Never heard of it before," he answered, breaking his silence with a

carefree absence of shame at his confession of ignorance. "Sounds

like one of those labels on a soda-water fountain that nobody ever

samples."

Mrs. Draper made a humorously exaggerated gesture of despair and

turned to Sylvia. "Well, it's just as well, my dear, that you should

know at the very beginning what a perfect monster of illiteracy he is!

You needn't expect anything from him but his stupid good-looks, and

money and fascination. Otherwise he's a Cave-Man for ignorance. You

must take him in hand!" She turned back to the man. "Sylvia, you know,

is as clever as she is beautiful. She had the highest rank but three

in her class last year."

Sylvia was overcome with astonishment by this knowledge of a fact

which had seemed to make no impression on the world of the year

before. "Why, how could you know that!" she cried.

Mrs. Draper laughed. "Just hear her!" she appealed to the young man.

Her method of promoting the acquaintance of the two young people

seemed to consist in talking to each of the other. "Just hear her! She

converses as she fences--one bright flash, and you're skewered against

the wall--no parryings possible!" She faced Sylvia again: "Why, my

dear, in answer to your rapier-like question, I must simply confess

that this morning, being much struck with Jerry's being struck with

you, I went over to the registrar's office and looked you up. I know

that you passed supremely well in mathematics and French (what a

quaint combination!), very well indeed in history and chemistry, and

moderately in botany. What's the matter with botany? I have always

found Professor Cross a very obliging little man."

"He doesn't make me see any sense to botany," explained Sylvia, taking

the question seriously. "I don't seem to get hold of any real reason

for studying it at all. What difference does it make if a bush is a

hawthorn or not?--and anyhow, I know it's a hawthorn without studying

botany."

The young man spoke for himself now, with a keen relish for Sylvia's

words. He faced her for the first time. "Now you're _shouting_, Miss

Marshall!" he said. "That's the most sensible thing I ever heard said.

That's just what I always felt about the whole B.A. course, anyhow!

What's the diff? Who cares whether Charlemagne lived in six hundred or

sixteen hundred? It all happened before we were born. What's it all

_to_ us?"

Sylvia looked squarely at him, a little startled at his directly

addressing her, not hearing a word of what he said in the vividness of

her first-hand impression of his personality, his brilliant blue eyes,

his full, very red lips, his boldly handsome face and carriage, his

air of confidence. In spite of his verbal agreement with her opinion,

his look crossed hers dashingly, like a challenge, a novelty in the

amicable harmony which had been the tradition of her life. She felt

that tradition to be not without its monotony, and her young blood

warmed. She gazed back at him silently, wonderingly, frankly.

With her radiantly sensuous youth in the first splendor of its

opening, with this frank, direct look, she had a moment of brilliance

to make the eyes of age shade themselves as against a dazzling

brightness. The eyes of the man opposite her were not those of age.

They rested on her, roused, kindling to heat. His head went up like a

stag's. She felt a momentary hot throb of excitement, as though

her body were one great fiddle-string, twanging under a vigorously

plucking thumb. It was thrilling, it was startling, it was not

altogether pleasant. The corners of her sensitive mouth twitched

uncertainly.

Mrs. Draper, observing from under her down-drooped lids this silent

passage between the two, murmured amusedly to herself, "Ah, now you're

shouting, my children!"

CHAPTER XVI

PLAYING WITH MATCHES

There was much that was acrid about the sweetness of triumph which the

next months brought Sylvia. The sudden change in her life had not come

until there was an accumulation of bitterness in her heart the venting

of which was the strongest emotion of that period of strong emotions.

As she drove about the campus, perched on the high seat of the

red-wheeled dog-cart, her lovely face looked down with none of Eleanor

Hubert's gentleness into the envying eyes of the other girls. A high

color burned in her cheeks, and her bright eyes were not soft. She

looked continually excited.

At home she was hard to live with, quick to take offense at the

least breath of the adverse criticism which she felt, unspoken and

forbearing but thick in the air about her. She neglected her music,

she neglected her studies; she spent long hours of feverish toil over

Aunt Victoria's chiffons and silks. There was need for many toilets

now, for the incessantly recurring social events to which she went

with young Fiske, chaperoned by Mrs. Draper, who had for her old rival

and enemy, Mrs. Hubert, the most mocking of friendly smiles, as she

entered a ballroom, the acknowledged sponsor of the brilliant young

sensation of the college season.

At these dances Sylvia had the grim satisfaction, not infrequently the

experience of intelligent young ladies, of being surrounded by crowds

of admiring young men, for whom she had no admiration, the barren

sterility of whose conversation filled her with astonishment, even

in her fever of exultation. She knew the delights of frequently

"splitting" her dances so that there might be enough to go around. She

was plunged headlong into the torrent of excitement which is the life

of a social favorite at a large State University, that breathless

whirl of one engagement after another for every evening and for most

of the days, which is one of the oddest developments of the academic

life as planned and provided for by the pioneer fathers of those great

Western commonwealths; and she savored every moment of it, for during

every moment she drank deep at the bitter fountain of personal

vindication. She went to all the affairs which had ignored her

the year before, to all the dances given by the "swell men's

fraternities," to the Sophomore hop, to the "Football Dance," at the

end of the season, to the big reception given to the Freshman class by

the Seniors. And in addition to these evening affairs, she appeared

beside Jerry Fiske at every football game, at the first Glee Club

Concert, at the outdoor play given by the Literary Societies, and very

frequently at the weekly receptions to the students tendered by the

ladies of the faculty.

These affairs were always spoken of by the faculty as an attempt to

create a homogeneous social atmosphere on the campus; but this attempt

had ended, as such efforts usually do, in adding to the bewildering

plethora of social life of those students who already had too much,

and in being an added sting to the solitude and ostracism of those who

had none. Naturally enough, the ladies of the faculty who took most

interest in these afternoon functions were the ones who cared most for

society life, and there was only too obvious a contrast between their

manner of kindly, vague, condescending interest shown to one of the

"rough-neck" students, and the easy familiarity shown to one of those

socially "possible." The "rough-necks" seldom sought out more than

once the prettily decorated tables spread every Friday afternoon

in the Faculty Room, off the reading-room of the Library. Sylvia

especially had, on the only occasion when she had ventured into

this charming scene, suffered too intensely from the difference of

treatment accorded her and that given Eleanor Hubert to feel anything

but angry resentment. After that experience, she had passed along the

halls with the other outsiders, books in hand, her head held proudly

high, and never turned even to glance in at the gleaming tables,

the lighted candles, and the little groups of easily self-confident

fraternity men and girls laughing and talking over their teacups, and

revenging vicariously the rest of the ignored student-body by the

calm young insolence with which they in their turn ignored their

presumptive hostesses, the faculty ladies.

Mrs. Draper changed all this for Sylvia with a wave of her wand. She

took the greatest pains to introduce her protégée into this phase of

the social life of the University. On these occasions, as beautiful

and as over-dressed as any girl in the room, with Jermain Fiske in

obvious attendance; with the exclusive Mrs. Draper setting in a rich

frame of commentary any remark she happened to make (Sylvia was

acquiring a reputation for great wit); with Eleanor Hubert, eclipsed,

sitting in a corner, quite deserted save for a funny countrified freak

assistant in chemistry; with all the "swellest frat men" in college

rushing to get her tea and sandwiches; with Mrs. Hubert plunged

obviously into acute unhappiness, Sylvia knew as ugly moments of mean

satisfaction as often fall to the lot even of very pretty young women.

At home she knew no moments of satisfaction of any variety, although

there was no disapprobation expressed by any one, except in one or two

characteristically recondite comments by Professor Kennedy, who was

taking a rather uneasy triumph in the proof of an old theory of his as

to Sylvia's character. One afternoon, at a football game, he came up

to her on the grandstand, shook hands with Jermain Fiske, whom he had

flunked innumerable times in algebra, and remarked in his most acid

voice that he wished to congratulate the young man on being the

perfect specimen of the dolichocephalic blond whose arrival in

Sylvia's life he had predicted years before. Sylvia, belligerently

aware of the attitude of her home world, and ready to resent

criticism, took the liveliest offense at this obscure comment, which

she perfectly understood. She flushed indignantly and glared in

silence with the eyes of an angry young goddess.

Young Fiske, who found the remark, or any other made by a college

prof, quite as unintelligible as it was unimportant, laughed with

careless impudence in the old man's face; and Mrs. Draper, for all her

keenness, could make nothing of it. It sounded, however, so quite

like a dictum which she herself would have liked to make, that she

cross-questioned Sylvia afterwards as to its meaning; but Sylvia lied

fluently, asserting that it was just some of Professor Kennedy's

mathematical gibberish which had no meaning.

In the growing acquaintance of Sylvia and Jermain, Mrs. Draper acted

assiduously as chaperon, a refinement of sophisticated society which

was, as a rule, but vaguely observed in the chaotic flux of State

University social life, and she so managed affairs that they were

seldom together alone. For obvious reasons Sylvia preferred to see the

young man elsewhere than in her own home, where indeed he made almost

no appearance, beyond standing at the door of an evening, very

handsome and distinguished in his evening dress, waiting for Sylvia to

put on her wraps and go out with him to the carriage where Mrs. Draper

sat expectant, furred and velvet-wrapped. This discreet manager made

no objection to Sylvia's driving about the campus in the daytime

alone with Jermain, but to his proposal to drive the girl out to the

country-club for dinner one evening she added blandly the imperious

proviso that she be of the party; and she discouraged with firmness

any projects for solitary walks together through the woods near

the campus, although this was a recognized form of co-educational

amusement at that institution of learning.

For all her air of free-and-easy equality with the young man, she had

at times a certain blighting glance which, turned on him suddenly,

always brought him to an agreement with her opinion, an agreement

which might obviously ring but verbal on his tongue, but which was

nevertheless the acknowledged basis of action. As for Sylvia, she

acquiesced, with an eagerness which she did not try to understand, in

any arrangement which precluded tête-à-têtes with Jerry.

She did not, as a matter of fact, try to understand anything of what

was happening to her. She was by no means sure that she liked it, but

was stiffened into a stubborn resistance to any doubts by the unvoiced

objection to it all at home. With an instinct against disproportion,

perverse perhaps in this case, but with a germ of soundness in it,

she felt confusedly and resentfully that since her home circle was so

patently narrow and exaggerated in its standard of personality, she

would just have to even things up by being a little less fastidious

than was her instinct; and on the one or two occasions when a sudden

sight of Jerry sent through her a strange, unpleasant stir of all her

flesh, she crushed the feeling out of sight under her determination to

assert her own judgment and standards against those which had (she now

felt) so tyrannically influenced her childhood. But for the most

part she did little thinking, shaking as loudly as possible the

reverberating rattle of physical excitement.

Thus everything progressed smoothly under Mrs. Draper's management.

The young couple met each other usually in the rather close air of her

candle-lighted living-room, drinking a great deal of tea, consuming

large numbers of delicate, strangely compounded sandwiches,

and listening to an endless flow of somewhat startlingly frank

personalities from the magnetic mistress of the house. Sylvia and

Jermain did not talk much on these occasions. They listened with

edification to the racy remarks of their hostess, voicing that

theoretical "broadness" of opinion as to the conduct of life which,

quite as much as the perfume which she always used, was a specialty of

her provocative personality; they spoke now and then, to be sure, as

she drew them into conversation, but their real intercourse was almost

altogether silent. They eyed each other across the table, breathing

quickly, and flushing or paling if their hands chanced to touch in the

services of the tea-table. Once the young man came in earlier than

usual and found Sylvia alone for a moment in the silent, glowing,

perfumed room. He took her hand, apparently for the ordinary handclasp

of greeting, but with a surge of his blood retained it, pressing it

so fiercely that his ring cut into her finger, causing a tiny drop of

bright red to show on the youthful smoothness of her skin. At this

living ruby they both stared fixedly for an instant; then Mrs. Draper

came hastily into the room, saying chidingly, "Come, come, children!"

and looking with displeasure at the man's darkly flushed face. Sylvia

was paler than usual for the rest of the afternoon, and could not

swallow a mouthful of the appetizing food, which as a rule she

devoured with the frank satisfaction of a hungry child. She sat,

rather white, not talking much, avoiding Jerry's eyes for no reason

that she could analyze, and, in the pauses of the conversation, could

hear the blood singing loudly in her ears.

Yet, although she felt the oddest relief, as after one more escape,

at the end of each of these afternoons with her new acquaintances,

afternoons in which the three seemed perpetually gliding down a

steep incline and as perpetually being arrested on the brink of some

unexplained plunge, she found that their atmosphere had spoiled

entirely her relish for the atmosphere of her home. The home

supper-table seemed to her singularly flat and distasteful with its

commonplace fare--hot chocolate and creamed potatoes and apple sauce,

and its brisk, impersonal talk of socialism, and politics, and small

home events, and music. As it happened, the quartet had the lack of

intuition to play a great deal of Haydn that autumn, and to Sylvia

the cheerful, obvious tap-tap-tap of the hearty old master seemed to

typify the bald, unsubtle obtuseness of the home attitude towards

life. She herself took to playing the less difficult of the Chopin

nocturnes with a languorous over-accentuation of their softness which

she was careful to keep from the ears of old Reinhardt. But one

evening he came in, unheard, listened to her performance of the B-flat

minor nocturne with a frown, and pulled her away from the piano before

she had finished. "Not true music, not true love, not true anydings!"

he said, speaking however with an unexpected gentleness, and patting

her on the shoulder with a dirty old hand. "Listen!" He clapped his

fiddle under his chin and played the air of the andante from the

Kreutzer Sonata with so singing and heavenly a tone that Sylvia, as

helpless an instrument in his skilful hands as the violin itself, felt

the nervous tears stinging her eyelids.

This did not prevent her making a long détour the next day to avoid

meeting the uncomely old musician on the street and being obliged to

recognize him publicly. She lived in perpetual dread of being thus

forced, when in the company of Mrs. Draper or Jermain, to acknowledge

her connection with him, or with Cousin Parnelia, or with any of

the eccentrics who frequented her parents' home, and whom it was

physically impossible to imagine drinking tea at Mrs. Draper's table.

It was beside this same table that she met, one day in early December,

Jermain Fiske's distinguished father. He explained that he was in La

Chance for a day on his way from Washington to Mercerton, where the

Fiske family was collecting for its annual Christmas house-party, and

had dropped in on Mrs. Draper quite unexpectedly. He was, he added,

delighted that it happened to be a day when he could meet the lovely

Miss Marshall of whom (with a heavy accent of jocose significance)

he had heard so much. Sylvia was a little confused by the pointed

attentions of this gallant old warrior, oddly in contrast with the

manner of other elderly men she knew; but she thought him very

handsome, with his sweeping white mustache, his bright blue eyes,

so like his son's, and she was much impressed with his frock-coat,

fitting snugly around his well-knit, erect figure, and with the

silk hat which she noticed on the table in the hall as she went in.

Frock-coats and silk hats were objects seldom encountered in La

Chance, except in illustrations to magazine-stories, or in photographs

of life in New York or Washington. But of course, she reflected,

Colonel Fiske lived most of his life in Washington, about the

cosmopolitan delights of which he talked most eloquently to the two

ladies.

As was inevitable, Sylvia also met Eleanor Hubert more or less at Mrs.

Draper's. Sylvia had been rendered acutely self-conscious in that

direction by Mrs. Draper's very open comments on her rôle in the life

of the other girl, and at first had been so smitten by embarrassment

as positively to be awkward, a rare event in her life: but she was

soon set at ease by the other girl's gentle friendliness, so simple

and sincere that even Sylvia's suspicious vanity could not feel it

to be condescension. Eleanor's sweet eyes shone so kindly on her

successful rival, and she showed so frank and unenvious an

admiration of Sylvia's wit and learning, displayed perhaps a trifle

ostentatiously by that young lady in the ensuing conversation with

Mrs. Draper, that Sylvia had a fresh, healing impulse of shame for her

own recently acquired attitude of triumphing hostility towards the

world.

At the same time she felt a surprised contempt for the other girl's

ignorance and almost illiteracy. Whatever else Eleanor had learned in

the exclusive and expensive girls' school in New York, she had not

learned to hold her own in a conversation on the most ordinary topics;

and as for Mrs. Draper's highly spiced comments on life and folk, her

young friend made not the slightest attempt to cope with them or even

to understand them. The alluring mistress of the house might talk of

sex-antagonism and the hatefulness of the puritanical elements of

American life as much as she pleased. It all passed over the head of

the lovely, fair girl, sipping her tea and raising her candid eyes

to meet with a trustful smile, perhaps a little blank, the glance of

whomever chanced to be looking at her. It was significant that she had

the same smile for each of the three very dissimilar persons who sat

about the tea-table. Of all the circle into which Sylvia's changed

life had plunged her, Eleanor, the type of the conventional society

bud, was, oddly enough, the only one she cared to talk about in her

own extremely unconventional home. But even on this topic she felt

herself bruised and jarred by the severity, the unpicturesque

austerity of the home standards. As she was trying to give her mother

some idea of Eleanor's character, she quoted one day a remark of Mrs.

Draper's, to the effect that "Eleanor no more knows the meaning of her

beauty than a rose the meaning of its perfume." Mrs. Marshall kept

a forbidding silence for a moment and then said: "I don't take much

stock in that sort of unconsciousness. Eleanor isn't a rose, she isn't

even a child. She's a woman. The sooner girls learn that distinction,

the better off they'll be, and the fewer chances they'll run of being

horribly misunderstood."

Sylvia felt very angry with her mother for this unsympathetic

treatment of a pretty phrase, and thought with resentment that it was

not _her_ fault if she were becoming more and more alienated from her

family.

This was a feeling adroitly fostered by Mrs. Draper, who, in her

endless talks with Sylvia and Jermain about themselves, had hit upon

an expression and a turn of phrase which was to have more influence on

Sylvia's development than its brevity seemed to warrant. She had, one

day, called Sylvia a little Athenian, growing up, by the oddest of

mistakes, in Sparta. Sylvia, who was in the Pater-reading stage of

development, caught at her friend's phrase as at the longed-for key to

her situation. It explained everything. It made everything appear in

the light she wished for. Above all it enabled her to clarify her

attitude towards her home. Now she understood. One did not scorn

Sparta. One respected it, it was a noble influence in life; but for an

Athenian, for whom amenity and beauty and suavity were as essential as

food, Sparta was death. As was natural to her age and temperament, she

sucked a vast amount of pleasure out of this pitying analysis of her

subtle, complicated needs and the bare crudity of her surroundings.

She now read Pater more assiduously than ever, always carrying a

volume about with her text-books, and feeding on this delicate fare

in such unlikely and dissimilar places as on the trolley-cars, in the

kitchen, in the intervals of preparing a meal, or in Mrs. Draper's

living-room, waiting for the problematical entrance of that erratic

luminary.

There was none of Mrs. Draper's habits of life which made more of an

impression on Sylvia's imagination than her custom of disregarding

engagements and appointments, of coming and going, appearing and

disappearing quite as she pleased. To the daughter of a scrupulously

exact family, which regarded tardiness as a fault, and breaking an

appointment as a crime, this high-handed flexibility in dealing with

time and bonds and promises had an exciting quality of freedom.

On a good many occasions these periods of waiting chanced to be shared

by Eleanor Hubert, for whom, after the first two or three encounters,

Sylvia came to have a rather condescending sympathy, singularly in

contrast to the uneasy envy with which she had regarded her only a

few months before. However, as regards dress, Eleanor was still a

phenomenon of the greatest interest, and Sylvia never saw her without

getting an idea or two, although it was plain to any one who knew

Eleanor that this mastery of the technique of modern American costume

was no achievement of her own, that she was merely the lovely and

plastic material molded, perhaps to slightly over-complicated effects,

by her mother's hands.

From that absent but pervasive personality Sylvia took one suggestion

after another. For instance, a very brief association with Eleanor

caused her to relegate to the scrapheap of the "common" the ready-made

white ruching for neck and sleeves which she had always before taken

for granted. Eleanor's slim neck and smooth wrists were always set

off by a few folds of the finest white chiffon, laid with dexterous

carelessness, and always so exquisitely fresh that they were obviously

renewed by a skilful hand after only a few hours' wearing. The first

time she saw Eleanor, Sylvia noticed this detail with appreciation,

and immediately struggled to reproduce it in her own costume. Like

other feats of the lesser arts this perfect trifle turned out to

depend upon the use of the lightest and most adroit touch. None of the

chiffon which came in Aunt Victoria's boxes would do. It must be fresh

from the shop-counter, ruinous as this was to Sylvia's very modest

allowance for dress. Even then she spoiled many a yard of the filmy,

unmanageable stuff before she could catch the spirit of those

apparently careless folds, so loosely disposed and yet never

displaced. It was a phenomenon over which a philosopher might

well have pondered, this spectacle of Sylvia's keen brain and

well-developed will-power equally concerned with the problems of

chemistry and philosophy and history, and with the problem of

chiffon folds. She herself was aware of no incongruity, indeed of no

difference, between the two sorts of efforts.

Many other matters of Eleanor's attire proved as fruitful of

suggestion as this, although Aunt Victoria's well-remembered dictum

about the "kitchen-maid's pin-cushion" was a guiding finger-board

which warned Sylvia against the multiplication of detail, even

desirable detail.

Mrs. Hubert had evidently studied deeply the sources of distinction

in modern dress, and had grasped with philosophic thoroughness the

underlying principle of the art, which is to show effects obviously

costly, but the cost of which is due less to mere brute cash than to

prodigally expended effort. Eleanor never wore a costume which did not

show the copious exercise by some alert-minded human being, presumably

with an immortal soul, of the priceless qualities of invention,

creative thought, trained attention, and prodigious industry. Mrs.

Hubert's unchallengeable slogan was that dress should be an expression

of individuality, and by dint of utilizing all the details of the

attire of herself and of her two daughters, down to the last ruffle

and buttonhole, she found this medium quite sufficient to express the

whole of her own individuality, the conspicuous force of which was

readily conceded by any observer of the lady's life.

As for Eleanor's own individuality, any one in search of that very

unobtrusive quality would have found it more in the expression of her

eyes and in the childlike lines of her lips than in her toilets. It

is possible that Mrs. Hubert might have regarded it as an unkind

visitation of Providence that the results of her lifetime of effort

in an important art should have been of such slight interest to

her daughter, and should have served, during the autumn under

consideration, chiefly as hints and suggestions for her daughter's

successful rival.

That she was Eleanor's successful rival, Sylvia had Mrs. Draper's more

than outspoken word. That lady openly gloried in the impending defeat

of Mrs. Hubert's machinations to secure the Fiske money and position

for Eleanor; although she admitted that a man like Jerry had his two

opposing sides, and that he was quite capable of being attracted by

two such contrasting types as Sylvia and Eleanor. She informed Sylvia

indeed that the present wife of Colonel Fiske--his third, by the

way--had evidently been in her youth a girl of Eleanor's temperament.

It was more than apparent, however, that in the case of the son,

Sylvia's "type" was in the ascendent; but it must be set down to

Sylvia's credit that the circumstance of successful competition gave

her no satisfaction. She often heartily wished Eleanor out of it. She

could never meet the candid sweetness of the other's eyes without a

qualm of discomfort, and she suffered acutely under Eleanor's gentle

amiability.

Once or twice when Mrs. Draper was too outrageously late at an

appointment for tea, the two girls gave her up, and leaving the house,

walked side by side back across the campus, Sylvia quite aware of the

wondering surmise which followed their appearance together. On these

occasions, Eleanor talked with more freedom than in Mrs. Draper's

presence, always in the quietest, simplest way, of small events and

quite uninteresting minor matters in her life, or the life of the

various household pets, of which she seemed extremely fond. Sylvia

could not understand why, when she bade her good-bye at the driveway

leading into the Hubert house, she should feel anything but a rather

contemptuous amusement for the other's insignificance, but the odd

fact was that her heart swelled with inexplicable warmth. Once she

yielded to this foolish impulse, and felt a quivering sense of

pleasure at the sudden startled responsiveness with which Eleanor

returned a kiss, clinging to her as though she were an older, stronger

sister.

One dark late afternoon in early December, Sylvia waited alone in the

candle-lighted shrine, neither Eleanor nor her hostess appearing.

After five o'clock she started home alone along the heavily shaded

paths of the campus, as dim as caves in the interval before the big,

winking sputtering arc-lights were flashed on. She walked swiftly and

lightly as was her well-trained habit, and before she knew it, was

close upon a couple sauntering in very close proximity. With the

surety of long practice Sylvia instantly diagnosed them as a college

couple indulging in what was known euphemistically as "campus work,"

and prepared to pass them with the slight effect of scorn for

philanderings which she always managed to throw into her high-held

head and squarely swinging shoulders. But as she came up closer,

walking noiselessly in the dusk, she recognized an eccentric,

flame-colored plume just visible in the dim light, hanging down

from the girl's hat--and stopped short, filled with a rush of very

complicated feelings. The only flame-colored plume in La Chance was

owned and worn by Eleanor Hubert, and if she were out sauntering

amorously in the twilight, with whom could she be but Jerry

Fiske,--and that meant--Sylvia's pangs of conscience about supplanting

Eleanor were swept away by a flood of anger as at a defeat. She could

not make out the girl's companion, beyond the fact that he was tall

and wore a long, loose overcoat. Jerry was tall and wore a long, loose

overcoat. Sylvia walked on, slowly now, thoroughly aroused, quite

unaware of the inconsistency of her mental attitude. She felt a rising

tide of heat. She had, she told herself, half a notion to step forward

and announce her presence to the couple, whose pace as the Hubert

house was approached became slower and slower.

But then, as they stood for a moment at the entrance of the Hubert

driveway, the arc-lights blazed up all over the campus at once and she

saw two things: one was that Eleanor was walking very close to her

companion, with her arm through his, and her little gloved fingers

covered by his hand, and next that he was not Jerry Fiske at all,

but the queer, countrified "freak" assistant in chemistry with

whom Eleanor, since Jerry's defection, had more or less masked her

abandonment.

At the same moment the two started guiltily apart, and Sylvia halted,

thinking they had discovered her. But it was Mrs. Hubert whom they had

seen, advancing from the other direction, and making no pretense that

she was not in search of an absent daughter. She bore down upon the

couple, murmured a very brief greeting to the man, accompanied by a

faint inclination of her well-hatted head, drew Eleanor's unresisting

hand inside her arm, and walked her briskly into the house.

CHAPTER XVII

MRS. MARSHALL STICKS TO HER PRINCIPLES

During the autumn and early winter it not only happened unfortunately

that the quartet played altogether too much Haydn, but that Sylvia's

father, contrary to his usual custom, was away from home a great deal.

The State University had arrived at that stage of its career when, if

its rapidly increasing needs and demands for State money were to be

recognized by the Legislature, it must knit itself more closely to

the rest of the State system of education, have a more intimate

affiliation with the widely scattered public high schools, and weld

into some sort of homegeneity their extremely various standards of

scholarship. This was a delicate undertaking, calling for much tact

and an accurate knowledge of conditions in the State, especially in

the rural districts. Professor Marshall's twenty years of popularity

with the more serious element of the State University students (that

popularity which meant so little to Sylvia, and which she so ignored)

had given him a large acquaintance among the class which it was

necessary to reach. He knew the men who at the University had been the

digs, and jays, and grinds, and who were now the prosperous

farmers, the bankers, the school-trustees, the leading men in their

communities; and his geniality, vivacity, and knack for informal

public speaking made him eminently fitted to represent the University

in the somewhat thankless task of coaxing and coercing backward

communities to expend the necessary money and effort to bring their

schools up to the State University standard.

If all this had happened a few years sooner, he undoubtedly would have

taken Sylvia with him on many of these journeys into remote corners

of the State, but Sylvia had her class-work to attend to, and the

Professor shared to the fullest extent the academic prejudice against

parents who broke in upon the course of their children's regular

instruction by lawless and casual junketings. Instead, it was Judith

who frequently accompanied him, Judith who was now undergoing that

home-preparation for the University through which Sylvia had passed,

and who, since her father was her principal instructor, could carry

on her studies wherever he happened to be; as well as have the

stimulating experience of coming in contact with a wide variety of

people and conditions. It is possible that Professor Marshall's

sociable nature not only shrank from the solitude which his wife

would have endured with cheerfulness, but that he also wished to take

advantage of this opportunity to come in closer touch with his second

daughter, for whose self-contained and occasionally insensitive nature

he had never felt the instinctive understanding he had for Sylvia's

moods. It is certain that the result was a better feeling between the

two than had existed before. During the long hours of jolting over

branch railroads back to remote settlements, or waiting at cheerless

junctions for delayed trains, or gaily eating impossible meals at

extraordinary country hotels, the ruddy, vigorous father, now growing

both gray and stout, and the tall, slender, darkly handsome girl of

fifteen, were cultivating more things than history and mathematics and

English literature. The most genuine feeling of comradeship sprang up

between the two dissimilar natures, a feeling so strong and so warm

that Sylvia, in addition to her other emotional complications, felt

occasionally a faint pricking of jealousy at seeing her primacy with

her father usurped.

A further factor in her temporary feeling of alienation from him was

the mere physical fact that she saw him much less frequently and that

he had nothing like his usual intimate knowledge of her comings and

goings. And finally, Lawrence, now a too rapidly growing and delicate

lad of eleven, had a series of bronchial colds which kept his mother

much occupied with his care. As far as her family was concerned,

Sylvia was thus left more alone than ever before, and although she had

been trained to too delicate and high a personal pride to attempt the

least concealment of her doings, it was not without relief that she

felt that her parents had but a very superficial knowledge of the

extent and depth to which she was becoming involved in her new

relations. She herself shut her eyes as much as possible to the rate

at which she was progressing towards a destination rapidly becoming

more and more imperiously visible; and consciously intoxicated herself

with the excitements and fatigues of her curiously double life of

intellectual effort in classes and her not very skilful handling of

the shining and very sharp-edged tools of flirtation.

But this ambiguous situation was suddenly clarified by the unexpected

call upon Mrs. Marshall, one day about the middle of December, of no

less a person than Mrs. Jermain Fiske, Sr., wife of the Colonel, and

Jerry's stepmother. Sylvia happened to be in her room when the shining

car drove up the country road before the Marshall house, stopped at

the gate in the osage-orange hedge, and discharged the tall, stooping,

handsomely dressed lady in rich furs, who came with a halting step up

the long path to the front door. Although Sylvia had never seen Mrs.

Fiske, Mrs. Draper's gift for satiric word-painting had made her

familiar with some items of her appearance, and it was with a rapidly

beating heart that she surmised the identity of the distinguished

caller. But although her quick intelligence perceived the probable

significance of the appearance, and although she felt a distinct shock

at the seriousness of having Jerry's stepmother call upon her, she was

diverted from these capital considerations of such vital importance to

her life by the trivial consideration which had, so frequently during

the progress of this affair, absorbed her mind to the exclusion of

everything else--the necessity for keeping up appearances. If the

Marshall tradition had made it easier for her to achieve this not very

elevated goal, she might have perceived more clearly where her rapid

feet were taking her. Just now, for example, there was nothing in her

consciousness but the embittered knowledge that there was no maid to

open the door when Mrs. Fiske should ring.

She was a keen-witted modern young woman of eighteen, with a

well-trained mind stored with innumerable facts of science, but it

must be admitted that at this moment she reverted with passionate

completeness to quite another type. She would have given--she would

have given a year of her life--one of her fingers--all her knowledge

of history--anything! if the Marshalls had possessed what she felt any

decently prosperous grocer's family ought to possess--a well-appointed

maid in the hall to open the door, take Mrs. Fiske's card, show her

into the living-room, and go decently and in order to summon the

mistress of the house. Instead she saw with envenomed foresight what

would happen. At the unusual sound of the bell, her mother, who was

playing dominoes with Lawrence in one of his convalescences, would

open the door with her apron still on, and her spectacles probably

pushed up, rustic fashion, on top of her head. And then their

illustrious visitor, used as of course she was to ceremony in social

matters, would not know whether this was the maid, or her hostess;

and Mrs. Marshall would frankly show her surprise at seeing a richly

dressed stranger on the doorstep, and would perhaps think she had made

a mistake in the house; and Mrs. Fiske would not know whether to hand

over the cards she held ready in her whitely gloved fingers--in the

interval between the clanging shut of the gate and the tinkle of the

doorbell Sylvia endured a sick reaction against life, as an altogether

hateful and horrid affair.

As a matter of fact, nothing of all this took place. When the bell

rang, her mother called out a tranquil request to her to go and open

the door, and so it was Sylvia herself who confronted the unexpected

visitor,--Sylvia a little flurried and breathless, but ushering the

guest into the house with her usual graceful charm of manner.

She had none of this as a moment later she went rather slowly upstairs

to summon her mother. It occurred to her that Mrs. Marshall might very

reasonably be at a loss as to the reason of this call. Indeed, she

herself felt a sinking alarm at the definiteness of the demonstration.

What could Mrs. Fiske have to say to Mrs. Marshall that would not lead

to some agitating crystallization of the dangerous solution which

during the past months Mrs. Marshall's daughter had been so

industriously stirring up? Mrs. Marshall showed the most open surprise

at the announcement, "Mrs. Colonel Fiske to see me? What in the

world--" she began, but after a glance at Sylvia's down-hung head and

twisting fingers, she stopped short, looking very grave, and rose to

go, with no more comments.

They went down the stairs in silence, tall mother and tall daughter,

both sobered, both frightened at what might be in the other's mind,

and at what might be before them, and entered the low-ceilinged

living-room together. A pale woman, apparently as apprehensive as

they, rose in a haste that had almost some element of apology in it,

and offered her hand to Mrs. Marshall. "I'm Mrs. Fiske," she said

hurriedly, in a low voice, "Jerry's stepmother, you know. I hope you

won't mind my coming to see you. What a perfectly lovely home you

have! I was wishing I could just stay and _stay_ in this room."

She spoke rapidly with the slightly incoherent haste of shy people

overcoming their weakness, and glanced alternately, with faded blue

eyes, at Sylvia and at her mother. In the end she remained standing,

looking earnestly into Mrs. Marshall's face. That lady now made a step

forward and again put out her hand with an impulsive gesture at which

Sylvia wondered. She herself had felt no attraction towards the thin,

sickly woman who had so little grace or security of manner. It was

constantly surprising Sylvia to discover how often people high in

social rank seemed to possess no qualifications for their position.

She always felt that she could have filled their places with vastly

more aplomb.

"I'm very glad to see you," said Mrs. Marshall in a friendly tone. "Do

sit down again. Sylvia, go and make us some tea, won't you? Mrs. Fiske

must be cold after driving out here from town."

When Sylvia came back ten minutes later, she found the guest saying,

"My youngest is only nine months old, and he is having _such_ a time

with his teeth."

"Oh!" thought Sylvia scornfully, pouring out the tea. "She's _that_

kind of a woman, is she?" With the astonishingly quick shifting of

viewpoint of the young, she no longer felt the least anxiety that her

home, or even that she herself should make a good impression on this

evidently quite negligible person. Her anguish about the ceremony of

opening the door seemed years behind her. She examined with care all

the minutiae of the handsome, unindividualized costume of black velvet

worn by their visitor, but turned an absent ear to her talk, which

brought out various facts relating to a numerous family of young

children. "I have six living," said Mrs. Fiske, not meeting Mrs.

Marshall's eyes as she spoke, and stirring her tea slowly, "I lost

four at birth."

Sylvia was indeed slightly interested to learn through another turn of

the conversation that the caller, who looked to her unsympathetic eyes

any age at all, had been married at eighteen, and that that was only

thirteen years ago. Sylvia thought she certainly looked older than

thirty-one, advanced though that age was.

The call passed with no noteworthy incidents beyond a growing wonder

in Sylvia's mind that the brilliant and dashing old Colonel, after

his other matrimonial experiences, should have picked out so dull and

colorless a wife. She was not even pretty, not at all pretty, in spite

of her delicate, regular features and tall figure. Her hair was dry

and thin, her eyes lusterless, her complexion thick, with brown

patches on it, and her conversation was of a domesticity unparalleled

in Sylvia's experience. She seemed oddly drawn to Mrs. Marshall,

although that lady was now looking rather graver than was her wont,

and talked to her of the overflowing Fiske nursery with a loquacity

which was evidently not her usual habit. Indeed, she said naïvely, as

she went away, that she had been much relieved to find Mrs. Marshall

so approachable. "One always thinks of University families as so

terribly learned, you know," she said, imputing to her hostess, with a

child's tactlessness, an absence of learning like her own. "I really

dreaded to come--I go out so little, you know--but Jerry and the

Colonel thought I ought, you know--and now I've really enjoyed it--and

if Miss Marshall will come, Jerry and the Colonel will be quite

satisfied. And so, of course, will I." With which rather jerky

valedictory she finally got herself out of the house.

Sylvia looked at her mother inquiringly. "If I go where?" she asked.

Something must have taken place while she was out of the room getting

the tea.

"She called to invite you formally to a Christmas house-party at the

Fiskes' place in Mercerton," said Mrs. Marshall, noting smilelessly

Sylvia's quick delight at the news. "Oh, what have I got to wear!"

cried the girl. Mrs. Marshall said merely, "We'll see, we'll see,"

and without discussing the matter further, went back to finish the

interrupted game with Lawrence.

But the next evening, when Professor Marshall returned from his latest

trip, the subject was taken up in a talk between Sylvia and her

parents which was more agitating to them all than any other incident

in their common life, although it was conducted with a great effort

for self-control on all sides. Judith and Lawrence had gone upstairs

to do their lessons, and Professor Marshall at once broached the

subject by saying with considerable hesitation, "Sylvia--well--how

about this house-party at the Fiskes'?"

Sylvia was on the defense in a moment. "Well, how about it?" she

repeated.

"I hope you don't feel like going."

"But I do, very much!" returned Sylvia, tingling at the first clear

striking of the note of disapproval she had felt for so many weeks

like an undertone in her life. As her father said nothing more, biting

his nails and looking at her uncertainly, she added in the accent

which fitted the words, "Why shouldn't I?"

He took a turn about the room and glanced at his wife, who was hemming

a napkin very rapidly, her hands trembling a little. She looked up at

him warningly, and he waited an instant before speaking. Finally he

brought out with the guarded tone of one forcing himself to moderation

of speech, "Well, the Colonel is an abominable old black-guard in

public life, and his private reputation is no better."

Sylvia flushed. "I don't see what that has to do with his son. It's

not fair to judge a young man by his father--or by anything but what

he is himself--you yourself are always saying that, if the trouble is

that the father is poor or ignorant or something else tiresome."

Professor Marshall said cautiously, "From what I hear, I gather that

the son in this case is a good deal like his father."

"No, he _isn't!_" cried Sylvia quickly. "He may have been wild when he

first came up to the University, but he's all right now!" She spoke as

with authoritative and intimate knowledge of all the details of Fiske,

Jr.'s, life. "And anyhow, I don't see what difference it makes, _what_

the Colonel's reputation is. I'm just going up there with a lot of

other young people to have a good time. Eleanor Hubert's invited, and

three or four other society girls. I don't see why we need to be such

a lot more particular than other people. We never are when it's a

question of people being dirty, or horrid, other ways! How about

Cousin Parnelia and Mr. Reinhardt? I guess the Fiskes would laugh

at the idea of people who have as many queer folks around as we do,

thinking _they_ aren't good enough."

Professor Marshall sat down across the table from his daughter and

looked at her. His face was rather ruddier than usual and he swallowed

hard. "Why, Sylvia, the point is this. It's evident, from what your

mother tells me of Mrs. Fiske's visit, that going to this house party

means more in your case than with the other girls. Mrs. Fiske came all

the way to La Chance to invite you, and from what she said about

you and her stepson, it was evident that she and the Colonel--" He

stopped, opening his hands nervously.

"I don't know how they think they know anything about it," returned

Sylvia with dignity, though she felt an inward qualm at this news.

"Jerry's been ever so nice to me and given me a splendid time, but

that's all there is to it. Lots of fellows do that for lots of girls,

and nobody makes such a fuss about it."

Mrs. Marshall laid down her work and went to the heart of the matter.

"Sylvia, you don't _like_ Mr. Fiske?"

"Yes, I do!" said Sylvia defiantly, qualifying this statement an

instant later by, "Quite well, anyhow. Why _shouldn't_ I?"

Her mother assumed this rhetorical question to be a genuine one and

answered it accordingly. "Why, he doesn't seem at all like the type of

young man who would be liked by a girl with your tastes and training.

I shouldn't think you'd find him interesting or--"

Sylvia broke out: "Oh, you don't know how sick I get of being so

everlastingly high-brow! What's the _use_ of it? People don't think

any more of you! They think less! You don't have any better time--nor

so good! And why should you and Father always be so down on anybody

that's rich, or dresses decently? _Jerry's_ all right--if his clothes

_do_ fit!"

"Do you really _know_ him at all?" asked her father pointedly.

"Of course I do--I know he's very handsome, and awfully good-natured,

and he's given me the only good time I've had at the University. You

just don't know how ghastly last year was to me! I'm awfully grateful

to Jerry, and that's all there is to it!"

Before this second disclaimer, her parents were silent again, Sylvia

looking down at her lap, picking at her fingers. Her expression was

that of a naughty child--that is, with a considerable admixture of

unhappiness in her wilfulness.

By this time Professor Marshall's expression was clearly one of

downright anger, controlled by violent effort. Mrs. Marshall was the

first one to speak. She went over to Sylvia and laid her hand on her

shoulder. "Well, Sylvia dear, I'm sorry about--" She stopped and

began again. "You know, dear, that we always believed in letting our

children, as far as possible, make their own decisions, and we won't

go back on that now. But I want you to understand that that puts a

bigger responsibility on you than on most girls to make the _right_

decisions. We trust you--your good sense and right feeling--to keep

you from being carried away by unworthy motives into a false position.

And, what's just as important, we trust to your being clear-headed

enough to see what your motives really are."

"I don't see," began Sylvia, half crying, "why something horrid should

come up just because I want a good time--other girls don't have to be

all the time so solemn, and thinking about things!"

"There'd be more happy women if they did," remarked Mrs. Marshall,

adding: "I don't believe we'd better talk any more about this now. You

know how we feel, and you must take that into consideration. You think

it over."

She spoke apparently with her usual calmness, but as she finished she

put her arms about the girl's neck and kissed the flushed cheeks.

Caresses from Mrs. Marshall were unusual, and, even through her tense

effort to resist, Sylvia was touched. "You're just worrying about

nothing at all, Mother," she said, trying to speak lightly, but

escaped from a possible rejoinder by hurriedly gathering up her

text-books and following Judith and Lawrence upstairs.

Her father and mother confronted each other. "_Well!_" said Professor

Marshall hotly, "of all the weak, inconclusive, modern parents--is

_this_ what we've come to?"

Mrs. Marshall took up her sewing and said in the tone which always

quelled her husband, "Yes, this is what we've come to."

His heat abated at once, though he went on combatively, "Oh, I know

what you mean, reasonable authority and not tyranny and all that--yes,

I believe in it--of course--but this goes beyond--" he ended. "Is

there or is there not such a thing as parental authority?"

Mrs. Marshall answered with apparent irrelevance, "You remember what

Cavour said?"

"Good Heaven! No, I don't remember!" cried Professor Marshall, with an

impatience which might have been Sylvia's.

"He said, 'Any idiot can rule by martial law.'"

"Yes, of course, that theory is all right, but--"

"If a theory is all right, it ought to be acted upon."

Professor Marshall cried out in exasperation, "But see here,

Barbara--here is a concrete fact--our daughter--our precious

Sylvia--is making a horrible mistake--and because of a theory we

mustn't reach out a hand to pull her back."

"We _can't_ pull her back by force," said his wife. "She's eighteen

years old, and she has the habit of independent thought. We can't go

back on that now."

"We don't seem to be pulling her back by force or in any other way! We

seem to be just weakly sitting back and letting her do exactly as she

pleases."

"If during all these years we've had her under our influence we

haven't given her standards that--" began the mother.

"You heard how utterly she repudiated our influence and our standards

and--"

"Oh, what she _says_--it's what she's made of that'll count--that's

the _only_ thing that'll count when a crisis comes--"

Professor Marshall interrupted hastily: "When a crisis! What do you

call _this_ but a crisis--she's like a child about to put her hand

into the fire."

"I trust in the training she's had to give her firm enough nerves to

pull it out again when she feels the heat," said her mother steadily.

Professor Marshall sprang up, with clenched hands, tall, powerful,

helpless. "It's outrageous, Barbara, for all your talk! We're

responsible! We ought to shut her up under lock and key--"

"So _many_ girls have been deterred from a mistake by being shut up

under lock and key!" commented Mrs. Marshall, with an ironical accent.

"But, good Heavens! Think of her going to that old scoundrel's--how

can I look people in the face, when they all know my opinion of

him--how I've opposed his being a Trustee and--"

"_Ah_,--!" remarked his wife significantly, "that's the trouble, is

it?"

Professor Marshall flushed, and for a moment made no rejoinder. Then,

shifting his ground, he said bitterly: "I think you're forgetting that

I've had a disillusionizing experience in this sort of thing which you

were spared. You forget that Sylvia is closely related to my sister."

"I don't forget that--but I don't forget either that Sylvia has had

a very different sort of early life from poor Victoria's. She has

breathed pure air always--I trust her to recognize its opposite."

He made an impatient gesture of exasperation. "But she'll be _in_

it--it'll be too late--"

"It's never too late." She spoke quickly, but her unwavering

opposition began to have in it a note of tension.

"She'll be caught--she'll have to go on because it'll be too hard to

get out--"

"The same vigor that makes her resist us now will give her strength

then--she's not Eleanor Hubert."

Her husband burst out upon her in a frightened, angry rush of

reproach: "Barbara--how _can_ you! You make me turn cold! This isn't a

matter of talk--of theories--we're confronted with--"

She faced him down with unflinching, unhappy eyes. "Oh, of course

if we are to believe in liberty only so long as everything goes

smoothly--" She tried to add something to this, but her voice broke

and she was silent. Her husband looked at her, startled at her pallor

and her trembling lips, immensely moved by the rare discomposure of

that countenance. She said in a whisper, her voice shaking, "Our

little Sylvia--my first baby--"

He flung himself down in the chair beside her and took her hand. "It's

damnable!" he said.

His wife answered slowly, with long pauses. "No--it's all right--it's

part of the whole thing--of life. When you bring children into the

world--when you live at all--you must accept the whole. It's not fair

to rebel--to rebel at the pain--when--"

"Good God, it's not _our_ pain I'm shrinking from--!" he broke out.

"No--oh no--that would be easy--"

With an impulse of yearning, and protection, and need, he leaned to

put his arms around her, his graying beard against her pale cheek.

They sat silent for a long time.

In the room above them, Sylvia bent over a problem in trigonometry,

and rapidly planned a new evening-dress. After a time she got up and

opened her box of treasures from Aunt Victoria. The yellow chiffon

would do--Jerry had said he liked yellow--she could imagine how Mrs.

Hubert would expend herself on Eleanor's toilets for this great

occasion--if she could only hit on a design which wouldn't look

as though it came out of a woman's magazine--something really

sophisticated--she could cover her old white slippers with that bit

of gold-tissue off Aunt Victoria's hat--she shook out the chiffon and

laid it over the bed, looking intently at its gleaming, shimmering

folds and thinking, "How horrid of Father and Mother to go and try to

spoil everything so!" She went back to the problem in trigonometry and

covered a page with figures, at which she gazed unseeingly. She was by

no means happy. She went as far as the door, meaning to go down and

kiss her parents good-night, but turned back. They were not a family

for surface demonstrations. If she could not yield her point--She

began to undress rapidly, turned out the light, opened the windows,

and sprang into bed. "If they only wouldn't take things so awfully

_solemnly_!" she said to herself petulantly.

CHAPTER XVIII

SYLVIA SKATES MERRILY ON THIN ICE

The design for the yellow chiffon dropped almost literally at Sylvia's

feet the next day, on the frontispiece of a theatrical magazine left

by another passenger in the streetcar in which she chanced to be

riding. Sylvia pounced on it with instant recognition of its value.

It was "different" and yet not "queer," it was artistic and yet

fashionable, and with its flowing lines it would not be hard to

construct. It was the creation of a Parisian boulevard actress, known

widely for her costumes, for the extraordinary manner in which she

dressed her hair, and for the rapidity of her succeeding emotional

entanglements. Her name meant nothing to Sylvia. She tore out the

page, folded it, and put it for safe-keeping between the pages of her

text-book on Logic.

That afternoon she began work on it, running the long seams up on the

machine with whirring rapidity, acutely aware of her mother's silent,

uncommenting passage back and forth through the sewing-room. With an

impulse of secrecy which she did not analyze, she did the trying-on in

her own room, craning and turning about before her own small mirror.

She knew that her mother would think the dress was cut too low,

although, as she told herself, looking with complacency at the smooth,

white, exquisitely fine-grained skin thus disclosed, it wasn't nearly

as low cut as the dresses Eleanor Hubert wore to any little dance. She

had long felt it to be countrified in the extreme to wear the mild

compromises towards evening-dress which she and most of the State

University girls adopted, as compared with the frankly disclosing

gowns of the "town girls" whose clothes came from Chicago and New

York. She knew from several outspoken comments that Jerry admired

Eleanor's shoulders, and as she looked at her own, she was not sorry

that he was to compare them to those of the other girl.

After this brief disposal of the question, she gave it no more

thought, working with desperate speed to complete all her

preparations. She had but a week for these, a week filled with

incessant hurry, since she was naturally unwilling to ask help of her

mother. Judith was off again with her father.

This absence greatly facilitated the moment of Sylvia's departure,

which she had dreaded. But, as it happened, there was only her mother

to whom to say the rather difficult good-bye, her mother who could be

counted on never to make a scene.

About the middle of the morning of the twenty-third of December,

she came down the stairs, her hand-bag in her hand, well-hatted,

well-gloved, freshly veiled, having achieved her usual purpose of

looking to the casual eye like the daughter of a wealthy man. She had

put all of her autumn allowance for dress into a set of furs, those

being something which no ingenuity could evolve at home. The rest

of her outfit, even to the odd little scarlet velvet hat, with its

successful and modish touch of the ugly, was the achievement of her

own hands. Under its absurd and fashionable brim, her fresh face shone

out, excessively pretty and very young.

Mrs. Marshall kissed her good-bye gently, not smiling at Sylvia's

attempt to lighten the moment's seriousness by saying playfully,

"Now, Mother, don't you be such an old worrier!" But she said nothing

"uncomfortable," for which Sylvia was very grateful.

She had no sooner embarked upon the big Interurban trolley-car which

was to take her to Mercerton than her attention was wholly diverted

from uneasy reflections by the unexpected appearance of two of the

house-party guests. Eleanor Hubert, every detail of her Complicated

costume exquisitely finished as a Meissonier painting, sat looking out

of the window rather soberly, and so intently that she saw neither

Sylvia's entrance, nor, close upon her heels, that of a florid-faced,

rather heavily built young man with a large, closely shaven jaw, who

exclaimed joyfully at seeing Miss Marshall, and appropriated with

ready assurance the other half of her seat.

"Now, this is surely dandy! You're going to the house-party too,

of course!" he cried, unbuttoning and throwing back his bright tan

overcoat. "Here's where I cut Jerry out all right, all right! Wait

a minute! _How_ much time have we?" He appealed to the conductor

as though a matter of life and death depended on the answer. "Four

minutes?--here goes--" He sprang to his feet, dashed out of the car

and disappeared, leaving his coat beside Sylvia. It was evidently

quite new, of the finest material, with various cunningly stitched

seams and straps disposed upon its surface in a very knowing way.

Sylvia noted out of the corner of her eye that the address of the

maker, woven into the neckband, was on Fifth Avenue, New York.

The four minutes passed--and the conductor approached Sylvia. "Your

friend's coming back, ain't he?" he asked, with the tolerant,

good-natured respect natural for the vagaries of expensively dressed

young men who wore overcoats made on Fifth Avenue. Sylvia, who had met

the young man but once before, when Jerry had introduced him as an

old friend, was a little startled at having a casual acquaintance so

publicly affixed to her; but after an instant's hesitation, in which

she was reflecting that she positively did not even remember her

"friend's" name, she answered, "Oh yes, yes, I suppose so--here he is

now."

The young man bounded up on the back platform panting, holding his hat

on with one hand, a large box of candy in the other. Sylvia glanced at

the name on the cover. "You didn't go all the way to _Button's!_" she

cried.

He nodded, breathless, evidently proud of his feat, and when he caught

his breath enough to speak, explained, "Yepp,--it's the only place in

this bum town where you can get Alligretti's, and they're the only

kind that're fit to eat" He tore open the box as he spoke, demolishing

with ruthless and practised hands the various layers of fine paper

and gold cord which wrapped it about, and presented the rich layer of

black chocolates to Sylvia. "Get a move on and take one," he urged

cordially; "I pretend I buy 'em for the girls, but I'm crazy about 'em

myself," He bit into one with an air of prodigious gusto, took off his

hat, wiped his forehead, and looked at Sylvia with a relish as frank

as his enjoyment of the bonbon. "That's a corking hat you got on,"

he commented. "Most girls would look like the old Harry with that

dangling thing in their eyes, but _you_ can carry it off all right."

Sylvia's face assumed a provocative expression. "Did you ever make

that remark to any other girl, I wonder?" she said reflectively.

He laughed aloud, eyeing her with appreciation, and clapping another

large black chocolate into his mouth. "You're the prompt article,

aren't you?" he said. He hitched himself over and leaned towards her.

"Something tells me I'm goin' to have a good time at this house-party,

what?"

Sylvia stiffened. She did not like his sitting so close to her, she

detected now on his breath a faint odor of alcohol, and she was afraid

that Eleanor Hubert would think her lacking in dignity. She regretted

having succumbed to the temptation to answer him in his own tone; but,

under her bravado, she was really somewhat apprehensive about this

expedition, and she welcomed a diversion. Besides, the voluble young

man showed not the slightest sign of noting her attempt to rebuff him,

and she found quite unavailing all her efforts to change the current

of the talk, the loud, free-and-easy, personally admiring note of

which had the effect on her nerves of a draught of raw spirits. She

did not enjoy the taste while it was being administered, but the

effect was certainly stimulating, not to say exciting, and absorbed

her attention so entirely that uncomfortable self-questionings were

impossible. She was also relieved to note that, although the young

man flung himself about in the public conveyance with the same

unceremonious self-assurance that he would have shown in a lady's

drawing-room, Eleanor Hubert, at the other end of the car, was

apparently unaware of his presence. Perhaps she too had some grounds

for uncomfortable thought, for throughout the hour's journey she

continued to stare unseeingly out of the window, or to look down

fixedly and rather sadly at her gloved hands.

Even through the confusion of her own ideas and plans, and the need

for constant verbal self-defense against the encroaching familiarity

of her companion, the notion flitted across Sylvia's mind that

probably Eleanor was thinking of the young assistant in chemistry. How

queer and topsy-turvy everything was, she reflected, as she bandied

lively words with the lively young man at her side, continuing to eat

his candies, although their rich, cloying taste had already palled on

her palate--here was Mrs. Hubert throwing Eleanor at Jerry's head,

when what Eleanor wanted was that queer, rough-neck freak of an

assistant prof; and here were Jerry's parents making such overtures

to Sylvia, when what _she_ wanted--she didn't know what she did want.

Yes, she did, she wanted a good time, which was somehow paradoxically

hard to attain. Something always kept spoiling it,--half the time

something intangible inside her own mind. She gave the candy-box a

petulant push. "Oh, take it away!" she said impatiently; "I've eaten

so many now, it makes me sick to look at them!"

The donor showed no resentment at this ingratitude, holding the box on

his knees, continuing to help himself to its contents with unabated

zest, and to keep the conversation up to concert pitch: "--the only

girl I ever saw who'd stop eating Alligretti's while there was one

left--another proof that there's only one of you--I said right off,

that any co-ed that Jerry Fiske would take to must be a unique

specimen--" He did not further specify the period to which he

referred by his "right off," but the phrase gave Sylvia a tingling,

uncomfortable sense of having been for some time the subject of

speculation in circles of which she knew nothing.

They were near Mercerton now, and as she gathered her wraps together

she found that she was bracing herself as for an ordeal of some sort.

The big car stopped, a little way out of town, in front of a long

driveway bordered with maple-trees; she and the young man descended

from one end-platform and Eleanor Hubert from the other, into the

midst of loud and facetious greetings from the young people who had

come down to meet them. Jerry was there, very stalwart, his white

sweater stretched over his broad chest. All the party carried skates,

which flashed like silver in the keen winter sun. They explained with

many exclamations that they had been out on the ice, which was, so the

three new-comers were assured many times, "perfectly grand, perfectly

dandy, simply elegant!"

A big, many-seated sled came jingling down the driveway now, driven by

no less a personage than Colonel Fiske himself, wrapped in a fur-lined

coat, his big mustache white against the red of his strongly marked

old face. With many screams and shouts the young people got themselves

into this vehicle, the Colonel calling out in a masterful roar above

the din, "Miss Marshall's to come up here with me!"

He held in his pawing, excited horses with one hand and helped Sylvia

with the other. In the seat behind them sat Jerry and Eleanor Hubert

and the young man of the trolley trip. Sylvia strained her ears to

catch Jerry's introduction of him to Eleanor, so that she might

know his name. It was too absurd not even to know his name! But the

high-pitched giggles and deeper shouts of mirth from the rest of the

party drowned out the words. As a matter of fact, although he played

for an instant a rather important rôle in Sylvia's drama, she was

destined never to know his name.

The Colonel looked back over the sleighload, shouted out "All aboard!"

loosened the reins, and snapped his whip over the horses' heads. They

leaped forward with so violent a spring that the front runners of the

long sled were for an instant lifted into the air. Immediately all the

joyful shrieking and screaming which had gone on before, became as

essential silence compared to the delighted uproar which now rose from

the sleigh. The jerk had thrown most of the young people over backward

into each other's arms and laps, where, in a writhing, promiscuous

mass, they roared and squealed out their joy in the joke, and made

ineffectual and not very determined efforts to extricate themselves.

Sylvia had seen the jerk coming and saved herself by a clutch forward

at the dashboard. Glancing back, she saw that Jerry and Eleanor Hubert

still sat upright; although the gay young man beside them had let

himself go backward into the waving arms and legs, and, in a frenzy of

high spirits, was shouting and kicking and squirming with the others.

It was a joke after his own heart.

Colonel Fiske, so far from slackening his pace to help his young

guests out of their predicament, laughed loudly and cracked his whip

over the horses' ears. They went up the long, curving driveway like

a whirlwind, and drew up under the porte-cochère of a very large

brick-and-stone house with another abrupt jerk which upset those in

the sleigh who had succeeded in regaining their seats. Pandemonium

broke out again, in the midst of which Sylvia saw that Mrs. Fiske had

come to the doorway and stood in it with a timid smile. The Colonel

did not look at her, Jerry nodded carelessly to her as he passed in,

and of all the disheveled, flushed, and laughing young people who

crowded past her into the house, only Sylvia and Eleanor recognized

her existence. The others went past her without a glance, exclaimed at

the lateness of the hour, cried out that they must go and "fix up" for

lunch, and ran upstairs, filling the house with their voices. Sylvia

heard one girl cry to another, "_Oh_, I've had such a good time! I've

hollered till I'm hoarse!"

After luncheon, a meal at which more costly food was served than

Sylvia had ever before seen, Jerry suggested between puffs of the

cigarette he was lighting that they have a game of billiards. Most of

the young people trooped off after him into the billiard-room, but

Sylvia, after a moment's hesitation, lingered near the big wood-fire

in the hall, unwilling to admit that she had never seen a billiard

table. She made a pretext of staying to talk to Mrs. Fiske, who sat

stooping her tall figure forward in a chair too small for her. Sylvia

looked at this ungraceful attitude with strong disapproval. What she

thought was that such inattention to looks was perfectly inexcusable.

What she said was, in a very gracious voice: "What a beautiful home

you have, Mrs. Fiske! How wonderfully happy you must be in it."

The other woman started a little at being addressed, and looked around

vaguely at the conventional luxury of the room, with its highly

polished floors, its huge rich rugs, its antlers on the wall, and its

deeply upholstered leather chairs. When Sylvia signified her intention

of continuing the talk by taking a seat beside the fire, Mrs. Fiske

roused herself to the responsibility of entertaining the young guest.

After some futile attempts at conversation in the abstract, she

discharged this responsibility through the familiar expedient of the

family photograph album. With this between them, the two women were

able to go through the required form of avoiding silences. Sylvia was

fearfully bored by the succession of unknown faces, and utterly unable

to distinguish, in her hostess' somewhat disconnected talk, between

the different sets of the Colonel's children. "This one is Stanley,

Jermain's brother, who died when he was a baby," the dull voice droned

on; "and this is Mattie in her wedding dress."

"Oh, I didn't know Jerry had a married sister," murmured Sylvia

indifferently, glad of any comment to make.

"She's only his half-sister, a great deal older."

"But _you_ haven't a daughter old enough to be married?" queried

Sylvia, astonished.

"Oh--no--no. Mattie is the daughter of the Colonel's first wife."

"Oh," said Sylvia awkwardly, remembering now that Mrs. Draper had

spoken of the Colonel's several marriages. She added to explain her

question, "I'd forgotten that Jerry's mother was the Colonel's second

wife and not his first."

"She was his third," breathed Mrs. Fiske, looking down at the pages of

the album.

Sylvia repressed a "Good gracious!" of startled repugnance to the

topic, and said, to turn the conversation, "Oh, who is that beautiful

little girl with the fur cap?"

"That is my picture," said Mrs. Fiske, "when I was eighteen. I was

married soon after. I've changed very much since my marriage."

Decidedly it was not Sylvia's lucky day for finding topics of talk.

She was wondering how the billiard game was progressing, and was sorry

she had not risked going with the others. She was recalled by Mrs.

Fiske's saying with a soft earnestness, "I want you to know, Miss

Marshall, how I _appreciate_ your kindness to me!"

Sylvia looked at her in astonishment, half fearing that she was being

made fun of.

The other went on: "It was _very_ nice of you--your staying here to

talk with me instead of going off with the young people--the others

don't often--" She played nervously with a gleaming pendant on a

platinum chain which hung over her flat chest, and went on: "I--you

have _always_ seemed to me the very nicest of Jerry's friends--and I

shall never forget your mother's kindness. I hope--I hope so much I

shall see more of her. The Colonel thinks so too--we've liked so much

having him like you." The incoherence of this did not prevent Sylvia's

having a chillingly accurate grasp on its meaning. "It is the

Colonel's hope," she went on painfully, "to have Jerry marry as soon

as he graduates from the Law School. The Colonel thinks that nothing

is so good for a young man as an early marriage--though of course

Jerry isn't so very, very young any more. He--the--Colonel is a great

believer in marriage--" Her voice died away into murmurs. Her long,

thin throat contracted in a visible swallow.

At this point only Sylvia's perception of the other's anguished

embarrassment prevented her from literally running away. As it was,

they sat silent, fingering over the pages of the album and gazing

unseeingly at the various set countenances which looked out at them

with the unnatural glare of the photographed. Sylvia was canvassing

desperately one possibility of escape after another when the door

opened, and the lively young man of the trolley-car stepped in.

He tiptoed to the fireplace with exaggerated caution, looking

theatrically over his shoulder for a pursuer. Sylvia positively

welcomed his appearance and turned to him with a cordiality quite

unlike the cool dignity with which she had planned to treat him. He

sat down on the rug before the fire, very close to her feet, and

looked up at her, grinning. "Here's where I get another one on

Jerry--what?" he said, ignoring Mrs. Fiske. "Old Jerry thinks he's

playing such a wonderful game in there he can't tear himself away--but

there'll be something doing, I guess, when he does come and finds

where I am!" He had partaken freely of the excellent white wine served

at luncheon (the first Sylvia had ever seen), and though entirely

master of his speech, was evidently even more uplifted than was his

usual hilarious wont. Sylvia looked down at him, and across at the

weak-faced woman opposite her, and had a moment of wishing heartily

she had never come. She stood up impatiently, a movement which the

young man took to mean a threat of withdrawal. "Aw, _don't_ go!" he

pleaded, sprawling across the rug towards her. As she turned away, he

snatched laughingly at her skirts, crying out, "Tag! You're caught!

You're It!"

At this moment Jerry Fiske appeared in the doorway. He looked darkly

at his friend's cheerful face and said shortly: "Here, Stub--quit it!

Get up out of that!" He added to Sylvia, holding out his hand: "Come

on, go skating with me. The ice is great."

"Are the others going?" asked Sylvia.

"Oh yes, I suppose so," said Jerry, a trifle impatiently.

The young man on the floor scrambled up. "Here's one that's going,

whoever else don't," he announced.

"Get yourself a girl, then," commanded Jerry, "and tell the rest to

come along. There's to be eats at four o'clock."

* * * * *

The ice was even as fine as it had been so redundantly represented to

Sylvia. Out of doors, leaning her supple, exquisitely poised body to

the wind as she veered like a bird on her flying skates, Sylvia's

spirits rebounded with an instant reaction into enjoyment. She adored

skating, and she had in it, as in all active exercise, the half-wild

pleasure of one whose childhood is but a short time behind her.

Furthermore, her costume prepared for this event (Mrs. Draper had told

her of the little lake on the Fiske estate) was one of her successes.

It had been a pale cream broadcloth of the finest texture, one of Aunt

Victoria's reception gowns, which had evidently been spoiled by having

coffee spilled down the front breadth. Sylvia had had the bold notion

of dyeing it scarlet and making it over with bands of black plush

(the best bits from an outworn coat of her mother's). On her gleaming

red-brown hair she had perched a little red cap with a small black

wing on either side (one of Lawrence's pet chickens furnished this),

and she carried the muff which belonged with her best set of furs.

Thus equipped, she looked like some impish, slender young Brunhilde,

with her two upspringing wings. The young men gazed at her with the

most unconcealed delight. As she skated very well, better than any

of the other girls, she felt, sweeping about the pond in long, swift

curves, that she was repaid for her ignorance of billiards.

Jerry and the young man he called Stub were openly in competition

for her attention, highly jocose on Stub's part and not at all so on

Jerry's, whose brow did not clear at the constant crackling of the

other's witticisms. On the shore burned a big fire, tended by a

man-servant in livery, who was occupied in setting out on a long table

a variety of sandwiches and cups of steaming bouillon. Sylvia had

never encountered before a real man-servant in livery. She looked at

him with the curiosity she might have shown at seeing a mediaeval

knight in full armor. Jerry brought her a cup of the bouillon, which

was deliciously hot and strong. Experienced as she was in the prudent

provisioning of the Marshall kitchen she was staggered to think how

many chickens had gone into filling with that clear liquor the big

silver tureen which steamed over the glittering alcohol lamp. The

table was set, for that casual outdoor picnic lunch, as she could

hardly have imagined a royal board.

"What beautiful things your people have!" she exclaimed to Jerry,

looking at a pile of small silver forks with delicately carved ivory

handles. "The rugs in the house are superb."

Jerry waved them aside as phenomena of no importance. "All of 'em

tributes from Dad's loving constituents," he said, repeating what was

evidently an old joke in the family. "You'd better believe Dad doesn't

vote to get the tariff raised on anything unless he sees to it that

the manufacturers know who they have to thank. It works something

fine! Talk about the presents a doctor gets from his grateful

patients! Nothing to it!"

This picturesque statement of practical politics meant so little to

Sylvia's mind that she dismissed it unheard, admiring, in spite of her

effort to take things for granted, the fabulous fineness of the

little fringed napkin set under the bouillon cup. Jerry followed

the direction of her eyes. "Yep--tariff on linen," he commented

pregnantly.

The young man called Stub now sped up to them, skating very fast, and

swept Sylvia off. "_Here's_ where we show 'em how to do it!" he cried

cheerfully, skating backward with crazy rapidity, and pulling Sylvia

after him. There was a clang of swift steel on ice, and Jerry bore

down upon them, the muscles of his jaw showing prominently. Without a

word he thrust his friend aside, caught at Sylvia's hands, and bore

her in a swooping flight to the other end of the pond, now deserted by

the other skaters.

As they sped along he bent over Sylvia fiercely and said in a low,

angry tone, "You don't like that bounder, do you? You _don't_!"

Sylvia was astonished at the heat of his suspicion. She had known that

Jerry was not notably acute, but it had seemed to her that her dislike

for his friend must be more than apparent to any one. They had reached

the edge of the ice now, and Sylvia's hands were still in Jerry's,

although they were not skating, but stood facing each other. A bush

of osier, frozen into the ice, lifted its red twigs near them. Sylvia

looked down at it, hesitating how to express her utter denial of any

liking for the hilarious young man. Jerry misunderstood her pause and

cried out: "Good God! Sylvia! Don't say you _do._"

Sylvia's heart gave a frightened leap. "Oh no--no--not a bit!" she

said hastily, looking longingly across the pond at the group around

the fire. Jerry caught his breath with a gasp and gripped her hands

hard. "It makes me crazy to see you look at another fellow," he said.

He forced her eyes to meet his. "Sylvia--you know--you know what I

mean."

Yes, Sylvia knew what he meant. Her very white face showed that. The

young man went on, pressing, masterful, confident, towering over her:

"It's idiotic to speak of it now, out here--with all these people

around--but it just _got_ me to see you with that--I wasn't sure how I

felt about you till I saw how I felt when you seemed so friendly

with him, when you got off the car together. Then I knew. It made me

crazy--I _wanted_ you!"

Sylvia had not been able once to look away from him since he began to

speak. Her mouth was a little open in her white face, her eyes fixed

with a painful intensity on his. He moistened his lips with his

tongue. "Sylvia--_it's all right_--isn't it?"

With no change of expression in her strained face, Sylvia nodded. As

suddenly and apparently as automatically she took a backward step.

The young man made a great stride towards her--there was a sound of

quick strokes on the ice and--"BOO!" shouted the hilarious young man,

bursting between them at railroad speed. He executed a marvelous

pirouette and returned instantly, calling out, "Less spooning in

the corners if you please--or if it's got to be, let me in!" He

was followed closely by a string of young men and girls, playing

snap-the-whip. They "snapped" just as they reached Jerry. The end girl

flew off and bumped, screaming with joy, into Jerry's arms. He looked

furiously over her head towards Sylvia, but she had been enveloped in

a ring and was being conveyed away to the accompaniment of the usual

squeals and shouts. The Colonel had come down to take them all back,

she was informed, and was waiting for them with the sleigh.

CHAPTER XIX

AS A BIRD OUT OF A SNARE

Sylvia dressed for dinner literally like one in a dream. Outwardly she

was so calm that she thought she was so inwardly. It was nothing like

so exciting as people said, to get engaged, she thought as she brushed

out her hair and put it up in a big, gleaming knot. Here she had been

engaged for a whole hour and a half, and was getting calmer every

minute, instead of the reverse. She astonished herself by the lucidity

of her brain, although it only worked by snatches--there being lacunae

when she could not have told what she was doing. And yet, as she had

approached the house, sitting again beside the Colonel, she had looked

with a new thrill of interest at its imposing battlemented façade. The

great hall had seemed familiar to her already as she stepped across

it on her way to the stairs, her feet had pressed the rugs with

assurance, she had been able to be quite nonchalant about refusing the

services of the maid who offered to help her dress.

It was true that from time to time she suddenly flushed or paled; it

was true that her mind seemed incapable of the slightest consecutive

thought; it was true that she seemed to be in a dream, peopled by

crazily inconsequent images--she had again and again a vision,

startlingly vivid, of the red-twigged osier beside which she had

stood; it was true that she had a slight feeling of vertigo when she

tried to think ahead of the next moment--but still she was going ahead

with her unpacking and dressing so steadily that she marveled. She

decided again from the depth of her experience that getting engaged

was nothing like so upsetting an event as people made out. She thrust

the last pin into her hair and tipped her head preeningly before the

big triplicate mirror--the first time she had ever encountered this

luxury outside of a ready-made clothes shop. The yellow chiffon

came out from the trunk in perfect condition, looking like a big,

silk-petaled flower as she slipped it on over her bare shoulders, and

emerged above, triumphant and yet half afraid to look at herself in

the mirror lest she should see that her home-made toilet had not "the

right look." One glance satisfied even her jealous eagerness. It had

exactly the right look--that is, it looked precisely like the picture

from which she had copied it. She gazed with naïve satisfaction at the

faithfulness with which her reflected appearance resembled that of the

Parisian demi-mondaine whose photograph she had seen, and settled

on her slim, delicately modeled shoulders the straps of shirred and

beaded chiffon which apparently performed the office of keeping her

dress from sliding to the floor. In reality, under its fluid, gauzy

draperies, it was constructed on a firm, well-fitting, well-fastened

foundation of opaque cloth which quite adequately clothed the young

body, but its appearance was of a transparent cloud, only kept from

floating entirely away by those gleaming straps on the shoulders, an

effect carefully calculated in the original model, and inimitably

caught by Sylvia's innocent fingers.

She turned herself about, artlessly surprised to see that her neck and

shoulders looked quite like those of the women in the fashion-plates

and the magazine illustrations. She looked at the clock. It was early

yet. She reflected that she never _could_ take the time other girls

did in dressing. She wondered what they did. What could one do, after

one's bath was taken, one's hair done, and one's gown donned--oh, of

course, powder! She applied it liberally, and then wiped away every

grain, that being what she had seen older girls do in the Gymnasium

dressing-room. Then with a last survey of her face, unaltered by the

ceremonial with the powder-puff, she stepped to the door.

But there, with her hand on the knob, she was halted by an

inexplicable hesitation about opening the door and showing herself.

She looked down at her bare shoulders and bosom, and faintly blushed.

It was really very, very low, far lower than any dress she had ever

worn! And the fact that Eleanor Hubert, that all the "swell" girls

wore theirs low, did not for the moment suffice her--it was somehow

different--their showing their shoulders and her showing her own.

She could not turn the knob and stood, irresolute, frowning vaguely,

though not very deeply disquieted. Finally she compromised by taking

up a pretty spangled scarf Aunt Victoria had sent her, wrapping it

about her like a shawl, in which quaint garb she went out in more

confidence, and walked down the hall to the stairway. Half-way down

she met Colonel Fiske just coming up to dress. Seeing one of his young

guests arrayed for the evening he made her his compliments, the first

words rather absent and perfunctory. But when he was aware which guest

she was, he warmed into a pressing and personal note, as his practised

eyes took in the beauty, tonight startlingly enhanced by excitement,

of the girl's dark, shining eyes, flushed cheeks, and white neck and

arms. He ended by lifting her hand, in his florid way, and pressing

it to his white mustache for a very fervent kiss. Sylvia blushed

prettily, meeting his hot old eyes with a dewy unconsciousness,

and smiling frankly up into the deeply lined carnal face with the

simple-hearted pleasure she would have felt at the kind word of any

elderly man. The Colonel seemed quite old to her--much older than her

father--like Professor Kennedy.

"Jerry's in the library, waiting," his father announced with a sly

laugh. "I wondered at the young rascal's being dressed so far ahead of

time." He turned reluctantly and went on up the stairs, leaving Sylvia

to go forward to her first meeting alone with the man she had promised

to marry. As she descended the long flight of stairs, her scarf,

loosened by her movement, slipped unobserved in her excitement and

hung lightly about her shoulders.

The door to the library was shut. She opened it with a rapidly beating

heart and stood on the threshold, shyly hesitating to advance further,

looking with agitation at the stalwart, handsome, well-groomed figure

which stood in an attitude of impatient expectation by the window.

Except for the light which came in from the electric bulb on the porch

outside, the big room was in twilight. In the brilliantly lighted

door-opening, she stood revealed as by a searchlight.

At the sound of the opening door, and his name spoken in a quavering

voice, the young man turned, paused an instant as if blinded by the

vision, and sprang forward. The door behind Sylvia swung shut, and her

eyes, widening in the dusk, saw only the headlong, overwhelming rush

upon her of her lover. She was enfolded strongly in muscular arms,

she was pressed closer and yet closer to a powerful body, whose heat

burned through the thin broadcloth, she was breathless, stunned,

choked. As the man bent forward over her, clasping her to him, her

flexible spine bent and her head drooped backward, her face with its

flush all gone, gleaming white in the dusk. At this he rained kisses

on it, on her eyes, hair, cheeks, mouth, the burning softness of his

full lips seeming to leave a smear on her skin where they pressed it.

Still holding her with one arm, pressed to him as though the two young

bodies were gripped together by a vice, he loosened the other arm and

thrust it at the back of her dress, through the flimsy gauze of her

scarf, down next her body. His stiff cuff caught on the edge of her

dress, and his sleeve slid up--it was his bare arm against her naked

flesh. He gave a savage, smothered, gasping exclamation, pressed his

fingers deeply into her side, still kissing her passionately, her

neck, her shoulders, burying his hot face in her bosom.

It was the girl's body which acted, since at the first instant of the

whirlwind which had broken over her, her mind had been shocked into

a swooning paralysis. Only her strong, sound body, hardened by work,

fortified by outdoor exercise, was ready in its every fiber for this

moment. Her body bent suddenly like a spring of fine steel, its

strength momentarily more than a match for his, and thrust the man

from her with staggering violence. Her reaction from him was as

physical a sensation as though she had bitten into a tempting fruit

and found it not sweet--not even bitter--but nasty. She sickened at

the sight of him.

As he caught his balance, laughing a little but not at all

good-naturedly, and started back towards her with a dangerous dark

face of excited anger and desire, his headlong rush was checked an

instant by the fierce eyes which flamed at him from her crimson face.

Even her neck and shoulders were now scarlet. She held him off for the

space of a breath, giving one deep exclamation, "_Oh_!" short, sharply

exhaled, almost like a blow in his face.

But his blood was up as well as hers, and after his momentary pause,

he rushed forward again, his handsome, blond face black with passion.

Sylvia stooped, gathered up her skirts, turned, burst open the door,

and fled out of the room, running in her high-heeled satin slippers as

she did on the track in the Gymnasium, with long, deer-like bounds. In

a flash she had crossed the wide hall--which was as it happened empty,

although she would not have slackened her pace for all the assembled

company--and was darting arrow-like up the stairs, her torn scarf

flying behind her like a banner. Her flight had been so unexpected

and so swift that young Fiske did not attempt to follow her; but she

reached her room, flung the door shut, and locked it with as much

precipitancy as though he were on her heels, instead of standing quite

still, open-mouthed, where she had left him.

The sharp crack of her slamming door, loud in the quiet house, broke

the spell which held him. His mouth shut, and his clenched hands

loosened from their fierce tension. He took an aimless step and drew a

long breath. A moment later, quite automatically, he fumbled for his

cigarette-case, and finding it, took out a cigarette and lighted it

with fingers that were not steady. The familiar action and the first

puff of smoke affected him like emerging from a turmoil of darkness

into the quiet and order of a well-lighted room. "Well, may I be

damned!" he said to himself with the beginning of a return of his

usual assurance--"the damn little spitfire!"

He walked about the room, puffing vigorously, feeling with relief his

blood resume its usual rate of circulation. His head seemed to clear

of a thick vapor. The startling recollection of the anger in his

fiancée's eyes was fading rapidly from his mind. Now he only saw her,

blushing, recoiling, fleeing--he laughed out a little, this time not

angrily, but with relish. "Ain't she the firebrand!" he said aloud. He

found his desire for her a hundredfold enhanced and stood still, his

eyes very lustrous, feeling again in imagination the warm softness of

her bosom under his lips. "Gee!" he exclaimed, turning restlessly in

his pacing walk.

He was aware that some one in the room moved. "Jermain," said his

stepmother's faint voice. He looked at her smiling. "Hello, Momma," he

said good-naturedly, "when did _you_ gum-shoe in?"

"Oh, just now," she told him, giving him an assurance which he

doubted, and which he would not have valued had he known it to

be true. He was perfectly indifferent as to the chance that this

negligible person might have been a spectator to the scene between the

son of the house and a guest. If she said anything about it, he meant

to give the all-sufficing explanation that he and Miss Marshall had

just become engaged. This would of course, it seemed self-evident to

him, make it all right.

But Mrs. Fiske did not make any remark calling forth that information.

She only said, in her usual listless manner, "Your sleeve is shoved

up."

He glanced down in surprise, realizing how excited he must be not to

have noticed that before, and remained for a moment silent, looking at

the splendidly muscular white arm, and the large well-manicured

hand. He was feeling in every nerve the reminiscence of the yielding

firmness of Sylvia's flesh, bare against his own. The color came up

flamingly into his face again. He moistened his lips with his tongue.

"Jesus _Christ_!" he exclaimed, contemptuously careless of his

listener, "I'm wild in love with that girl!" He pulled his sleeve down

with a quick, vigorous gesture, deftly shot the cuff out beyond the

black broadcloth, and, the picture of handsome, well-groomed youth in

easy circumstances, turned again to his father's wife. "What you in

here _for_, anyhow?" he asked still with his light absence of concern

about anything she did or did not do.

She hesitated, looking about the room. "I thought Miss Marshall would

be here. She promised to come down early to write the names on the

place-cards. I thought I heard her voice."

"You did," he told her. "She came down early all right--but she went

back again." He laughed, tossed his cigarette-end in the fireplace,

and vouchsafing no more explanation, strolled into the billiard-room,

and began to knock the balls about, whistling a recent dance tune with

great precision and vivacity. He was anticipating with quickened blood

the next meeting with Sylvia. As he thrust at the gleaming balls, his

mouth smiled and his eyes burned.

Mrs. Fiske went upstairs and knocked at Sylvia's door. There was a

rush of quick footsteps and the girl asked from the other side in a

muffled voice, "Who is it?" Mrs. Fiske gave her name, and added, in

answer to another question, that she was alone. The door opened enough

for her to enter, and closed quickly after her. She looked about the

disordered room, saw the open trunk, the filmy cascade of yellow

chiffon half on and half off the bed, the torn and crumpled spangled

scarf, and Sylvia herself, her hastily donned kimono clutched about

her with tense hands.

The mistress of the house made no comment on this scene, looking at

Sylvia with dull, faded eyes in which there was no life, not even the

flicker of an inquiry. But Sylvia began in a nervous voice to attempt

an explanation: "Oh, Mrs. Fiske--I--you'll have to excuse me--I must

go home at once--I--I was just packing. I thought--if I hurried I

could make the eight-o'clock trolley back to La Chance, and you could

send my trunk after me." Her every faculty was so concentrated on the

single idea of flight--flight back to the safety of home, that she did

not think of the necessity of making an excuse, giving a reason for

her action. It seemed that it must be self-evident to the universe

that she could not stay another hour in that house.

Mrs. Fiske nodded. "Yes, I'll send your trunk after you," she said.

She drew a long breath, almost audible, and looked down at the fire on

the hearth. Sylvia came up close to her, looking into her lusterless

eyes with deep entreaty. "And, Mrs. Fiske, _would_ you mind not

telling any one I'm going, until I'm gone--_nobody_ at all! It's

because--I--you could say I didn't feel well enough to come down to

dinner. I--if you--and say I don't want any dinner up here either!"

"Won't you be afraid to go down through the grounds to the trolley

alone, at night?" asked Mrs. Fiske, without looking at her.

"Everybody will be at dinner, won't they?" asked Sylvia.

Mrs. Fiske nodded, her eyes on the floor.

Upon which, "Oh no, I won't be afraid!" cried Sylvia.

Her hostess turned to the door. "Well, I won't tell them if you don't

want me to," she said. She went out, without another word, closing the

door behind her. Sylvia locked it, and went on with her wild packing.

When she came to the yellow chiffon she rolled it up tightly and

jammed it into a corner of her trunk; but the instant afterward she

snatched it out and thrust it fiercely into the fire. The light fabric

caught at once, the flames leaped up, filling the room with a roaring

heat and flare, which almost as quickly died down to blackened

silence.

Sylvia faced that instant of red glare with a grimly set jaw and a

deeply flushed face. It did not look at all like her own face.

At a quarter of eight the room was cleared, the trunk strapped and

locked, and Sylvia stood dressed for the street, gloved, veiled, and

furred. Under her veil her face showed still very flushed. She took up

her small handbag and her umbrella and opened the door with caution.

A faint clatter of dishes and a hum of laughing talk came up to her

ears. Dinner was evidently in full swing. She stepped out and went

noiselessly down the stairs. On the bottom step, close to the

dining-room door, her umbrella-tip caught in the balustrade and fell

with a loud clatter on the bare polished floor of the hall. Sylvia

shrank into herself and waited an instant with suspended breath for

the pause in the chatter and laughter which it seemed must follow. The

moment was forever connected in her mind with the smell of delicate

food, and fading flowers, and human beings well-washed and perfumed,

which floated out to her from the dining-room. She looked about her at

the luxuriously furnished great hall, and hated every inch of it.

If the noise was heard, it evidently passed for something dropped by a

servant, for Colonel Fiske, who was telling a humorous story, went on,

his recital punctuated by bass and treble anticipatory laughter from

his auditors: "--and when he called her upon the 'phone the next day

to ask her about it, she said _she_ didn't know he'd been there at

all!" A roar of appreciation greeted this recondite climax, under

cover of which Sylvia opened the front door and shut it behind her.

The pure coldness of the winter night struck sharply and gratefully on

her senses after the warmth and indoor odors of the house. She sprang

forward along the porch and down the steps, distending her nostrils

and filling her lungs again and again. These long deep breaths seemed

to her like the renewal of life.

As her foot grated on the gravel of the driveway she heard a stealthy

sound back of her, at which her heart leaped up and stood still. The

front door of the house had opened very quietly and shut again. She

looked over her shoulder fearfully, preparing to race down the road,

but seeing only Mrs. Fiske's tall, stooping figure, stopped and turned

expectantly. The older woman came down the steps towards the fugitive,

apparently unaware of the biting winter wind on her bared shoulders.

Quite at a loss, and suspiciously on her guard, Sylvia waited for her,

searching the blurred pale face with impatient inquiry.

"I--I thought I'd walk with you a little ways," said the other,

looking down at her guest.

"Oh no! _Don't_!" pleaded Sylvia in despair lest some one notice her

hostess' absence. "You'll take a dreadful cold! With no wraps on--_do_

go back! I'm not a bit afraid!"

The other looked at her with a smoldering flush rising through the

ashes of her gray face. "It wasn't that--I didn't suppose you'd

be afraid--I--I just thought I'd like to go a ways with you,"

she repeated, bringing out the words confusedly and with obvious

difficulty. "_I_ won't make you late," she added, as if guessing the

girl's thoughts. She put a thin hand on Sylvia's arm and drew her

rapidly along the driveway. For a moment they walked in silence. Then,

"How soon will you reach home?" she asked.

"Oh, about a quarter to ten--the Interurban gets into La Chance

at nine-fifteen, and it's about half an hour across town on the

Washington Street trolley."

"In less than two hours!" cried Mrs. Fiske wildly. "In less than two

hours!"

Seeing no cause for wonder in her statement, and not welcoming at

all this unsought escort, Sylvia made no answer. There was another

silence, and then, looking in the starlight at her companion, the girl

saw with consternation that the quiet tears were running down her

cheeks. She stopped short, "Oh ... _oh_!" she cried. She caught up the

other's hand in a bewildered surprise. She had not the faintest idea

what could cause her hostess' emotion. She was horribly afraid she

would lose the trolley. Her face painted vividly her agitation and her

impatience.

Mrs. Fiske drew back her hand and wiped her eyes with her palm. "Well,

I must be going back," she said. She looked dimly at the girl's face,

and suddenly threw her arms about Sylvia's neck, clinging to her. She

murmured incoherent words, the only ones which Sylvia could make out

being, "I can't--I can't--I _can't!_"

What it was she could not do, remained an impenetrable mystery to

Sylvia, for at that moment she turned away quickly, and went back up

the driveway, her face in her hands. Sylvia hesitated, penetrated,

in spite of her absorption in her own affairs, by a vague pity, but

hearing in the distance the clang of the trolley-car's bell, she

herself turned and ran desperately down the driveway. She reached the

public road just in time to stop the heavy car, and to swing herself

lightly on, to all appearances merely a rather unusually well-set-up,

fashionably dressed young lady, presenting to the heterogeneous

indifference of the other passengers in the car even a more

ostentatiously abstracted air than is the accepted attitude for young

ladies traveling alone. One or two of her fellow voyagers wondered at

the deep flush on her face, but forgot it the next moment. It was a

stain which was not entirely to fade from Sylvia's face and body for

many days to come.

CHAPTER XX

"BLOW, WIND; SWELL, BILLOW; AND SWIM, BARK!"

She reached home, as she had thought, before ten o'clock, her

unexpected arrival occasioning the usual flurry of exclamation and

question not to be suppressed even by the most self-contained family

with a fixed desire to let its members alone, and a firm tradition of

not interfering in their private affairs. Judith had come home before

her father and now looked up from her game of checkers with wondering

eyes. Sylvia explained that she was not sick, and that nothing had

happened to break up or disturb the house-party. "I just _felt_ like

coming home, that's all!" she said irritably, touched on the raw by

the friendly loving eyes and voices about her. She was glad at least

that her father was not at home. That was one less to look at her.

"Well, get along to bed with you!" said her mother, in answer to her

impatient explanation. "And, you children--keep still! Don't bother

her!"

Sylvia crept upstairs into the whiteness of her own slant-ceilinged

room, and without lighting a lamp sat down on the bed. Her knees shook

under her. She made no move to take off her furs or hat. She felt no

emotion, only a leaden fatigue and lameness as though she had been

beaten. Her mother, coming in five minutes later with a lighted lamp

and a cup of hot chocolate, made no comment at finding her still

sitting, fully dressed in the dark. She set the lamp down, and with

swift deftness slipped out hatpins, unhooked furs, unbuttoned and

unlaced and loosened, until Sylvia woke from her lethargy and quickly

completed the process, slipping on her nightgown and getting into bed.

Not a word had been exchanged. Mrs. Marshall brought the cup of hot

chocolate and Sylvia drank it as though she were a little girl again.

Her mother kissed her good-night, drew the blankets a little more

snugly over her, opened two windows wide, took away the lamp, and shut

the door.

Sylvia, warmed and fed by the chocolate, lay stretched at full length

in the bed, breathing in the fresh air which rushed across her face

from the windows, feeling herself in a white beatitude of safety and

peace. Especially did she feel grateful to her mother. "Isn't Mother

_great_!" she said to herself. Everything that had passed seemed like

a confusing dream to her, so dreadful, so terrifying that she was

amazed to feel herself, in spite of it, overcome with drowsiness. Now

the rôles were reversed. It was her brain that was active, racing and

shuddering from one frightening mental picture to another, while her

body, young, sound, healthful, fell deeper and deeper into torpor,

dragging the quivering mind down to healing depths of oblivion. The

cold, pure air blew so strongly in her face that she closed her eyes.

When she opened them again the sun was shining.

She started up nervously, still under the influence of a vivid

dream--strange.... Then as she blinked and rubbed her eyes she saw her

mother standing by the bed, with a pale, composed face.

"It's nine o'clock, Sylvia," she said, "and Mr. Fiske is downstairs,

asking to see you. He tells me that you and he are engaged to be

married."

Sylvia was instantly wide awake. "Oh no! Oh no!" she said

passionately. "No, we're not! I won't be! I won't see him!" She

looked about her wildly, and added, "I'll write him that--just wait a

minute." She sprang out of bed, caught up a pad of paper, and wrote

hastily: "It was all a mistake--I don't care for you at all--not a

bit! I hope I shall never have to speak to you again." "There," she

said, thrusting it into her mother's hands. She stood for a moment,

shivering in her thin nightgown in the icy draught, and then jumped

back into bed again.

Her mother came back in a few moments, closed the windows, and opened

the register. There was not in her silence or in a line of her quiet

presence the faintest hint of curiosity about Sylvia's actions.

She had always maintained in theory, and now at this crisis with

characteristic firmness of purpose acted upon her theory, that

absolutely unforced confidence was the only kind worth having, and

that moreover, unless some help was necessary, it might be as well for

the younger generation early to acquire the strengthening capacity to

keep its own intimate experiences to the privacy of its own soul,

and learn to digest them and feed upon them without the dubiously

peptonizing aid of blundering adult counsel. Sylvia watched her mother

with wondering gratitude. She wasn't going to ask! She was going to

let Sylvia shut that ghastly recollection into the dark once for

all. She wasn't going by a look or a gesture to force her helplessly

responsive child to give, by words, weight and substance to a black,

shapeless horror from which Sylvia with a vivid impulse of sanity

averted her eyes.

She got out of bed and put her arms around her mother's neck. "Say,

Mother, you are _great_!" she said in an unsteady voice. Mrs. Marshall

patted her on the back.

"You'd better go and take your bath, and have your breakfast," she

said calmly. "Judith and Lawrence have gone skating."

When Sylvia, tingling with the tonic shock of cold water and rough

toweling, and rosy in her old blue sailor-suit, came downstairs, she

found her mother frying pancakes for her in the kitchen blue with

smoke from the hot fat. She was touched, almost shocked by this

strange lapse from the tradition of self-help of the house, and said

with rough self-accusation: "My goodness! The idea of _your_ waiting

on _me_!" She snatched away the handle of the frying-pan and turned

the cakes deftly. Then, on a sudden impulse, she spoke to her mother,

standing by the sink. "I came back because I found I didn't like Jerry

Fiske as much as I thought I did. I found I didn't like him at all,"

she said, her eyes on the frying-pan.

At this announcement her mother's face showed pale, and for an instant

tremulous through the smoke. She did not speak until Sylvia lifted

the cakes from the pan and piled them on a plate. At this signal of

departure into the dining-room she commented, "Well, I won't pretend

that I'm not very glad."

Sylvia flushed a little and looked towards her silently. She had a

partial, momentary vision of what the past two months must have been

to her mother. The tears stood in her eyes. "Say, Mother dear," she

said in a quavering voice that tried to be light, "why don't you eat

some of these cakes to keep me company? It's 'most ten. You must have

had breakfast three hours ago. It'd be fun! I can't begin to eat all

these."

"Well, I don't care if I do," answered Mrs. Marshall. Sylvia laughed

at the turn of her phrase and went into the dining-room. Mrs. Marshall

followed in a moment with a cup of hot chocolate and buttered toast.

Sylvia pulled her down and kissed her. "You'd prescribe hot chocolate

for anything from getting religion to a broken leg!" she said,

laughing. Her voice shook and her laugh ended in a half-sob.

"No--oh no!" returned her mother quaintly. "Sometimes hot milk is

better. Here, where is my share of those cakes?" She helped herself,

went around the table, and sat down. "Cousin Parnelia was here

this morning," she went on. "Poor old idiot, she was certain that

planchette would tell who it was that stole our chickens. I told her

to go ahead--but planchette wouldn't write. Cousin Parnelia laid it to

the blighting atmosphere of skepticism of this house."

Sylvia laughed again. Alone in the quiet house with her mother,

refreshed by sleep, aroused by her bath, safe, sheltered, secure, she

tried desperately not to think of the events of the day before. But in

spite of herself they came back to her in jagged flashes--above all,

the handsome blond face darkened by passion. She shivered repeatedly,

her voice was quite beyond her control, and once or twice her hands

trembled so that she laid down her knife and fork. She was silent

and talkative by turns--a phenomenon of which Mrs. Marshall took no

outward notice, although when the meal was finished she sent her

daughter out into the piercing December air with the command to

walk six miles before coming in. Sylvia recoiled at the prospect of

solitude. "Oh, I'd rather go and skate with Judy and Larry!" she

cried.

"Well, if you skate hard enough," her mother conceded.

* * * * *

The day after her return Sylvia had a long letter from Jermain Fiske,

a letter half apologetic, half aggrieved, passionately incredulous of

the seriousness of the break between them, and wholly unreconciled to

it. The upshot of his missive was that he was sorry if he had done

anything to offend her, but might he be everlastingly confounded if

he thought she had the slightest ground for complaint! Everything had

been going on so swimmingly--his father had taken the greatest notion

to her--had said (the very evening she'd cut and run that queer way)

that if he married that rippingly pretty Marshall girl he could have

the house and estate at Mercerton and enough to run it on, and could

practise as much or as little law as he pleased and go at once into

politics--and now she had gone and acted so--what in the world was

the matter with her--weren't they engaged to be married--couldn't an

engaged man kiss his girl--had he ever been anything but too polite

for words to her before she had promised to marry him--and what

_about_ that promise anyhow? His father had picked out the prettiest

little mare in the stables to give her when the engagement should be

announced--the Colonel was as much at a loss as he to make her out--if

the trouble was that she didn't want to live in Mercerton, he was sure

the Colonel would fix it up for them to go direct to Washington, where

with his father's connection she could imagine what an opening they'd

have! And above all he was crazy about her--he really was! He'd never

had any idea what it was to be in love before--he hadn't slept a wink

the night she'd gone away--just tossed on his bed and thought of her

and longed to have her in his arms again--Sylvia suddenly tore the

letter in two and cast it into the fire, breathing hard. In answer she

wrote, "It makes me sick to think of you!"

She could not endure the idea of "talking over" the experience with

any one, and struggled to keep it out of her mind, but her resolution

to keep silence was broken by Mrs. Draper, who was informed,

presumably by Jermain himself, of the circumstances, and encountering

Sylvia in the street waited for no invitation to confidence by the

girl, but pounced upon her with laughing reproach and insidiously

friendly ridicule. Sylvia, helpless before the graceful assurance of

her friend, heard that she was a silly little unawakened schoolgirl

who was throwing away a brilliantly happy and successful life for the

queerest and funniest of ignorant notions. "What did you suppose, you

baby? You wouldn't have him marry you unless he was in love with you,

would you? Why do you suppose a man _wants_ to marry a woman? Did you

suppose that men in love carry their sweethearts around wrapped in

cotton-wool? You're a woman now, you ought to welcome life--rich,

full-blooded life--not take this chilly, suspicious attitude toward

it! Why, Sylvia, I thought you were a big, splendid, vital, fearless

modern girl--and here you are acting like a little, thin-blooded New

England old maid. How can you blame Jerry? He was engaged to you. What

do you think marriage _is_? Oh, Sylvia, just think what your life

would be in Washington with your beauty and charm!"

This dexterously aimed attack penetrated Sylvia's armor at a dozen

joints. She winced visibly, and hung her head, considering profoundly.

She found that she had nothing to oppose to the other's arguments.

Mrs. Draper walked beside her in a silence as dexterous as her

exhortation, her hand affectionately thrust through Sylvia's arm.

Finally, Sylvia's ponderings continuing so long that they were

approaching the Marshall house, in sight of which she had no mind to

appear, she gave Sylvia's arm a little pat, and stood still. She said

cheerfully, in a tone which seemed to minimize the whole affair into

the smallest of passing incidents: "Now, you queer darling, don't

stand so in your own light! A word would bring Jerry back to you

now--but I won't say it will always. I don't suppose you've ever

considered, in your young selfishness, how cruelly you have hurt his

feelings! He was awfully sore when I saw him. And Eleanor Hubert is

right on the spot with Mamma Hubert in the background to push."

Sylvia broke her silence to say in a low tone, blushing scarlet, "He

was--_horrid_!"

Mrs. Draper dropped her light tone and said earnestly: "Dear little

ignorant Sylvia--you don't recognize life when you see it. That's the

way men are--all men--and there's no use thinking it horrid unless

you're going into a convent. It's not so bad either,--once you get the

hang of managing it--it's a hold on them. It's a force, like any other

force of nature that you can either rebel against, or turn to your

account and make serviceable, if you'll only accept it and not try to

quarrel with water for running downhill. As long as she herself isn't

carried away by it, it's a weapon in the hand of a clever woman. Only

the stupid women get hurt by it--the silly ones who can't keep their

heads. And after all, my dear, it _is_ a force of nature--and you're

too intelligent not to know that there's no use fighting against that.

It's just idiotic and puritanic to revolt from it--and doesn't do any

good besides!" She looked keenly into Sylvia's downcast, troubled

face, and judged it a propitious moment for leaving her. "_Good_-bye,

darling," she said, with a final pat on the shoulder.

Sylvia walked slowly into the house, her heart like lead. Her food had

no savor to her. She did not know what she was eating, nor what her

mother, the only one at home for lunch, was saying to her. As a matter

of fact Mrs. Marshall said very little, even less than was her custom.

Her face had the look of terrible, patient endurance it had worn

during the time when Lawrence had had pneumonia, and his life had hung

in the balance for two days; but she went quietly about her usual

household tasks.

After the meal was over, Sylvia continued to sit alone at the table,

staring palely down at the tablecloth, her mind full of Mrs. Draper's

illuminating comments on life, which had gone through her entire

system like a dexterously administered drug. And yet that ingenious

lady would have been surprised to know how entirely her attack had

failed in the one point which seemed to her important, the possibility

of a reconciliation between Sylvia and Jermain. The girl was deeply

under the impression made by the philosophy of the older woman; she

did not for the moment dream of denying its truth; but she stood

granite in a perfectly illogical denial of its implications in her own

case. She did not consciously revolt against the suggestion that she

renew her relations to Jerry Fiske, because with a united action of

all her faculties she refused utterly to consider it for an instant.

She would no more have been persuaded to see Jerry again, by a

consideration of the material advantages to be gained, than she could

have been persuaded to throw herself down from the housetop. That

much was settled, not by any coherent effort of her brain, but by a

co-ordination of every instinct in her, by the action of her whole

being, by what her life had made her.

But that certainty brought her small comfort in the blackness of the

hour. What hideous world was this in which she had walked unawares

until now! Mrs. Draper's jaunty, bright acceptance of it affected her

to moral nausea. All the well-chosen words of her sophisticated friend

were imbedded in the tissue of her brain like grains of sand in an

eyeball. She could not see for very pain. And yet her inward vision

was lurid with the beginning of understanding of the meaning of those

words, lighted up as they were by her experience of the day before,

now swollen in her distraught mind to the proportions of a nightmare:

"It's a weapon in the hand of a clever woman--it's not so bad once

you get the hang of managing it--it's a hold on men--" Sylvia turned

whiter and whiter at the glimpse she had had of what was meant by

Mrs. Draper's lightly evasive "it"; a comprehension of which all her

"advanced" reading and study had left her mind as blankly ignorant as

a little child's. Now it was vain to try to shut her thoughts away

from Jermain. She lived over and over the scene with him, she endured

with desperate passivity the recollection of his burning lips on her

bosom, his fingers pressing into her side. Why not, if every man was

like that as soon as he dared? Why not, if that was all that men

wanted of women? Why not, if that was the sole ghastly reality which

underlay the pretty-smooth surface of life?

And beyond this bleak prospect, which filled her with dreary horror,

there rose glimpsed vistas which sent the shamed blood up to her face

in a flood--if every man was like that, why, so were the men she had

known and loved and trusted; old Reinhardt, who seemed so simple,

what had been his thoughts when he used years ago to take her on his

knee--what were his thoughts now when he bent over her to correct her

mistakes on the piano?

The expression of Colonel Fiske's eyes, as he had complimented her,

brought her to her feet with a shudder--but Colonel Fiske was an old,

old man--as old as Professor Kennedy--

Why, perhaps Professor Kennedy--perhaps--she flung out her

arms--perhaps her father--

She ran to the piano as to a refuge, meaning to drown out these

maddening speculations, which were by this time tinctured with

insanity; but the first chords she struck jarred on her ear like a

discordant scream. She turned away and stood looking at the floor with

a darkening face, one hand at her temple.

* * * * *

Her mother, darning stockings by the window, suddenly laid down her

work and said: "Sylvia, how would you like to walk with me over to the

Martins' to see if they have any eggs? Our hens have absolutely gone

back on us."

Sylvia did not welcome this idea at all, feeling as overwhelming an

aversion to companionship as to solitude, but she could think of no

excuse, and in an ungracious silence put on her wraps and joined her

mother, ready on the porch, the basket in her mittened hand.

Mrs. Marshall's pace was always swift, and on that crisp, cold, sunny

day, with the wind sweeping free over the great open spaces of the

plain about them, she walked even more rapidly than usual. Not a word

was spoken. Sylvia, quite as tall as her mother now, and as vigorous,

stepped beside her, not noticing their pace, nor the tingling of the

swift blood in her feet and hands. Her fresh young face was set in

desolate bitterness.

The Martins' house was about six miles from the Marshalls'. It was

reached, the eggs procured, and the return begun. Still not a word had

been exchanged between the two women. Mrs. Marshall would have been

easily capable, under the most ordinary circumstances, of this long

self-contained silence, but it had worked upon Sylvia like a sojourn

in the dim recesses of a church. She felt moved, stirred, shaken. But

it was not until the brief winter sun was beginning to set red

across the open reaches of field and meadow that her poisoned heart

overflowed. "Oh, Mother--!" she exclaimed in an unhappy tone, and said

no more. She knew no words to phrase what was in her mind.

"Yes, dear," said her mother gently. She looked at her daughter

anxiously, expectantly, with a passion of yearning in her eyes, but

she said no more than those two words.

There was a silence. Sylvia was struggling for expression. They

continued to walk swiftly through the cold, ruddy, sunset air, the

hard-frozen road ringing beneath their rapid advance. Sylvia clasped

her hands together hard in her muff. She felt that something in her

heart was dying, was suffocating for lack of air, and yet that it

would die if she brought it to light. She could find no words at all

to ask for help, agonizing in a shy reticence impossible for an adult

to conceive. Finally, beginning at random, very hurriedly, looking

away, she brought out, faltering, "Mother, _is_ it true that all men

are--that when a girl marries she must expect to--aren't there _any_

men who--" She stopped, burying her burning face in her muff.

Her words, her tone, the quaver of desperate sincerity in her accent,

brought her mother up short. She stopped abruptly and faced the girl.

"Sylvia, look at me!" she said in a commanding voice which rang loud

in the frosty silences about them. Sylvia started and looked into her

mother's face. It was moved so darkly and so deeply from its usual

serene composure that she would have recoiled in fear, had she not

been seized upon and held motionless by the other's compelling eyes.

"Sylvia," said her mother, in a strong, clear voice, acutely

contrasted to Sylvia's muffled tones, "Sylvia, it's a lie that men

are nothing but sensual! There's nothing in marriage that a good girl

honestly in love with a good man need fear."

"But--but--" began Sylvia, startled out of her shyness.

Her mother cut her short. "Anything that's felt by decent men in love

is felt just as truly, though maybe not always so strongly, by women

in love. And if a woman doesn't feel that answer in her heart to what

he feels--why, he's no mate for her. Anything's better for her than

going on. And, Sylvia, you mustn't get the wrong idea. Sensual feeling

isn't bad in itself. It's in the world because we have bodies as well

as minds--it's like the root of a plant. But it oughtn't to be a very

big part of the plant. And it must be the root of the woman's feeling

as well as the man's, or everything's all wrong."

"But how can you _tell_!" burst out Sylvia.

"You can tell by the way you feel, if you don't lie to yourself, or

let things like money or social position count. If an honest

girl shrinks from a man instinctively, there's something not

right--sensuality is too big a part of what the man feels for her--and

look here, Sylvia, that's not always the man's fault. Women don't

realize as they ought how base it is to try to attract men by their

bodies," she made her position clear with relentless precision, "when

they wear very low-necked dresses, for instance--" At this chance

thrust, a wave of scarlet burst up suddenly over Sylvia's face, but

she could not withdraw her eyes from her mother's searching, honest

gaze, which, even more than her words, spoke to the girl's soul. The

strong, grave voice went on unhesitatingly. For once in her life

Mrs. Marshall was speaking out. She was like one who welcomes the

opportunity to make a confession of faith. "There's no healthy life

possible without some sensual feeling between the husband and wife,

but there's nothing in the world more awful than married life when

it's the only common ground."

Sylvia gazed with wide eyes at the older woman's face, ardent,

compelling, inspired, feeling too deeply, to realize it wholly,

the vital and momentous character of the moment. She seemed to see

nothing, to be aware of nothing but her mother's heroic eyes of truth;

but the whole scene was printed on her mind for all her life--the

hard, brown road they stood on, the grayed old rail-fence back of Mrs.

Marshall, a field of brown stubble, a distant grove of beech-trees,

and beyond and around them the immense sweeping circle of the horizon.

The very breath of the pure, scentless winter air was to come back to

her nostrils in after years.

"Sylvia," her mother went on, "it is one of the responsibilities of

men and women to help each other to meet on a high plane and not on

a low one. And on the whole--health's the rule of the world--on

the whole, that's the way the larger number of husbands and wives,

imperfect as they are, do live together. Family life wouldn't be

possible a day if they didn't."

Like a strong and beneficent magician, she built up again and

illuminated Sylvia's black and shattered world. "Your father is just

as pure a man as I am a woman, and I would be ashamed to look any

child of mine in the face if he were not. You know no men who are not

decent--except two--and those you did not meet in your parents' home."

For the first time she moved from her commanding attitude of prophetic

dignity. She came closer to Sylvia, but although she looked at her

with a sudden sweetness which affected Sylvia like a caress, she but

made one more impersonal statement: "Sylvia dear, don't let anything

make you believe that there are not as many decent men in the world as

women, and they're just as decent. Life isn't worth living unless you

know that--and it's true." Apparently she had said all she had to say,

for she now kissed Sylvia gently and began again to walk forward.

The sun had completely set, and the piled-up clouds on the horizon

flamed and blazed. Sylvia stood still, looking at them fixedly. The

great shining glory seemed reflected from her heart, and cast its

light upon a regenerated world--a world which she seemed to see for

the first time. Strange, in that moment of intensely personal life,

how her memory was suddenly flooded with impersonal impressions of

childhood, little regarded at the time and long since forgotten,

but now recurring to her with the authentic and uncontrovertible

brilliance which only firsthand experiences in life can bring with

them--all those families of her public-school mates, the plain, ugly

homes in and out of which she had come and gone, with eyes apparently

oblivious of all but childish interests, but really recording

life-facts which now in her hour of need stretched under her feet like

a solid pathway across an oozing marsh. All those men and women whom

she had seen in a thousand unpremeditated acts, those tired-faced,

kind-eyed, unlettered fathers and mothers were not breathing poisoned

air, were not harboring in their simple lives a ghastly devouring

wild-beast. She recalled with a great indrawn breath all the

farmer-neighbors, parents working together for the children, the

people she knew so well from long observation of their lives, whose

mediocre, struggling existence had filled her with scornful pity, but

whom now she recalled with a great gratitude for the explicitness of

the revelations made by their untutored plainness. For all she could

ever know, the Drapers and the Fiskes and the others of their

world might be anything, under the discreet reticence of their

sophistication; but they did not make up all the world. She knew, from

having breathed it herself, the wind of health which blew about those

other lives, bare and open to the view, as less artless lives were

not. There was some other answer to the riddle, beside Mrs. Draper's.

Sylvia was only eighteen years old and had the childish immaturity of

her age, but her life had been so ordered that she was not, even at

eighteen, entirely in the helpless position of a child who must depend

on the word of others. She had accumulated, unknown to herself, quite

apart from polished pebbles of book-information, a small treasury

of living seeds of real knowledge of life, taken in at first-hand,

knowledge of which no one could deprive her. The realization of this

was a steadying ballast which righted the wildly rolling keel under

her feet. She held up her head bravely against the first onslaught of

the storm. She set her hand to the rudder!

Perceiving that her mother had passed on ahead of her she sprang

forward in a run. She ran like a schoolboy, like a deer, like a man

from whose limbs heavy shackles have been struck off. She felt so

suddenly lightened of a great heaviness that she could have clapped

her hands over her head and bounded into the air. She was, after all,

but eighteen years old, and three years before had been a child.

She came up to her mother with a rush, radiating life. Mrs. Marshall

looked at the glowing face and her own eyes, dry till then, filled

with the tears so rare in her self-controlled life. She put out her

hand, took Sylvia's, and they sped along through the quick-gathering

dusk, hand-in-hand like sisters.

Judith and Lawrence had reached home before them, and the low brown

house gleamed a cheerful welcome to them from shining windows. For the

first time in her life, Sylvia did not take for granted her home, with

all that it meant. For an instant it looked strangely sweet to her.

She had a passing glimpse, soon afterwards lost in other impressions,

of how in after years she would look back on the roof which had

sheltered and guarded her youth.

She lay awake that night a long time, staring up into the cold

blackness, her mind very active and restless in the intense stillness

about her. She thought confusedly but intensely of many things--the

months behind her, of Jerry, of Mrs. Draper, of her yellow dress,

of her mother--of herself. In the lucidity of those silent hours of

wakefulness she experienced for a time the piercing, regenerating

thrust of self-knowledge. For a moment the full-beating pulses of her

youth slackened, and between their throbs there penetrated to her

perplexed young heart the rarest of human emotions, a sincere

humility. If she had not burned the yellow dress at Mercerton, she

would have arisen and burned it that night....

During the rest of the Christmas vacation she avoided being alone. She

and Judith and Lawrence skated a great deal, and Sylvia learned at

last to cut the grapevine pattern on the ice. She also mastered the

first movement of the Sonata Pathétique, so that old Reinhardt was

almost satisfied.

The day after the University opened for the winter term the Huberts

announced the engagement of their daughter Eleanor to Jermain Fiske,

Jr., the brilliant son of that distinguished warrior and statesman,

Colonel Jermain Fiske. Sylvia read this announcement in the Society

Column of the La Chance _Morning Herald_, with an enigmatic expression

on her face, and betaking herself to the skating-pond, cut grapevines

with greater assiduity than ever, and with a degree of taciturnity

surprising in a person usually so talkative. That she had taken the

first step away from the devouring egotism of childhood was proved by

the fact that at least part of the time, this vigorous young creature,

swooping about the icy pond like a swallow, was thinking pityingly of

Eleanor Hubert's sweet face.

CHAPTER XXI

SOME YEARS DURING WHICH NOTHING HAPPENS

Judith had said to the family, taking no especial pains that her

sister should not hear her, "Well, folks, now that Sylvia's got

through with that horrid Fiske fellow, I do hope we'll all have some

peace!" a remark which proved to be a prophecy. They all, including

Sylvia herself, knew the tranquillity of an extended period of peace.

It began abruptly, like opening a door into a new room. Sylvia had

dreaded the beginning of the winter term and the inevitable sight of

Jerry, the enforced crossings of their paths. But Jerry never returned

to his classes at all. The common talk was to the effect that the

Colonel had "worked his pull" to have Jerry admitted to the bar

without further preliminaries. After some weeks of relief, it occurred

to Sylvia that perhaps Jerry had dreaded meeting her as much as she

had seeing him. For whatever reason, the campus saw young Fiske no

more, except on the day in May when he passed swiftly across it on his

way to the Hubert house where Eleanor, very small and white-faced,

waited for him under a crown of orange blossoms.

Sylvia did not go to the wedding, although an invitation had come,

addressed economically and compendiously to "Professor and Mrs.

Marshall and family." It was a glorious spring day and in her Greek

history course they had just reached the battle of Salamis, at the

magnificent recital of which Sylvia's sympathetic imagination leaped

up rejoicing, as all sympathetic imaginations have for all these many

centuries. She was thrilling to a remembered bit of "The Persians" as

she passed by the Hubert house late that afternoon. She was chanting

to herself, "The right wing, well marshaled, led on foremost in good

order, and we heard a mighty shout--'Sons of the Greeks! On! Free your

country!'" She did not notice that she trod swiftly across a trail of

soiled rice in the Hubert driveway.

She was like a person recovered from a fever who finds mere health a

condition of joy. She went back to her music, to her neglected books,

with a singing heart. And in accordance with the curious ways of

Providence, noted in the proverb relating the different fates of him

who hath and him who hath not, there was at once added to her pleasure

in the old elements of her life the very elements she had longed for

unavailingly. Seeing her friendly and shining of face, friendliness

went out to her. She had made many new acquaintances during her brief

glittering flight and had innumerable more points of contact with the

University life than before. She was invited to a quite sufficient

number of hops and proms, had quite the normal number of masculine

"callers," and was naïvely astonished and disillusioned to find that

those factors in life were by no means as entirely desirable and

amusing as her anguished yearning had fancied them. She joined one of

the literary societies and took a leading part in their annual outdoor

play. At the beginning of her Junior year, Judith entered as a

Freshman and thereafter became a close companion. Sylvia devoured

certain of her studies, history, and English, and Greek, with

insatiable zest and cast aside certain others like political economy

and physics, which bored her, mastering just enough of their elements

to pass an examination and promptly forgetting them thereafter. She

grew rapidly in intellectual agility and keenness, not at all in

philosophical grasp, and emotionally remained as dormant as a potato

in a cellar.

She continually looked forward with a bright, vague interest to

"growing up," to the mastery of life which adolescents so trustfully

associate with the arrival of adult years. She spent three more years

in college, taking a Master's degree after her B.A., and during those

three years, through the many-colored, shifting, kaleidoscopic,

disorganized life of an immensely populous institution of learning,

she fled with rapid feet, searching restlessly everywhere for that

entity, as yet non-existent, her own soul.

She had, in short, a thoroughly usual experience of modern American

education, emerging at the end with a vast amount of information, with

very little notion of what it was all about, with Phi Beta Kappa and a

great wonder what she was to do with herself.

Up to that moment almost every step of her life had been ordered and

systematized, that she might the more quickly and surely arrive at the

goal of her diploma. Rushing forward with the accumulated impetus of

years of training in swiftly speeding effort, she flashed by the goal

... and stopped short, finding herself in company with a majority of

her feminine classmates in a blind alley. "_Now_ what?" they asked

each other with sinking hearts. Judith looked over their heads with

steady eyes which saw but one straight and narrow path in life, and

passed on by them into the hospital where she began her nurse's

training. Sylvia began to teach music to a few children, to take on

some of Reinhardt's work as he grew older. She practised assiduously,

advanced greatly in skill in music, read much, thought acutely,

rebelliously and not deeply, helped Lawrence with his studies ... and

watched the clock.

For there was no denying that the clock stood still. She was not going

forward to any settled goal now, she was not going forward at all. She

was as far from suspecting any ordered pattern in the facts of life as

when she had been in college, surrounded by the conspiracy of

silence about a pattern in facts which university professors so

conscientiously keep up before their students. She was slowly

revolving in an eddy. Sometimes she looked at the deep, glowing

content of her father and mother with a fierce resentment. "How _can_

they!" she cried to herself. At other times she tried to chide herself

for not being as contented herself, "... but it's their life they're

living," she said moodily, "and I haven't any to live. I can't live on

their happiness any more than the beefsteaks somebody else has eaten

can keep me from starving to death."

The tradition of her life was that work and plenty of it would keep

off all uneasiness, that it was a foolishness, not to say a downright

crime, to feel uneasiness. So she practised many hours a day, and took

a post-graduate course in early Latin. But the clock stood still.

One of the assistants in her father's department proposed to her.

She refused him automatically, with a wondering astonishment at his

trembling hands and white lips. Decidedly the wheels of the clock

would never begin to revolve.

And then it struck an hour, loudly. Aunt Victoria wrote inviting

Sylvia to spend a few weeks with her during the summer at Lydford.

Sylvia read this letter aloud to her mother on the vine-covered porch

where she had sat so many years before, and repeated "star-light,

star-bright" until she had remembered Aunt Victoria. Mrs. Marshall

watched her daughter's face as she read, and through the tones of the

clear eager voice she heard the clock striking. It sounded to her

remarkably like a tolling bell, but she gave no sign beyond a slight

paling. She told herself instantly that the slowly ticking clock

had counted her out several years of grace beyond what a mother

may expect. When Sylvia finished and looked up, the dulled look of

resignation swept from her face by the light of adventurous change,

her mother achieved the final feat of nodding her head in prompt,

cheerful assent.

But when Sylvia went away, light-hearted, fleeting forward to new

scenes, there was in her mother's farewell kiss a solemnity which she

could not hide. "Oh, Mother dear!" protested Sylvia, preferring

as always to skim over the depths which her mother so dauntlessly

plumbed. "Oh, Mother darling! How can you be so--when it's only for a

few weeks!"

BOOK III

_IN CAPUA AT LAST_