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 Fingals, 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 Fingals' 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 Fingals 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 Fingals' 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 Fingals, 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 Fingals 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 seances 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, Moliere, 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 crepe-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 Lindstroem 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 eclair in silence. It was the first eclair 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 eclair. 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 anybody 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 Lindstroem, 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 facade 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 Lindstroem'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 Lindstroem; "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 Lindstroem 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 Lindstroem'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 Lindstroem'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."