"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 naively, 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 role 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-cochere 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 facade. 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 naive 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 fiancee'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 roles 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."