Sylvia gazed with wide eyes at the older woman's face, ardent, compelling, inspired, feeling too deeply, to realize it wholly, the vital and momentous character of the moment. She seemed to see nothing, to be aware of nothing but her mother's heroic eyes of truth; but the whole scene was printed on her mind for all her life—the hard, brown road they stood on, the grayed old rail-fence back of Mrs. Marshall, a field of brown stubble, a distant grove of beech-trees, and beyond and around them the immense sweeping circle of the horizon. The very breath of the pure, scentless winter air was to come back to her nostrils in after years.

"Sylvia," her mother went on, "it is one of the responsibilities of men and women to help each other to meet on a high plane and not on a low one. And on the whole—health's the rule of the world—on the whole, that's the way the larger number of husbands and wives, imperfect as they are, do live together. Family life wouldn't be possible a day if they didn't."

Like a strong and beneficent magician, she built up again and illuminated Sylvia's black and shattered world. "Your father is just as pure a man as I am a woman, and I would be ashamed to look any child of mine in the face if he were not. You know no men who are not decent—except two—and those you did not meet in your parents' home."

For the first time she moved from her commanding attitude of prophetic dignity. She came closer to Sylvia, but although she looked at her with a sudden sweetness which affected Sylvia like a caress, she but made one more impersonal statement: "Sylvia dear, don't let anything make you believe that there are not as many decent men in the world as women, and they're just as decent. Life isn't worth living unless you know that—and it's true." Apparently she had said all she had to say, for she now kissed Sylvia gently and began again to walk forward.

The sun had completely set, and the piled-up clouds on the horizon flamed and blazed. Sylvia stood still, looking at them fixedly. The great shining glory seemed reflected from her heart, and cast its light upon a regenerated world—a world which she seemed to see for the first time. Strange, in that moment of intensely personal life, how her memory was suddenly flooded with impersonal impressions of childhood, little regarded at the time and long since forgotten, but now recurring to her with the authentic and uncontrovertible brilliance which only firsthand experiences in life can bring with them—all those families of her public-school mates, the plain, ugly homes in and out of which she had come and gone, with eyes apparently oblivious of all but childish interests, but really recording life-facts which now in her hour of need stretched under her feet like a solid pathway across an oozing marsh. All those men and women whom she had seen in a thousand unpremeditated acts, those tired-faced, kind-eyed, unlettered fathers and mothers were not breathing poisoned air, were not harboring in their simple lives a ghastly devouring wild-beast. She recalled with a great indrawn breath all the farmer-neighbors, parents working together for the children, the people she knew so well from long observation of their lives, whose mediocre, struggling existence had filled her with scornful pity, but whom now she recalled with a great gratitude for the explicitness of the revelations made by their untutored plainness. For all she could ever know, the Drapers and the Fiskes and the others of their world might be anything, under the discreet reticence of their sophistication; but they did not make up all the world. She knew, from having breathed it herself, the wind of health which blew about those other lives, bare and open to the view, as less artless lives were not. There was some other answer to the riddle, beside Mrs. Draper's.

Sylvia was only eighteen years old and had the childish immaturity of her age, but her life had been so ordered that she was not, even at eighteen, entirely in the helpless position of a child who must depend on the word of others. She had accumulated, unknown to herself, quite apart from polished pebbles of book-information, a small treasury of living seeds of real knowledge of life, taken in at first-hand, knowledge of which no one could deprive her. The realization of this was a steadying ballast which righted the wildly rolling keel under her feet. She held up her head bravely against the first onslaught of the storm. She set her hand to the rudder!

Perceiving that her mother had passed on ahead of her she sprang forward in a run. She ran like a schoolboy, like a deer, like a man from whose limbs heavy shackles have been struck off. She felt so suddenly lightened of a great heaviness that she could have clapped her hands over her head and bounded into the air. She was, after all, but eighteen years old, and three years before had been a child.

She came up to her mother with a rush, radiating life. Mrs. Marshall looked at the glowing face and her own eyes, dry till then, filled with the tears so rare in her self-controlled life. She put out her hand, took Sylvia's, and they sped along through the quick-gathering dusk, hand-in-hand like sisters.

Judith and Lawrence had reached home before them, and the low brown house gleamed a cheerful welcome to them from shining windows. For the first time in her life, Sylvia did not take for granted her home, with all that it meant. For an instant it looked strangely sweet to her. She had a passing glimpse, soon afterwards lost in other impressions, of how in after years she would look back on the roof which had sheltered and guarded her youth.

She lay awake that night a long time, staring up into the cold blackness, her mind very active and restless in the intense stillness about her. She thought confusedly but intensely of many things—the months behind her, of Jerry, of Mrs. Draper, of her yellow dress, of her mother—of herself. In the lucidity of those silent hours of wakefulness she experienced for a time the piercing, regenerating thrust of self-knowledge. For a moment the full-beating pulses of her youth slackened, and between their throbs there penetrated to her perplexed young heart the rarest of human emotions, a sincere humility. If she had not burned the yellow dress at Mercerton, she would have arisen and burned it that night....

During the rest of the Christmas vacation she avoided being alone. She and Judith and Lawrence skated a great deal, and Sylvia learned at last to cut the grapevine pattern on the ice. She also mastered the first movement of the Sonata Pathetique, so that old Reinhardt was almost satisfied.

The day after the University opened for the winter term the Huberts announced the engagement of their daughter Eleanor to Jermain Fiske, Jr., the brilliant son of that distinguished warrior and statesman, Colonel Jermain Fiske. Sylvia read this announcement in the Society Column of the La Chance Morning Herald, with an enigmatic expression on her face, and betaking herself to the skating-pond, cut grapevines with greater assiduity than ever, and with a degree of taciturnity surprising in a person usually so talkative. That she had taken the first step away from the devouring egotism of childhood was proved by the fact that at least part of the time, this vigorous young creature, swooping about the icy pond like a swallow, was thinking pityingly of Eleanor Hubert's sweet face.



CHAPTER XXI

SOME YEARS DURING WHICH NOTHING HAPPENS

Judith had said to the family, taking no especial pains that her sister should not hear her, "Well, folks, now that Sylvia's got through with that horrid Fiske fellow, I do hope we'll all have some peace!" a remark which proved to be a prophecy. They all, including Sylvia herself, knew the tranquillity of an extended period of peace.

It began abruptly, like opening a door into a new room. Sylvia had dreaded the beginning of the winter term and the inevitable sight of Jerry, the enforced crossings of their paths. But Jerry never returned to his classes at all. The common talk was to the effect that the Colonel had "worked his pull" to have Jerry admitted to the bar without further preliminaries. After some weeks of relief, it occurred to Sylvia that perhaps Jerry had dreaded meeting her as much as she had seeing him. For whatever reason, the campus saw young Fiske no more, except on the day in May when he passed swiftly across it on his way to the Hubert house where Eleanor, very small and white-faced, waited for him under a crown of orange blossoms.

Sylvia did not go to the wedding, although an invitation had come, addressed economically and compendiously to "Professor and Mrs. Marshall and family." It was a glorious spring day and in her Greek history course they had just reached the battle of Salamis, at the magnificent recital of which Sylvia's sympathetic imagination leaped up rejoicing, as all sympathetic imaginations have for all these many centuries. She was thrilling to a remembered bit of "The Persians" as she passed by the Hubert house late that afternoon. She was chanting to herself, "The right wing, well marshaled, led on foremost in good order, and we heard a mighty shout—'Sons of the Greeks! On! Free your country!'" She did not notice that she trod swiftly across a trail of soiled rice in the Hubert driveway.

She was like a person recovered from a fever who finds mere health a condition of joy. She went back to her music, to her neglected books, with a singing heart. And in accordance with the curious ways of Providence, noted in the proverb relating the different fates of him who hath and him who hath not, there was at once added to her pleasure in the old elements of her life the very elements she had longed for unavailingly. Seeing her friendly and shining of face, friendliness went out to her. She had made many new acquaintances during her brief glittering flight and had innumerable more points of contact with the University life than before. She was invited to a quite sufficient number of hops and proms, had quite the normal number of masculine "callers," and was naively astonished and disillusioned to find that those factors in life were by no means as entirely desirable and amusing as her anguished yearning had fancied them. She joined one of the literary societies and took a leading part in their annual outdoor play. At the beginning of her Junior year, Judith entered as a Freshman and thereafter became a close companion. Sylvia devoured certain of her studies, history, and English, and Greek, with insatiable zest and cast aside certain others like political economy and physics, which bored her, mastering just enough of their elements to pass an examination and promptly forgetting them thereafter. She grew rapidly in intellectual agility and keenness, not at all in philosophical grasp, and emotionally remained as dormant as a potato in a cellar.

She continually looked forward with a bright, vague interest to "growing up," to the mastery of life which adolescents so trustfully associate with the arrival of adult years. She spent three more years in college, taking a Master's degree after her B.A., and during those three years, through the many-colored, shifting, kaleidoscopic, disorganized life of an immensely populous institution of learning, she fled with rapid feet, searching restlessly everywhere for that entity, as yet non-existent, her own soul.

She had, in short, a thoroughly usual experience of modern American education, emerging at the end with a vast amount of information, with very little notion of what it was all about, with Phi Beta Kappa and a great wonder what she was to do with herself.

Up to that moment almost every step of her life had been ordered and systematized, that she might the more quickly and surely arrive at the goal of her diploma. Rushing forward with the accumulated impetus of years of training in swiftly speeding effort, she flashed by the goal ... and stopped short, finding herself in company with a majority of her feminine classmates in a blind alley. "Now what?" they asked each other with sinking hearts. Judith looked over their heads with steady eyes which saw but one straight and narrow path in life, and passed on by them into the hospital where she began her nurse's training. Sylvia began to teach music to a few children, to take on some of Reinhardt's work as he grew older. She practised assiduously, advanced greatly in skill in music, read much, thought acutely, rebelliously and not deeply, helped Lawrence with his studies ... and watched the clock.

For there was no denying that the clock stood still. She was not going forward to any settled goal now, she was not going forward at all. She was as far from suspecting any ordered pattern in the facts of life as when she had been in college, surrounded by the conspiracy of silence about a pattern in facts which university professors so conscientiously keep up before their students. She was slowly revolving in an eddy. Sometimes she looked at the deep, glowing content of her father and mother with a fierce resentment. "How can they!" she cried to herself. At other times she tried to chide herself for not being as contented herself, "... but it's their life they're living," she said moodily, "and I haven't any to live. I can't live on their happiness any more than the beefsteaks somebody else has eaten can keep me from starving to death."

The tradition of her life was that work and plenty of it would keep off all uneasiness, that it was a foolishness, not to say a downright crime, to feel uneasiness. So she practised many hours a day, and took a post-graduate course in early Latin. But the clock stood still.

One of the assistants in her father's department proposed to her. She refused him automatically, with a wondering astonishment at his trembling hands and white lips. Decidedly the wheels of the clock would never begin to revolve.

And then it struck an hour, loudly. Aunt Victoria wrote inviting Sylvia to spend a few weeks with her during the summer at Lydford.

Sylvia read this letter aloud to her mother on the vine-covered porch where she had sat so many years before, and repeated "star-light, star-bright" until she had remembered Aunt Victoria. Mrs. Marshall watched her daughter's face as she read, and through the tones of the clear eager voice she heard the clock striking. It sounded to her remarkably like a tolling bell, but she gave no sign beyond a slight paling. She told herself instantly that the slowly ticking clock had counted her out several years of grace beyond what a mother may expect. When Sylvia finished and looked up, the dulled look of resignation swept from her face by the light of adventurous change, her mother achieved the final feat of nodding her head in prompt, cheerful assent.

But when Sylvia went away, light-hearted, fleeting forward to new scenes, there was in her mother's farewell kiss a solemnity which she could not hide. "Oh, Mother dear!" protested Sylvia, preferring as always to skim over the depths which her mother so dauntlessly plumbed. "Oh, Mother darling! How can you be so—when it's only for a few weeks!"



BOOK III

IN CAPUA AT LAST



CHAPTER XXII

A GRATEFUL CARTHAGINIAN

Arnold Smith put another lump of sugar on his saucer, poured out a very liberal allowance of rum into his tea, and reached for a sandwich, balancing the cup and saucer with a deftness out of keeping with his long, ungraceful loose-jointedness. He remarked in an indifferent tone to Sylvia, back of the exquisitely appointed tea-tray: "I don't say anything because I haven't the least idea what you are talking about. Who was Capua, anyhow?"

Sylvia broke into a peal of laughter which rang like a silver chime through the vine-shaded, airy spaces of the pergola. Old Mr. Sommerville, nosing about in his usual five-o'clock quest, heard her and came across the stretch of sunny lawn to investigate. "Oh, here's tea!" he remarked on seeing Arnold, lounging, white-flanneled, over his cup. He spoke earnestly, as was his custom when eating was in question, and Sylvia served him earnestly and carefully, with an instant harmonious response to his mood, putting in exactly the right amount of rum and sugar to suit his taste, and turning the slim-legged "curate's assistant" so that his favorite sandwiches were nearest him.

"You spoil the old gentlemen, Sylvia," commented Arnold, evidently caring very little whether she did or not.

"She spoils everybody," returned Mr. Sommerville, tasting his tea complacently; "'c'est son metier.' She has an uncanny instinct for suiting everybody's taste."

Sylvia smiled brightly at him, exactly the brilliant smile which suited her brilliant, frank face and clear, wide-open eyes. Under her smile she was saying to herself, "If that's so, I wonder—not that I care at all—but I really wonder why you don't like me."

Sylvia was encountering for the first time this summer a society guided by tradition and formula, but she was not without excellent preparation for almost any contact with her fellow-beings, a preparation which in some ways served her better than that more conscious preparation of young ladies bred up from childhood to sit behind tea-tables and say the right things to tea-drinkers. Association with the crude, outspoken youth at the State University had been an education in human nature, especially masculine nature, for her acute mind. Her unvarnished association with the other sex in classroom and campus had taught her, by means of certain rough knocks which more sheltered boarding-school girls never get, an accuracy of estimate as to the actual feeling of men towards the women they profess to admire unreservedly which (had he been able to conceive of it) old Mr. Sommerville would have thought nothing less than cynical.

But he did not conceive of it, and now sat, mellowed by the rightness of his tea, white-haired, smooth-shaven, pink-gilled, white-waistcoated, the picture of old age at its best, as he smiled gallantly at the extremely pretty girl behind the table. Unlike Sylvia he knew exactly why he did not like her and he wasted no time in thinking about it. "What were you laughing about, so delightfully, as I came in, eh?" he asked, after the irretrievable first moment of joy in gratified appetite had gone.

Sylvia had not the slightest backwardness about explaining. In fact she always took the greatest pains to be explicit with old Mr. Sommerville about the pit from which she had been digged. "Why, this visit to Aunt Victoria is like stepping into another world for me. Everything is so different from my home-life. I was just thinking, as I sat there behind all this glorious clutter," she waved a slim hand over the silver and porcelain of the tea-table, "what a change it was from setting the table one's self and washing up the dishes afterwards. That's what we always do at home. I hated it and I said to Arnold, 'I've reached Capua at last!' and he said," she stopped to laugh again, heartily, full-throated, the not-to-be-imitated laugh of genuine amusement, "he said, 'Who is Capua, anyhow?'"

Mr. Sommerville laughed, but grudgingly, with an impatient shake of his white head and an uneasy look in his eyes. For several reasons he did not like to hear Sylvia laugh at Arnold. He distrusted a young lady with too keen a sense of humor, especially when it was directed towards the cultural deficiencies of a perfectly eligible young man. To an old inhabitant of the world, with Mr. Sommerville's views as to the ambitions of a moneyless young person, enjoying a single, brief fling in the world of young men with fortunes, it seemed certain that Sylvia's lack of tactful reticence about Arnold's ignorance could only be based on a feeling that Arnold's fortune was not big enough. She was simply, he thought with dismay, reserving her tact and reticence for a not-impossible bigger. His apprehensions about the fate of a bigger of his acquaintance if its owner ever fell into the hands of this altogether too well-informed young person rose to a degree which almost induced him to cry out, "Really, you rapacious young creature, Arnold's is all any girl need ask, ample, well-invested, solid...." But instead he said, "Humph! Rather a derogatory remark about your surroundings, eh?"

Arnold did not understand, did not even hear, leaning back, long, relaxed, apathetic, in his great wicker-chair and rolling a cigarette with a detached air, as though his hands were not a part of him. But Sylvia heard, and understood, even to the hostility in the old gentleman's well-bred voice. "Being in Capua usually referring to the fact that the Carthaginians went to pieces that winter?" she asked. "Oh yes, of course I know that. Good gracious! I was brought up on the idea of the dangers of being in Capua. Perhaps that's why I always thought it would be such fun to get there." She spoke rebelliously.

"They got everlastingly beaten by the Romans," advanced Mr. Sommerville.

"Yes, but they had had one grand good time before! The Romans couldn't take that away from them! I think the Carthaginians got the best of it!" Provocative, light-hearted malice was in her sparkling face. She was thinking to herself with the reckless bravado of youth, "Well, since he insists, I'll give him some ground for distrusting my character!"

Arnold suddenly emitted a great puff of smoke and a great shout of "Help! help! Molly to the rescue!" and when a little white-clad creature flitting past the door turned and brought into that quiet spot of leafy shadow the dazzling quickness of her smile, her eyes, her golden hair, he said to her nonchalantly: "Just in time to head them off. Sylvia and your grandfather were being so high-brow I was beginning to feel faint,"

Molly laughed flashingly. "Did Grandfather keep his end up? I bet he couldn't!"

Arnold professed an entire ignorance of the relative status. "Oh, I fell off so far back I don't know who got in first. Who was this man Capua, anyhow? I'm a graduate of Harvard University and I never heard of him."

"I'm a graduate of Miss Braddon's Mountain School for Girls," said Molly, "and I think it's a river."

Mr. Sommerville groaned out, exaggerating a real qualm, "What my mother would have said to such ignorance, prefaced by 'I bet!' from the lips of a young lady!"

"Your mother," said Molly, "would be my great-grandmother!" She disposed of him conclusively by this statement and went on: "And I'm not a young lady. Nobody is nowadays."

"What are you, if a mere grandfather may venture to inquire?" asked Mr. Sommerville deferentially.

"I'm a femme watt-man" said Molly, biting a large piece from a sandwich.

Arnold explained to the others: "That's Parisian for a lady motor-driver; some name!"

"Well, you won't be that, or anything else alive, if you go on driving your car at the rate I saw it going past the house this morning," said her grandfather. He spoke with an assumption of grandfatherly severity, but his eyes rested on her with a grandfather's adoration.

"Oh, I'd die if I went under thirty-five," observed Miss Sommerville negligently.

"Why, Mr. Sommerville," Arnold backed up his generation. "You can't call thirty-five per hour dangerous, not for a girl who can drive like Molly."

"Oh, I'm as safe as if I were in a church," continued Molly. "I keep my mind on it. If I ever climb a telegraph-pole you can be sure it'll be because I wanted to. I never take my eye off the road, never once."

"How you must enjoy the landscape," commented her grandfather.

"Heavens! I don't drive a car to look at the landscape!" cried Molly, highly amused at the idea, apparently quite new to her.

"Will you gratify the curiosity of the older generation once more, and tell me what you do drive a car for?" inquired old Mr. Sommerville, looking fondly at the girl's lovely face, like a pink-flushed pearl.

"Why, I drive to see how fast I can go, of course," explained Molly. "The fun of it is to watch the road eaten up."

"It is fascinating," Sylvia gave the other girl an unexpected reinforcement. "I've driven with Molly, and I've been actually hypnotized seeing the road vanish under the wheels."

"Oh, children, children! When you reach my age," groaned Arnold, "and have eaten up as many thousand miles as I, you'll stay at home."

"I've driven for three years now," asserted Molly, "and every time I buy a new car I get the craze all over again. This one I have now is a peach of an eight. I never want to drive a six again,—never! I can bring it up from a creep to—to fast enough to scare Grandfather into a fit, without changing gears at all—just on the throttle—" She broke off to ask, as at a sudden recollection, "What was it about Capua, anyhow?" She went to sit beside Sylvia, and put her arm around her shoulder in a caressing gesture, evidently familiar to her.

"It wasn't about Capua at all," explained Sylvia indulgently, patting the lovely cheek, as though the other girl had been a child. "It was your grandfather finding out what a bad character I am, and how I wallow in luxury, now I have the chance."

"Luxury?" inquired Molly, looking about her rather blankly.

Sylvia laughed, this time with a little veiled, pensive note of melancholy, lost on the others but which she herself found very touching. "There, you see you're so used to it, you don't even know what I'm talking about!"

"Never mind, Molly," Arnold reassured her. "Neither do I! Don't try to follow; let it float by, the way I do!"

Miss Sommerville did not smile. She thrust out her red lips in a wistful pout, and looking down into the sugar-bowl intently, she remarked, her voice as pensive as Sylvia's own: "I wish I did! I wish I understood! I wish I were as clever as Sylvia!"

As if in answer to this remark, another searcher after tea announced himself from the door—a tall, distinguished, ugly, graceful man, who took a very fine Panama hat from a very fine head of brown hair, slightly graying, and said in a rich, cultivated voice: "Am I too late for tea? I don't mind at all if it's strong."

"Oh!" said Molly Sommerville, flushing and drawing away from Sylvia; "Lord!" muttered Arnold under his breath; and "Not at all. I'll make some fresh. I haven't had mine yet," said Sylvia, busying herself with the alcohol flame.

"How're you, Morrison?" said Mr. Sommerville with no enthusiasm, holding out a well-kept old hand for the other to shake.

Arnold stood up, reached under his chair, and pulled out a tennis racquet. "Excuse me, Morrison, won't you, if I run along?" he said. "It's not because you've come. I want a set of tennis before dinner if I can find somebody to play with me. Here, Molly, you've got your tennis shoes on already. Come along."

The little beauty shook her head violently. "No ... goodness no! It's too hot. And anyhow, I don't ever want to play again, since I've seen Sylvia's game." She turned to the other girl, breathing quickly. "You go, Sylvia dear. I'll make Mr. Morrison's tea for him."

Sylvia hesitated a barely perceptible instant, until she saw old Mr. Sommerville's eyes fixed speculatively on her. Then she stood up with an instant, cheerful alacrity. "That's awfully good of you, Molly darling! You won't mind, will you, Mr. Morrison!" She nodded brightly to the old gentleman, to the girl who had slipped into her place, to the other man, and was off.

The man she had left looked after her, as she trod with her long, light step beside the young man, and murmured, "Et vera incessu patuit dea."

Molly moved a plate on the table with some vehemence. "I suppose Sylvia would understand that language."

"She would, my dear Molly, and what's more, she would scorn me for using such a hackneyed quotation." To Mr. Sommerville he added, laughing, "Isn't it the quaintest combination—such radiant girlhood and her absurd book-learning!"

Mr. Sommerville gave his assent to the quaintness by silence, as he rose and prepared to retreat.

"Good-bye, Grandfather," said Molly with enthusiasm.

* * * * *

As they walked along, Arnold was saying to Sylvia with a listless appreciation: "You certainly know the last word of the game, don't you, Sylvia? I bet Morrison hasn't had a jolt like that for years."

"What are you talking about?" asked Sylvia, perhaps slightly overdoing her ignorance of his meaning.

"Why, it's a new thing for him, let me tell you, to have a girl jump up as soon as he comes in and delightedly leave him to another girl. And then to thank the other girl for being willing to take him off your hands,—that's more than knowing the rules,—that's art!" He laughed faintly at the recollection. "It's a new one for Morrison to meet a girl who doesn't kowtow. He's a very great personage in his line, and he can't help knowing it. The very last word on Lord-knows-what-all in the art business is what one Felix Morrison says about it. He's an eight-cylinder fascinator too, into the bargain. Mostly he makes me sore, but when I think about him straight, I wonder how he manages to keep on being as decent as he is—he's really a good enough sort!—with all the high-powered petticoats in New York burning incense. It's enough to turn the head of a hydrant. That's the hold Madrina has on him. She doesn't burn any incense. She wants all the incense there is being burned, for herself; and it keeps old Felix down in his place—keeps him hanging around too. You stick to the same method if you want to make a go of it."

"I thought he wrote. I thought he did aesthetic criticisms and essays," said Sylvia, laughing aloud at Arnold's quaint advice.

"Oh, he does. I guess he's chief medicine-man in his tribe all right. It's not only women who kowtow; when old man Merriman wants to know for sure whether to pay a million for a cracked Chinese vase, he always calls in Felix Morrison. Chief adviser to the predatory rich, that's one of his jobs! So you see," he came back to his first point, "it must be some jolt for the sacred F.M. to have a young lady, just a young lady, refuse to bow at the shrine. You couldn't have done a smarter trick, by heck! I've been watching you all those weeks, just too tickled for words. And I've been watching Morrison. It's been as good as a play! He can't stick it out much longer, unless I miss my guess, and I've known him ever since I was a kid. He's just waiting for a good chance to turn on the faucet and hand you a full cup of his irresistible fascination." He added carelessly, bouncing a ball up and down on the tense catgut of his racquet: "What all you girls see in that old wolf-hound, to lose your heads over! It gets me!"

"Why in the world 'wolf-hound'?" asked Sylvia.

"Oh, just as to his looks. He has that sort of tired, dignified, deep-eyed look a big dog has. I bet his eyes would be phosphorescent at night too. They are that kind; don't you know, when you strike a match in the evening, how a dog's eyes glow? It's what makes 'em look so soft and deep in the daytime. But as to his innards—no, Lord no! Whatever else Morrison is he's not a bit like any dog that ever lived—first cousin to a fish, I should say."

Sylvia laughed. "Why not make it grizzly bear, to take in the rest of the animal kingdom?"

"No," persisted Arnold. "Now I've thought of it, I mean fish, a great big, wise old fellow, who lives in a deep pool and won't rise to any ordinary fly." He made a brain-jolting change of metaphor and went on: "The plain truth, and it's not so low-down as it seems, is that a big fat check-book is admission to the grandstand with Felix. It has to be that way! He hasn't got much of his own, and his tastes are some—"

"Molly must be sitting in the front row, then," commented Sylvia indifferently, as though tired of the subject. They were now at the tennis-court. "Run over to the summer-house and get my racquet, will you? It's on the bench."

"Yes, Molly's got plenty of money," Arnold admitted as he came back, his accent implying some other lack which he forgot to mention, absorbed as he at once became in coping with his adversary's strong, swift serve.

The change in him, as he began seriously to play, was startling, miraculous. His slack loose-jointedness stiffened into quick, flexible accuracy, his lounging, flaccid air disappeared in a glow of concentrated vigorous effort. The bored good-nature in his eyes vanished, burned out by a stern, purposeful intensity. He was literally and visibly another person. Sylvia played her best, which was excellent, far better than that of any other girl in the summer colony. She had been well trained by her father and her gymnasium instructor, and played with an economy of effort delightful to see; but she was soon driven by her opponent's tiger-like quickness into putting out at once her every resource. There, in the slowly fading light of the long mountain afternoon, the two young Anglo-Saxons poured out their souls in a game with the immemorial instinct of their race, fierce, grim, intent, every capacity of body and will-power brought into play, everything else in the world forgotten....

For some time they were on almost equal terms, and then Sylvia became aware that her adversary was getting the upper hand of her. She had, however, no idea what the effort was costing him, until after a blazing fire of impossibly rapid volleys under which she went down to defeat, she stopped, called out, "Game and set!" and added in a generous tribute, "Say, you can play!" Then she saw that his face was almost purple, his eyes bloodshot, and his breath came in short, gasping pants. "Good gracious, what's the matter!" she cried, running towards him in alarm. She was deeply flushed herself, but her eyes were as clear as clear water, and she ran with her usual fawn-like swiftness. Arnold dropped on the bench, waving her a speechless reassurance. With his first breath he said, "Gee! but you can hit it up, for a girl!"

"What's the matter with you?" Sylvia asked again, sitting down beside him.

"Nothing! Nothing!" he panted. "My wind! It's confoundedly short." He added a moment later, "It's tobacco—this is the sort of time the cigarettes get back at you, you know!" The twilight dropped slowly about them like a thin, clear veil. He thrust out his feet, shapely in their well-made white shoes, surveyed them with dissatisfaction, and added with moody indifference: "And cocktails too. They play the dickens with a fellow's wind."

Sylvia said nothing for a moment, looking at him by no means admiringly. Her life in the State University had brought her into such incessant contact with young men that the mere fact of sitting beside one in the twilight left her unmoved to a degree which Mr. Sommerville's mother would have found impossible to imagine. When she spoke, it was with an impatient scorn of his weakness, which might have been felt by a fellow-athlete: "What in the world makes you do it, then?"

"Why not?" he said challengingly.

"You've just said why not—it spoils your tennis. It must spoil your polo. Was that what spoiled your baseball in college? You'd be twice the man if you wouldn't."

"Oh, what's the use?" he said, an immense weariness in his voice.

"What's the use of anything, if you are going to use that argument?" said Sylvia, putting him down conclusively.

He spoke with a sudden heartfelt simplicity, "Damn 'f I know, Sylvia." For the first time in all the afternoon, his voice lost its tonelessness, and rang out with the resonance of sincerity.

She showed an unflattering surprise. "Why, I didn't know you ever thought about such things."

He looked at her askance, dimly amused. "High opinion you have of me!"

She looked annoyed at herself and said with a genuine good-will in her voice, "Why, Arnold, you know I've always liked you."

"You like me, but you don't think much of me," he diagnosed her, "and you show your good sense." He looked up at the picturesque white house, spreading its well-proportioned bulk on the top of the terraced hillside before them. "I hope Madrina is looking out of a window and sees us here, our heads together in the twilight. You've guessed, I suppose, that she had you come on here for my benefit. She thinks she's tried everything else,—now it's her idea to get me safely married. She'd have one surprise, wouldn't she, if she could hear what we're saying!"

"Well, it would be a good thing for you," remarked Sylvia, as entirely without self-consciousness as though they were discussing the tennis game.

He was tickled by her coolness. "Well, Madrina sure made a mistake when she figured on you!" he commented ironically. And then, not having been subjected to the cool, hardy conditions which caused Sylvia's present clear-headedness, he felt his blood stirred to feel her there, so close, so alive, so young, so beautiful in the twilight. He leaned towards her and spoke in a husky voice, "See here, Sylvia, why don't you try it!"

"Oh, nonsense!" said the girl, not raising her voice at all, not stirring. "You don't care a bit for me."

"Yes, I do! I've always liked you!" he said, not perceiving till after the words were out of his mouth that he had repeated her own phrase.

She laughed to hear it, and he drew back, his faint stirring of warmth dashed, extinguished. "The fact is, Sylvia," he said, "you're too nice a girl to fall in love with."

"What a horrid thing to say!" she exclaimed.

"About you?" he defended himself. "I mean it as a compliment."

"About falling in love," she said.

"Oh!" he said blankly, evidently not at all following her meaning.

"What time is it?" she now inquired, and on hearing the hour, "Oh, we'll be late to dress for dinner," she said in concern, rising and ascending the marble steps to the terrace next above them.

He came after her, long, loose-jointed, ungraceful. He was laughing. "Do you realize that I've proposed marriage to you and you've turned me down?" he said.

"No such a thing!" she said, as lightly as he.

"It's the nearest I ever came to it!" he averred.

She continued to flit up the terraces before him, her voice rippling with amusement dropping down on him through the dusk. "Well, you'll have to come nearer than that, if you ever want to make a go of it!" she called over her shoulder. Upon which note this very modern conversation ended.



CHAPTER XXIII

MORE TALK BETWEEN YOUNG MODERNS

When they met at dinner, they laughed outright at the sight of one another, a merry and shadowless laugh. For an instant they looked like light-hearted children. The change of Arnold's long sallow face was indeed so noticeable that Mrs. Marshall-Smith glanced sharply at him, and then looked again with great satisfaction. She leaned to Sylvia and laid her charming white hand affectionately over the girl's slim, strong, tanned fingers. "It's just a joy to have you here, my dear. You're brightening us stupid, bored people like fresh west wind!" She went on addressing herself to the usual guest of the evening: "Isn't it always the most beautiful sight, Felix, how the mere presence of radiant youth can transform the whole atmosphere of life!"

"I hadn't noticed that my radiant youth had transformed much," commented Arnold dryly; "and Sylvia's only a year younger than I."

He was, as usual, disregarded by the course of the conversation. "Yes, sunshine in a shady place ..." quoted Morrison, in his fine mellow tenor, looking at Sylvia. It was a wonderful voice, used with discretion, with a fine instinct for moderation which would have kept the haunting beauty of its intonations from seeming objectionable or florid to any but American ears. In spite of the invariable good taste with which it was used, American men, accustomed to the toneless speech of the race, and jealously suspicious of anything approaching art in everyday life, distrusted Morrison at the first sound of his voice. Men who were his friends (and they were many) were in the habit of rather apologizing for those rich and harmonious accents. The first time she had heard it, Sylvia had thought of the G string of old Reinhardt's violin.

"I never in my life saw anything that looked less like a shady place," observed Sylvia, indicating with an admiring gesture the table before them, gleaming and flashing its glass and silver and close-textured, glossy damask up into the light.

"It's morally that we're so shady!" said Arnold, admiring his own wit so much that he could not refrain from adding, "Not so bad, what?" The usual conversation at his stepmother's table was, as he would have said, so pestilentially high-brow that he seldom troubled himself to follow it enough to join in. Arnold was in the habit of dubbing "high-brow" anything bearing on aesthetics; and Mrs. Marshall-Smith's conversational range hardly extending at all outside of aesthetics of one kind or another, communication between these two house-mates of years' standing was for the most part reduced to a primitive simplicity for which a sign-language would have sufficed. Arnold's phrase for the situation was, "I let Madrina alone, and she don't bother me." But now, seeing that neither the facade of Rouen, nor the influence of Chardin on Whistler, had been mentioned, his unusual loquacity continued. "Well, if one west wind (I don't mean that as a slam on Sylvia for coming from west of the Mississippi) has done us so much good, why not have another?" he inquired. "Why couldn't Judith come on and make us a visit too? It would be fun to have a scrap with her again." He explained to Morrison: "She's Sylvia's younger sister, and we always quarreled so, as kids, that after we'd been together half an hour the referee had to shoulder in between and tell us, 'Nix on biting in clinches.' She was great, all right, Judith was! How is she now?" he asked Sylvia. "I've been meaning ever so many times to ask you about her, and something else has seemed to come up. I can't imagine Judy grown up. She hasn't pinned up that great long braid, has she, that used to be so handy to pull?"

Sylvia took the last of her soup, put the spoon on the plate, and launched into a description of Judith, one of her favorite topics. "Oh, Judith's just fine! You ought to see her! She's worth ten of me: she has such lots of character! And handsome! You never saw anything like Judith's looks. Yes, she's put her hair up! She's twenty years old now, what do you suppose she does with her hair? She wears it in a great smooth braid all around her head. And she has such hair, Aunt Victoria!" She turned from Arnold to another woman, as from some one who would know nothing of the fine shades of the subject. "No short hairs at all, you know, like everybody else, that will hang down and look untidy!" She pulled with an explanatory petulance at the soft curls which framed her own face in an aureole of light. "Hers is all long and smooth, and the color like a fresh chestnut, just out of the burr; and her nose is like a Greek statue—she is a Greek statue!"

She had been carried by her affectionate enthusiasm out of her usual self-possession, her quick divination of how she was affecting everybody, and now, suddenly finding Morrison's eyes on her with an expression she did not recognize, she was brought up short. What had she said to make him look at her so oddly?

He answered her unspoken question at once, his voice making his every casual word of gold: "I am thinking that I am being present at a spectacle which cynics say is impossible, the spectacle of a woman delighting—and with the most obvious sincerity—in the beauty of another."

"Oh!" said Sylvia, relieved to know that the odd look concealed no criticism, "I didn't know that anybody nowadays made such silly Victorian generalizations about woman's cattiness,—anybody under old Mr. Sommerville's age, that is. And anyhow, Judith's my sister."

"Cases of sisters, jealous of each other's good looks, have not been entirely unknown to history," said Morrison, smiling and beginning to eat his fish with a delicate relish.

"Well, if Judy's so all-fired good-looking, let's have her come on, Madrina," said Arnold. "With her and Sylvia together, we'd crush Lydford into a pulp." He attacked his plate with a straggling fork, eating negligently, as he did everything else.

"She has a standing invitation, of course," said Mrs. Marshall-Smith. "Indeed, I wrote the other day, asking her if she could come here instead of to La Chance for her vacation. It's far nearer for her."

"Oh, Judith couldn't waste time to go visiting," said Sylvia. "I've told you she is worth ten of me. She's on the home-stretch of her trained-nurse's course now. She has only two weeks' vacation."

"She's going to be a trained nurse?" asked Arnold in surprise, washing down a large mouthful of fish with a large mouthful of wine. "What the dickens does she do that for?"

"Why, she's crazy about it,—ever since she was a little girl, fifteen years old and first saw the inside of a hospital. That's just Judith,—so splendid and purposeful, and single-minded. I wish to goodness I knew what I want to do with myself half so clearly as she always has."

If she had, deep under her consciousness, a purpose to win more applause from Morrison, by more disinterested admiration of Judith's good points, she was quite rewarded by the quickness with which he championed her against her own depreciation. "I've always noticed," he said meditatively, slowly taking a sip from his wine-glass, "that nobody can be single-minded who isn't narrow-minded; and I think it likely that people who aren't so cocksure what they want to do with themselves, hesitate because they have a great deal more to do with. A nature rich in fine and complex possibilities takes more time to dispose of itself, but when it does, the world's beauty is the gainer." He pointed the reference frankly by a smile at Sylvia, who flushed with pleasure and looked down at her plate. She was surprised at the delight which his leisurely, whimsically philosophical little speech gave her. She forgot to make any answer, absorbed as she was in poring over it and making out new meanings in it. How he had understood at less than a word the secret uncertainty of herself which so troubled her; and with what astonishing sureness he had known what to say to reassure her, to make her see clear! And then, her quick mind leaped to another significance.... All during these past weeks when she had been falling more and more under the fascination of his personality, when she had been piqued at his disregard of her, when she had thought he found her "young," and had bracketed her carelessly with Arnold, he had been in reality watching her, he had found her interesting enough to observe her, to study her, to have a theory about her character; and having done all that, to admire her as she admired him. Never in her life had she been the recipient of flattery so precisely to her taste. Her glow of pleasure was so warm that she suddenly distrusted her own judgment, she looked up at him quickly to see if she had not mistaken his meaning, had not absurdly exaggerated the degree to which he ... she found his eyes on hers, deep-set, shadowy eyes which did not, as she looked up, either smile or look away. Under cover of a rather wrangling discussion between Arnold and his stepmother as to having some champagne served, the older man continued to look steadily into Sylvia's eyes, with the effect of saying to her, gravely, kindly, intimately: "Yes, I am here. You did not know how closely you have drawn me to you, but here I am." Across the table, across the lights, the service, the idle talk of the other two, she felt him quietly, ever so gently but quite irresistibly, open an inner door of her nature ... and she welcomed him in.

* * * * *

After dinner, when Mrs. Marshall-Smith lifted her eyebrows at Sylvia and rose to go, Arnold made no bones of his horror at the prospect of a tete-a-tete with the distinguished critic. "Oh, I'm going in with you girls!" he said, jumping up with his usual sprawling uncertainty of action. He reserved for athletic sports all his capacity for physical accuracy. "Morrison and I bore each other more than's legal!"

"I may bore you, my dear Arnold," said the other, rising, "but you never bored me in your life, and I've known you from childhood."

To which entirely benevolent speech, Arnold returned nothing but the uneasy shrug and resentful look of one baffled by a hostile demonstration too subtle for his powers of self-defense. He picked up the chair he had thrown over, and waited sulkily till the others were in the high-ceilinged living-room before he joined them. Then when Morrison, in answer to a request from his hostess and old friend, sat down to the piano and began to play a piece of modern, plaintive, very wandering and chromatic music, the younger man drew Sylvia out on the wide, moon-lighted veranda.

"Morrison is the very devil for making you want to punch his head, and yet not giving you a decent excuse. I declare, Sylvia, I don't know but that what I like best of all about you is the way you steer clear of him. He's opening up on you too. Maybe you didn't happen to notice ... at the dinner-table? It wasn't much, but I spotted it for a beginning. I know old Felix, a few." Sylvia felt uneasy at the recurrence of this topic, and cast about for something to turn the conversation. "Oh, Arnold," she began, rather at random, "whatever became of Professor Saunders? I've thought about him several times since I've been here, but I've forgotten to ask you or Tantine. He was my little-girl admiration, you know."

Arnold smoked for a moment before answering. Then, "Well, I wouldn't ask Madrina about him, if I were you. He's not one of her successes. He wouldn't stay put."

Sylvia scented something uncomfortable, and regretted having introduced the subject.

Arnold added thoughtfully, looking hard at the ash of his cigarette, "I guess Madrina was pretty bad medicine for Saunders, all right."

Sylvia shivered a little and drew back, but she instantly put the matter out of her mind with a trained and definite action of her will. It was probably "horrid"; nothing could be done about it now; what else could they talk about that would be cheerful? This was a thought-sequence very familiar to Sylvia, through which she passed with rapid ease.

Arnold made a fresh start by offering her his cigarette-box. "Have one," he invited her, sociably.

She shook her head.

"Oh, all the girls do," he urged her.

Sylvia laughed. "I may be a fresh breeze from beyond the Mississippi, but I'm not so fresh as to think it's wicked for a girl to smoke. In fact I like to, myself, but I can't stand the dirty taste in my mouth the next morning. Smoking's not worth it."

"Well ..." commented Arnold. Apparently he found something very surprising in this speech. His surprise spread visibly from the particular to the general, like the rings widening from a thrown pebble, and he finally broke out: "You certainly do beat the band, Sylvia. You get me! You're a sample off a piece of goods that I never saw before!"

"What now?" asked Sylvia, amused.

"Why, for instance,—that reason for your not smoking. That's not a girl's reason. That's a man's ... a man who's tried it!"

"No, it isn't!" she said, the flicker of amusement still on her lips. "A man wouldn't have sense enough to know that smoking isn't worth waking up with your mouth full of rancid fur."

"Oh gosh!" cried Arnold, tickled by the metaphor: "rancid fur!"

"The point about me, why I seem so queer to you," explained Sylvia, brightening, "is that I'm a State University girl. I'm used to you. I've seen hundreds of you! The fact that you wear trousers and have to shave and wear your hair cut short, and smell of tobacco, doesn't thrill me for a cent. I know that I could run circles around you if it came to a problem in calculus, not that I want to brag."

Arnold did not seem as much amused as she thought he would be. He smoked in a long, meditative silence, and when he spoke again it was with an unusual seriousness. "It's not what you feel or don't feel about me ... it's what I feel and don't feel about you, that gets me," he explained, not very lucidly. "I mean liking you so, without ... I never felt so about a girl. I like it.... I don't make it out...." He looked at her with sincerely puzzled eyes.

She answered him as seriously. "I think," she said, speaking a little slowly, "I think the two go together, don't they?"

"How do you mean?" he asked.

"Why—it's hard to say—" she hesitated, but evidently not at all in embarrassment, looking at him with serious eyes, limpid and unafraid. "I've been with boys and men a lot, of course, in my classes and in the laboratories and everywhere, and I've found out that in most cases if the men and the girls really, really in their own hearts don't want to hurt each other, don't want to get something out of the other, but just want to be friends—why, they can be! Psychologists and all the big-wigs say they can't be, I know—but, believe me!—I've tried it—and it's awfully nice, and it's a shame that everybody shouldn't know that lots of the time you can do it—in spite of the folks who write the books! Maybe it wasn't so when the books were written, maybe it's only going to be so, later, if we all are as square as we can be now. But as a plain matter of fact, in one girl's experience, it's so, now! Of course," she modified by a sweeping qualification the audacity of her naively phrased, rashly innocent guess at a new possibility for humanity, "of course if the man's a decent man."

Arnold had not taken his gaze for an instant from her gravely thoughtful eyes. He was quite pale. He looked astonishingly moved, startled, arrested. When she stopped, he said, almost at once, in a very queer voice as though it were forced out of him, "I'm not a decent man."

And then, quite as though he could endure no longer her clear, steady gaze, he covered his eyes with his hand. An instant later he had sprung up and walked rapidly away out to the low marble parapet which topped the terrace. His gesture, his action had been so eloquent of surprised, intolerable pain, that Sylvia ran after him, all one quick impulse to console. "Yes, you are, Arnold; yes, you are!" she said in a low, energetic tone, "you are!"

He made a quavering attempt to be whimsical. "I'd like to know what you know about it!" he said.

"I know! I know!" she simply repeated.

He faced her in an exasperated shame. "Why, a girl like you can no more know what's done by a man like me ..." his lips twitched in a moral nausea.

"Oh ... what you've done ..." said Sylvia ... "it's what you are!"

"What I am," repeated Arnold bitterly. "If I were worth my salt I'd hang myself before morning!" The heartsick excitement of a man on the crest of some moral crisis looked out luridly from his eyes.

Sylvia rose desperately to meet that crisis. "Look here, Arnold. I'm going to tell you something I've never spoken of to anybody ... not even Mother ... and I'm going to do it, so you'll believe me when I say you're worth living. When I was eighteen years old I was a horrid, selfish, self-willed child. I suppose everybody's so at eighteen. I was just crazy for money and fine dresses and things like that, that we'd never had at home; and a man with a lot of money fell in love with me. It was my fault. I made him, though I didn't know then what I was doing, or at least I wouldn't let myself think what I was doing. And I got engaged to him. I got engaged at half-past four in the afternoon, and at seven o'clock that evening I was running away from him, and I've never seen him since." Her voice went on steadily, but a quick hot wave of scarlet flamed up over her face. "He was not a decent man," she said briefly, and went on: "It frightened me almost to death before I got my bearings: I was just a little girl and I hadn't understood anything—and I don't understand much now. But I did learn one thing from all that—I learned to know when a man isn't decent. I can't tell you how I know—it's all over him—it's all over me—it's his eyes, the way he stands, the expression of his mouth—I don't only see it—I feel it—I feel it the way a thermometer feels it when you put a match under the bulb ... I know!" She brought her extravagant, her preposterous, her ignorant, her incredibly convincing claims to an abrupt end.

"And you 'feel' that I ..." began Arnold, and could not go on.

"I'd like you for my brother," she said gently.

He tried to laugh at her, but the honest tears were in his eyes. "You don't know what you're talking about, you silly dear," he said unsteadily, "but I'm awfully glad you came to Lydford."

With her instinct for avoiding breaks, rough places, Sylvia quickly glided into a transition from this speech back into less personal talk. "Another queer thing about that experience I've never understood:—it cured me of being so crazy about clothes. You wouldn't think it would have anything to do with that, would you? And I don't see how it did. Oh, I don't mean I don't dearly love pretty dresses now. I do. And I spend altogether too much time thinking about them—but it's not the same. Somehow the poison is out. I used to be like a drunkard who can't get a drink, when I saw girls have things I didn't. I suppose," she speculated philosophically, "I suppose any great jolt that shakes you up a lot, shakes things into different proportions."

"Say, that fellow must have been just about the limit!" Arnold's rather torpid imagination suddenly opened to the story he had heard.

"No, no!" said Sylvia. "As I look back on it, I make a lot more sense out of it" (she might have been, by her accent, fifty instead of twenty-three), "and I can see that he wasn't nearly as bad as I thought him. When I said he wasn't decent, I meant that he belonged in the Stone Age, and I'm twentieth-century. We didn't fit together. I suppose that's what we all mean when we say somebody isn't decent ... that he's stayed behind in the procession. I don't mean that man was a degenerate or anything like that ... if he could have found a Stone Age woman he'd have ... they'd have made a good Stone Age marriage of it. But he didn't, the girl he...."

"Do you know, Sylvia," Arnold broke in wonderingly, "I never before in all my life had anybody speak to me of anything that really mattered. And I never spoke this way myself. I've wanted to, lots of times; but I didn't know people ever did. And to think of its being a girl who does it for me, a girl who...." His astonishment was immense.

"Look here, Arnold," said Sylvia, with a good-natured peremptoriness. "Let a girl be something besides a girl, can't you!"

But her attempt to change the tone to a light one failed. Apparently, now that Arnold had broken his long silence, he could not stop himself. He turned towards her with a passionate gesture of bewilderment and cried: "Do you remember, before dinner, you asked me as a joke what was the use of anything, and I said I didn't know? Well, I don't! I've been getting sicker and sicker over everything. What the devil am I here for, anyhow!"

As he spoke, a girl's figure stepped from the house to the veranda, from the veranda to the turf of the terrace, and walked towards them. She was tall, and strongly, beautifully built; around her small head was bound a smooth braid of dark hair. She walked with a long, free step and held her head high. As she came towards them, the moonlight full on her dark, proud, perfect face, she might have been the youthful Diana.

But it was no antique spirit which looked out of those frank, fearless eyes, and it was a very modern and colloquially American greeting which she now gave to the astonished young people. "Well, Sylvia, don't you know your own sister?" and "Hello there, Arnold."

"Why, Judith Marshall!" cried Sylvia, falling upon her breathlessly. "However in the world did you get here!"

Arnold said nothing. He had fallen back a step and now looked at the new-comer with a fixed, dazzled gaze.



CHAPTER XXIV

ANOTHER BRAND OF MODERN TALK

"Where's Judith?" said Arnold for sole greeting, as he saw Morrison at the piano and Sylvia sitting near it, cool and clear in a lacy white dress. Morrison lifted long fingers from the keys and said gravely, "She came through a moment ago, saying, 'Where's Arnold?' and went out through that door." His fingers dropped and Chopin's voice once more rose plaintively.

The sound of Arnold's precipitate rush across the room and out of the door was followed by a tinkle of laughter from Sylvia. Morrison looked around at her over his shoulder, with a flashing smile of mutual understanding, but he finished the prelude before he spoke. Then, without turning around, as he pulled out another sheet from the music heaped on the piano, he remarked: "If that French philosopher was right when he said no disease is as contagious as love-making, we may expect soon to find the very chairs and tables in this house clasped in each other's arms. Old as I am, I feel it going to my head, like a bed of full-blooming valerian."

Sylvia made no answer. She felt herself flushing, and could not trust her voice to be casual. He continued for a moment to thumb over the music aimlessly, as though waiting for her to speak.

The beautiful room, darkened against the midsummer heat, shimmered dimly in a transparent half-light, the vivid life of its bright chintz, its occasional brass, its clean, daring spots of crimson and purple flowers, subdued into a fabulous, half-seen richness. There was not a sound. The splendid heat of the early August afternoon flamed, and paused, and held its breath.

Into this silence, like a bird murmuring a drowsy note over a still pool, there floated the beginning of Am Meer. Sylvia sat, passive to her finger-tips, a vase filled to the brim with melody. She stared with unseeing eyes at the back of the man at the piano. She was not thinking of him, she was not aware that she was conscious of him at all; but hours afterward wherever she looked, she saw for an instant again in miniature the slender, vigorous, swaying figure; the thick brown hair, streaked with white and curling slightly at the ends; the brooding head....

When the last note was still, the man stood up and moved away from the piano. He dropped into an arm-chair near Sylvia, and leaning his fine, ugly head back against the brilliant chintz, he looked at her meditatively. His great bodily suavity gave his every action a curious significance and grace. Sylvia, still under the spell of his singing, did not stir, returning his look out of wide, dreaming eyes.

When he spoke, his voice blended with the silence almost as harmoniously as the music.... "Do you know what I wish you would do, Miss Sylvia Marshall? I wish you would tell me something about yourself. Now that I'm no longer forbidden to look at you, or think about you...."

"Forbidden?" asked Sylvia, very much astonished.

"There!" he said, wilfully mistaking her meaning, and smiling faintly, "I am such an old gentleman that I'm perfectly negligible to a young lady. She doesn't even notice or not whether I look at her, and think about her."

A few years before this Sylvia would have burst out impetuously, "Oh yes, I have! I've wondered awfully what made you so indifferent," but now she kept this reflection to herself and merely said, "What in the world did you fancy was 'forbidding' you?"

"Honor!" said Morrison, with a note of mock solemnity. "Honor! Victoria was so evidently snatching at you as a last hope for Arnold. She gave me to understand that everybody else but Arnold was to be strictly non-existent. But now that Arnold has found a character beautifully and archaically simple to match his own primitive needs, I don't see why I shouldn't enjoy a little civilized talk with you. In any case, it was absurd to think of you for Arnold. It merely shows how driven poor Victoria was!"

Sylvia tried to speak lightly, although she was penetrated with pleasure at this explanation of his holding aloof. "Oh, I like Arnold very much. I always have. There's something ... something sort of touching about Arnold, don't you think? Though I must say that I've heard enough about the difference between training quail dogs and partridge dogs to last me the rest of my life. But that's rather touching too, his not knowing what to do with himself but fiddle around with his guns and tennis-racquets. They're all he has to keep him from being bored to death, and they don't go nearly far enough. Some day he will just drop dead from ennui, poor Arnold! Wouldn't he have enjoyed being a civil engineer, and laying out railroads in wild country! He'd have been a good one too! The same amount of energy he puts into his polo playing would make him fight his way through darkest Thibet." She meditated over this hypothesis for a moment and then added with a nod of her head, "Oh yes, I like Arnold ever so much ... one kind of 'liking.'"

"Of course you like him," assented the older man, who had been watching her as she talked, and whose manner now, as he took up the word himself, resembled that of an exquisitely adroit angler, casting out the lightest, the most feathery, the most perfectly controlled of dry-flies. "You're too intelligent not to like everybody who's not base—and Arnold's not base. And he 'likes' you. If you had cared to waste one of your red-brown tresses on him, you could have drawn him by a single hair. But then, everybody 'likes' you."

"Old Mr. Sommerville doesn't!" said Sylvia, on an impulse.

Morrison looked at her admiringly, and put the tips of his fingers together with exquisite precision. "So you add second sight to your other accomplishments! How in the world could a girl of your age have the experience and intuition to feel that? Old Sommerville passes for a great admirer of yours. You won't, I hope, go so uncannily far in your omniscience as to pretend to know why he doesn't like you?"

"No, I won't," said Sylvia, "because I haven't the very faintest idea. Have you?"

"I know exactly why. It's connected with one of the old gentleman's eccentricities. He's afraid of you on account of his precious nephew."

"I didn't know he had a nephew." Sylvia was immensely astonished.

"Well, he has, and he bows down and worships him, as he does his granddaughter. You see how he adores Molly. It's nice of the old fellow, the cult he has for his descendants, but occasionally inconvenient for innocent bystanders. He thinks everybody wants to make off with his young folks. You and I are fellow-suspects. Haven't you felt him wish he could strike me dead, when Molly makes tea for me, or turns over music as I play?" He laughed a little, a gentle, kind, indulgent laugh. "Molly!" he said, as if his point were more than elucidated by the mere mention of her name.

Sylvia intimated with a laugh that her point was clearer yet in that she had no name to mention. "But I never saw his nephew. I never even heard of him until this minute."

"No, and very probably never will see him. He's very seldom here. And if you did see him, you wouldn't like him—he's an eccentric of the worst brand," said Morrison tranquilly. "But monomanias need no foundation in fact—" He broke off abruptly to say: "Is this all another proof of your diabolical cleverness? I started in to hear something about yourself, and here I find myself talking about everything else in the world."

"I'm not clever," said Sylvia, hoping to be contradicted.

"Well, you're a great deal too nice to be consciously so," admitted Morrison. "See here," he went on, "it's evident that you're more than a match for me at this game. Suppose we strike a bargain. You introduce yourself to me and I'll do the same by you. Isn't it quite the most fantastic of all the bizarreries of human intercourse that an 'introduction' to a fellow-being consists in being informed of his name,—quite the most unimportant, fortuitous thing about him?"

Sylvia considered. "What do you want to know?" she asked finally.

"Well, I'd like to know everything," said the man gaily. "My curiosity has been aroused to an almost unappeasable pitch. But of course I'll take any information you feel like doling out. In the first place, how, coming from such a ..." He checked himself and changed the form of his question: "I overheard you speaking to Victoria's maid, and I've been lying awake nights ever since, wondering how it happened that you speak French with so pure an accent."

"Oh, that's simple! Professor and Madame La Rue are old friends of the family and I've spent a lot of time with them. And then, of course, French is another mother-language for Father. He and Aunt Victoria were brought up in Paris, you know."

Morrison sighed. "Isn't it strange how all the miracles evaporate into mere chemical reactions when you once investigate! All the white-clad, ghostly spirits turn out to be clothes on the line. I suppose there's some equally natural explanation about your way on the piano—the clear, limpid phrasing of that Bach the other day, and then the color of the Bizet afterwards. It's astonishing to hear anybody of your crude youth playing Bach at all—and then to hear it played right—and afterwards to hear a modern given his right note...."

Sylvia was perfectly aware that she was being flattered, and she was immensely enjoying it. She became more animated, and the peculiar sparkle of her face more spirited. "Oh, that's old Reinhardt, my music teacher. He would take all the skin off my knuckles if I played a Bach gigue the least bit like that Arlesienne Minuet. He doesn't approve of Bizet very much, anyhow. He's a tremendous classicist."

"Isn't it," inquired Morrison, phrasing his question carefully, "isn't it, with no disrespect to La Chance intended, isn't it rather unusually good fortune for a smallish Western city to own a real musician?"

"Well, La Chance bears up bravely under its good fortune," said Sylvia dryly. "Old Mr. Reinhardt isn't exactly a prime favorite there. He's a terribly beery old man, and he wipes his nose on his sleeve. Our house was the only respectable one in town that he could go into. But then, our house isn't so very respectable. It has its advantages, not being so very respectable, though it 'most killed me as a young girl to feel us so. But I certainly have a choice gallery of queer folks in my acquaintance, and I have the queerest hodge-podge of scraps of things learned from them. I know a little Swedish from Miss Lindstroem. She's a Swedish old maid who does uplift work among the negroes—isn't that a weird combination? You just ought to hear what she makes of negro dialect! And I know all the socialist arguments from hearing a socialist editor get them off every Sunday afternoon. And I even know how to manage planchette and write mediumistically—save the mark!—from Cousin Parnelia, a crazy old cousin of Mother's who hangs round the house more or less."

"I begin to gather," surmised Morrison, "that you must have a remarkable father and mother. What are they like?"

"Well," said Sylvia thoughtfully, "Mother's the bravest thing you ever saw. She's not afraid of anything! I don't mean cows, or the house-afire, or mice, or such foolishness. I mean life and death, and sickness and poverty and fear...."

Morrison nodded his head understandingly, a fine light of appreciation in his eyes, "Not to be afraid of fear—that's splendid."

Sylvia went on to particularize. "When any of us are sick—it's my little brother Lawrence who is mostly—Judith and I are always well—Father just goes all to pieces, he gets so frightened. But Mother stiffens her back and makes everything in the house go on just as usual, very quiet, very calm. She holds everything together tight. She says it's sneaking and cowardly if you're going to accept life at all, not to accept all of it—the sour with the sweet—and not whimper."

"Very fine,—very fine! Possibly a very small bit ... grim?" commented Morrison, with a rising inflection.

"Oh, perhaps, a little!" agreed Sylvia, as if it did not matter; "but I can't give you any idea of Mother. She's—she's just great! And yet I couldn't live like her, without wanting to smash everything up. She's somebody that Seneca would have liked."

"And your father?" queried Morrison.

"Oh, he's great too—dear Father—but so different! He and Mother between them have just about all the varieties of human nature that are worth while! Father's red-headed (though it's mostly gray now), and quick, and blustering, and awfully clever, and just adored by his students, and talks every minute, and apparently does all the deciding, and yet ... he couldn't draw the breath of life without Mother; and when it comes right down to doing anything, what he always does is what he knows will come up to her standard."

Morrison raised delightedly amused hands to heaven. "The Recording Angel domiciled in the house!" he cried. "It had never occurred to me before how appallingly discerning the eye of the modern offspring must be. Go on, go on!"

Elated by the sensation of appearing clever, Sylvia continued with a fresh flow of eloquence. "And there never was such a highly moral bringing-up as we children have had. It's no fault of my family's if I've turned out a grasping materialist! I was brought up"—she flamed out suddenly as at some long-hoarded grievance—"I was brought up in a moral hot-house, and I haven't yet recovered from the shock of being transplanted into real earth in the real world."

Morrison paid instant tribute to her aroused and serious feeling by a grave look of attention. "Won't you explain?" he asked. "I'm so dull I don't follow you. But I haven't been so interested in years."

"Why, I mean," said Sylvia, trying hard to reduce to articulateness a complicated conception, "I mean that Father and Mother just deliberately represented values to me as different from what they really are, with real folks! And now I find that I'm real folks! I can't help it. You are as you are, you know. They kept representing to me always that the best pleasures are the ones that are the most important to folks—music, I mean, and Milton's poetry, and a fine novel—and, in Mother's case, a fine sunset, or a perfect rose, or things growing in the garden."

No old associate of Morrison's would have recognized the man's face, shocked as it was by surprise and interest out of his usual habit of conscious, acute, self-possessed observation. The angler had inadvertently stepped off a ledge into deep water, and a very swift current was tugging at him. He leaned forward, his eyes as eager with curiosity as a boy's. "Do I understand you to say that you repudiate those 'best pleasures'?"

"Of course you don't understand anything of the sort," said Sylvia very earnestly. "They've soaked me so in music that I'm a regular bond-slave to it. And a perfect rose is associated with so many lovely recollections of Mother's wonderful silent joy in it, that I could weep for pleasure. What I'm talking about—what I'm trying to tell you, is the shock it was to me, when I got out of that artificially unworldly atmosphere of home—for there's no use talking, it is artificial!—to find that those pleasures aren't the ones that are considered important and essential. How did I find things in the real world? Why, I find that people don't give a thought to those 'best pleasures' until they have a lot of other things first. Everything I'd been trained to value and treasure was negligible, not worth bothering about. But money—position—not having to work—elegance—those are vital—prime! Real people can't enjoy hearing a concert if they know they've got to wash up a lot of dishes afterwards. Hiring a girl to do that work is the first thing to do! There isn't another woman in the world, except my mother, who'd take any pleasure in a perfect rose if she thought her sleeves were so old-fashioned that people would stare at her. Folks talk about liking to look at a fine sunset, but what they give their blood and bones for, is a fine house on the best street in town!"

"Well, but you're not 'people' in that vulgar sense!" protested Morrison. He spoke now without the slightest arriere-pensee of flattering her, and Sylvia in her sudden burst for self-expression was unconscious of him, save as an opponent in an argument.

"You just say that, in that superior way," she flashed at him, "because you don't have to bother your head about such matters, because you don't have to associate with people who are fighting for those essentials. For they are what everybody except Father and Mother—every body feels to be the essentials—a pretty house, handsome clothes, servants to do the unpleasant things, social life—oh, plenty of money sums it all up, 'vulgar' as it sounds. And I don't believe you are different. I don't believe anybody you know is really a bit different! Let Aunt Victoria, let old Mr. Sommerville, lose their money, and you'd see how unimportant Debussy and Masaccio would be to them, compared to having to black their own shoes!"

"Well, upon my word!" exclaimed Morrison. "Are you at eighteen presuming to a greater knowledge of life than I at forty?"

"I'm not eighteen, I'm twenty-three," said Sylvia. "The difference is enormous. And if I don't know more about plain unvarnished human nature than you, I miss my guess! You haven't gone through five years at a State University, rubbing shoulders with folks who haven't enough sophistication to pretend to be different from what they are. You haven't taught music for three years in the middle-class families of a small Western city!" She broke off to laugh an apologetic depreciation of her own heat. "You'd think I was addressing a meeting," she said in her usual tone. "I got rather carried away because this is the first time I ever really spoke out about it. There are so few who could understand. If I ever tried to explain it to Father and Mother, I'd be sure to find them so deep in a discussion of the relation between Socrates and Christ that they couldn't pay any attention! Professor Kennedy could understand—but he's such a fanatic on the other side."

Morrison looked a quick suspicion. "Who is Professor Kennedy?" he inquired; and was frankly relieved when Sylvia explained: "He's the head of the Mathematics Department, about seventy years old, and the crossest, cantankerousest old misanthrope you ever saw. And thinks himself immensely clever for being so! He just loathes people—the way they really are—and he dotes on Mother and Judith because they're not like anybody else. And he hates me because they couldn't all hypnotize me into looking through their eyes. He thinks it low of me to realize that if you're going to live at all, you've got to live with people, and you can't just calmly brush their values on one side. He said once that any sane person in this world was like a civilized man with plenty of gold coin, cast away on a desert island with a tribe of savages who only valued beads and calico, and buttons and junk. And I said (I knew perfectly well he was hitting at me) that if he was really cast away and couldn't get to another island, I thought the civilized man would be an idiot to starve to death, when he could buy food of the savages by selling them junk. And I thought he just wasted his breath by swearing at the savages for not knowing about the value of gold. There I was hitting at him! He's spoiled his digestion, hating the way people are made. And Professor Kennedy said something nasty and neat (he's awfully clever) about that being rather a low occupation for a civilized being—taking advantage of the idiocies of savages—he meant me, of course—and he's right, it is a mean business; I hate it. And that's why I've always wanted to get on another island—not an uninhabited island, like the one Father and Mother have—but one where—well, this is one!" she waved her hand about the lovely room, "this is just one! Where everything's beautiful—costly too—but not just costly; where all the horrid, necessary consequences of things are taken care of without one's bothering—where flowers are taken out of the vases when they wilt and fresh ones put in; and dishes get themselves washed invisibly, inaudibly—and litter just vanishes without our lifting a hand. Of course the people who live so always, can rejoice with a clear mind in sunsets and bright talk. That's what I meant the other day—the day Judith came—when I said I'd arrived in Capua at last; when old Mr. Sommerville thought me so materialistic and cynical. If he did that, on just that phrase—what must you think, after all this confession intime d'un enfant du siecle?" She stopped with a graceful pretense of dreading his judgment, although she knew that she had been talking well, and read nothing but admiration in his very expressive face.

"But all this means, you extraordinary young person, that you're not in the least an enfant du siecle!" he cried. "It means that you're dropped down in this groaning, heavy-spirited twentieth century, troubled about many things, from the exact year that was the golden climax of the Renaissance; that you're a perfect specimen of the high-hearted, glorious ..." he qualified on a second thought, "unless your astonishing capacity to analyze it all, comes from the nineteenth century?"

"No, that comes from Father," explained Sylvia, laughing. "Isn't it funny, using the tool Father taught me to handle, against his ideas! He's just great on analysis. As soon as we were old enough to think at all, he was always practising us on analysis—especially of what made us want things, or not like them. It's one of his sayings—he's always getting it off to his University classes—that if you have once really called an emotion or an ambition by its right name, you have it by the tail, so to speak—that if you know, for instance, that it's your vanity and not your love that's wounded by something, you'll stop caring. But I never noticed that it really worked if you cared hard enough. Diagnosing a disease doesn't help you any, if you keep right on being sick with it."

"My dear! My dear!" cried the man, leaning towards her again, and looking—dazzled—into the beauty and intelligence of her eyes, "the idea that you are afflicted with any disease could only occur to the morbid mind of the bluest-nosed Puritan who ever cut down a May-pole! You're wonderfully, you're terrifyingly, you are superbly sound and vigorous!"

Breaking in upon this speech, there came the quick, smooth purr of an automobile with all its parts functioning perfectly, a streak of dark gray past the shutters, the sigh of an engine stopped suddenly—Molly Sommerville sprang from behind the steering wheel and ran into the house. She was exquisitely flushed and eager when she came in, but when she saw the two alone in the great, cool, dusky room, filled to its remotest corners with the ineffable aroma of long, intimate, and interrupted talk, she was brought up short. She faltered for an instant and then continued to advance, her eyes on Sylvia. "It's so hot," she said, at random, "and I thought I'd run over for tea—"

"Oh, of course," said Sylvia, jumping up in haste, "it's late! I'd forgotten it was time for tea! Blame me! Since I've been here, Aunt Victoria has left it to me—where shall I say to have it set?"

"The pergola's lovely," suggested Molly. She took her close motor-hat from the pure gold of her hair with a rather listless air.

"All right—the pergola!" agreed Sylvia, perhaps a little too anxiously. In spite of herself, she gave, and she knew she was giving, the effect of needing somehow to make something up to Molly....



CHAPTER XXV

NOTHING IN THE LEAST MODERN

Sylvia was sitting in the garden, an unread book on her knees, dreaming among red and yellow and orange gladioli. She looked with a fixed, bright, beatific stare at the flame-colored flowers and did not see them. She saw only Felix Morrison, she heard only his voice, she was brimming with the sense of him. In a few moments she would go into the house and find him in the darkened living-room, as he had been every afternoon for the last fortnight, ostensibly come in to lounge away the afternoon over a book, really waiting for her to join him. And when she came in, he would look up at her, that wonderful penetrating deep look of his ... and she would welcome him with her eyes.

And then they would talk! Judith and Arnold would be playing tennis, oblivious of the heat, and Aunt Victoria would be annihilating the tedious center of the day by sleep. Nobody would interrupt them for hours. How they would talk! How they had talked! As she thought of it the golden fortnight hummed and sang about Sylvia's ears like a Liszt Liebes-Traum.

They had talked of everything in the world, and it all meant but one thing, that they had discovered each other, a discovery visibly as wonderful for Morrison as for the girl. They had discovered each other, and they had been intelligent enough to know at once what it meant. They knew! And in a moment she would go into the house to him. She half closed her eyes as before a too-great brilliance....

Arnold appeared at the other end of the long row of gladioli. He was obviously looking for some one. Sylvia called to him, with the friendly tone she always had for him: "Here I am! I don't know where Judith is. Will I do?"

From a distance Arnold nodded, and continued to advance, the irregularity of his wavering gait more pronounced than usual. As soon as she could see the expression of his face, Sylvia's heart began to beat fast, with a divination of something momentous. He sat down beside her, took off his hat, and laid it on the bench. "Do you remember," he asked in a strange, high voice, "that you said you would like me for your brother?"

She nodded.

"Well, I'm going to be," he said, and covering his face with his hands, burst into sobs.

Sylvia was so touched by his emotion, so sympathetically moved by his news, that even through her happy ejaculations the tears rained down her own cheeks. She tried to wipe them away and discovered, absurdly enough, that she had lost her handkerchief. "Aren't we idiots!" she cried in a voice of joyful quavers. "I never understood before why everybody cries at a wedding. See here, Arnold, I've lost my handkerchief. Loan me yours." She pulled his handkerchief out of his pocket, she wiped her eyes, she put a sisterly kiss on his thin, sallow cheek, she cried: "You dears! Isn't it too good to be true! Arnold! So soon! Inside two weeks! How ever could you have the courage? Judith! My Judith! Why, she never looked at a man before. How did you dare?"

His overmastering fit of emotion was passed now. His look was of white, incredulous exaltation. "We saw each other and ran into each other's arms," he said; "I didn't have to 'dare.' It was like breathing."

"Oh, how perfect!" she cried, "how simply, simply perfect!" and now there was for an instant a note of wistful envy in her voice. "It's all perfect! She never so much as looked at a man before, and you said the other night you'd never been in love before."

Arnold looked at her wildly. "I said that!" he cried.

"Why, yes, don't you remember, after that funny, joking talk with me, you said that was the nearest you'd ever come to proposing to any girl?"

"God Almighty!" cried the man, and did not apologize for the blasphemy. He looked at her fixedly, as though unguessed-at horizons of innocence widened inimitably before his horrified eyes. And then, following some line of association which escaped Sylvia, "I'm not fit to look at Judith!" he cried. The idea seemed to burst upon him like a thunder-clap.

Sylvia patted him on the shoulder reassuringly. "That's the proper thing for a lover to think!" she said with cheerful, commonplace inanity. She did not notice that he shrank from her hand, because she now sprang up, crying, "But where's Judy? Where is Judy?"

He nodded towards the house. "She sent me out to get you. She's in her room—she wants to tell you—but when I saw you, I couldn't keep it to myself." His exaltation swept back like a wave, from the crest of which he murmured palely, "Judith! Judith!" and Sylvia laughed at him, with the tears of sympathy in her eyes, and leaving him there on the bench staring before him at the living fire of the flame-colored flowers, she ran with all her speed into the house.

Morrison, lounging in a chair with a book, looked up, startled at her whirlwind entrance. "What's up?" he inquired.

At the sound of his voice, she checked herself and pirouetted with a thistle-down lightness to face him. Her face, always like a clear, transparent vase lighted from within, now gave out, deeply moved as she was, an almost visible brightness. "Judith!" she cried, her voice ringing like a silver trumpet, "Judith and Arnold!" She was poised like a butterfly, and as she spoke she burst into flight again, and was gone.

She had not been near him, but the man had the distinct impression that she had thrown herself on his neck and kissed him violently, in a transport of delight. In the silent room, still fragrant, still echoing with her passage, he closed his book, and later his eyes, and sat with the expression of a connoisseur savoring an exquisite, a perfect impression....

* * * * *

Tea that afternoon was that strangest of phenomena, a formal ceremony of civilized life performed in the abashing and disconcerting presence of naked emotion. Arnold and Judith sat on opposite sides of the pergola, Judith shining and radiant as the dawn, her usually firmly set lips soft and tremulous; Arnold rather pale, impatient, oblivious to what was going on around him, his spirit prostrated before the miracle; and when their starry eyes met, there flowed from them and towards them from every one in the pergola, a thousand unseen waves of excitement.

The mistress of the house herself poured tea in honor of the great occasion, and she was very humorous and amusing about the mistakes caused by her sympathetic agitation. "There! I've put three lumps in yours, Mr. Sommerville. How could I! But I really don't know what I'm doing. This business of having love-at-first-sight in one's very family—! Give your cup to Molly; I'll make you a fresh one. Oh, Arnold! How could you look at Judith just then! You made me fill this cup so full I can't pass it!"

Mr. Sommerville, very gallant and full of compliments and whimsical allusions, did his best to help their hostess strike the decent note of easy pleasantry; but they were both battling with something too strong for them. Unseconded as they were by any of the others, they gave a little the effect of people bowing and smirking to each other at the foot of a volcano in full eruption. Morrison, picking up the finest and sharpest of his conversational tools, ventured the hazardous enterprise of expressing this idea to them. Mrs. Marshall-Smith, trying one topic after another, expressed an impatience with the slow progress of a Henry James novel she was reading, and Mr. Sommerville, remarking with a laugh, "Oh, you cannot hurry Henry," looked to see his mild witticism rewarded by a smile from the critic. But Morrison shook his head, "No, my dear old friend. Il faut hurler avec les loups—especially if you are so wrought up by their hurlements that you can't hear yourself think. I'm just giving myself up to the rareness, the richness of the impression."

The new fiancee herself talked rather more than usual, though this meant by no means loquacity, and presented more the appearance of composure than any one else there; although this was amusingly broken by a sudden shortness of breath whenever she met Arnold's eyes. She said in answer to a question that she would be going on to her hospital the day after tomorrow—her two weeks' vacation over—oh yes, she would finish her course at the hospital; she had only a few more months. And in answer to another question, Arnold replied, obviously impatient at having to speak to any one but Judith, that of course he didn't mind if she went on and got her nurse's diploma—didn't she want to? Anything she wanted....

No—decidedly the thing was too big to make a successful fete of. Morrison was silent and appreciatively observant, his eyes sometimes on Sylvia, sometimes on Judith; Mr. Sommerville, continuing doggedly to make talk, descended to unheard-of trivialities in reporting the iniquities of his chauffeur; Molly stirred an untasted cup, did not raise her eyes at all, and spoke only once or twice, addressing to Sylvia a disconnected question or two, in the answers to which she had obviously no interest. Judith and Arnold had never been very malleable social material, and in their present formidable condition they were as little assistance in the manufacture of geniality as a couple of African lions.

The professional fete-makers were consequently enormously relieved when it was over and their unavailing efforts could be decently discontinued. Professing different reasons for escape, they moved in disjointed groups across the smooth perfection of the lawn towards the house, where Molly's car stood, gleaming in the sun. Sylvia found herself, as she expected, manoeuvered to a place beside Morrison. He arranged it with his unobtrusive deftness in getting what he wanted out of a group of his fellow-beings, and she admired his skill, and leaned on it confidently. They had had no opportunity that day for the long talk which had been a part of every afternoon for the last week; and she now looked with a buoyant certainty to have him arrange an hour together before dinner. Her anticipation of it on that burning day of reflected heat sent thrills of eager disquietude over her. It was not only for Judith and Arnold that the last week had been one of meeting eyes, long twilight evenings of breathless, quick-ripening intimacy....