Why, perhaps Professor Kennedy—perhaps—she flung out her arms—perhaps her father—
She ran to the piano as to a refuge, meaning to drown out these maddening speculations, which were by this time tinctured with insanity; but the first chords she struck jarred on her ear like a discordant scream. She turned away and stood looking at the floor with a darkening face, one hand at her temple.
* * * * *
Her mother, darning stockings by the window, suddenly laid down her work and said: "Sylvia, how would you like to walk with me over to the Martins' to see if they have any eggs? Our hens have absolutely gone back on us."
Sylvia did not welcome this idea at all, feeling as overwhelming an aversion to companionship as to solitude, but she could think of no excuse, and in an ungracious silence put on her wraps and joined her mother, ready on the porch, the basket in her mittened hand.
Mrs. Marshall's pace was always swift, and on that crisp, cold, sunny day, with the wind sweeping free over the great open spaces of the plain about them, she walked even more rapidly than usual. Not a word was spoken. Sylvia, quite as tall as her mother now, and as vigorous, stepped beside her, not noticing their pace, nor the tingling of the swift blood in her feet and hands. Her fresh young face was set in desolate bitterness.
The Martins' house was about six miles from the Marshalls'. It was reached, the eggs procured, and the return begun. Still not a word had been exchanged between the two women. Mrs. Marshall would have been easily capable, under the most ordinary circumstances, of this long self-contained silence, but it had worked upon Sylvia like a sojourn in the dim recesses of a church. She felt moved, stirred, shaken. But it was not until the brief winter sun was beginning to set red across the open reaches of field and meadow that her poisoned heart overflowed. "Oh, Mother—!" she exclaimed in an unhappy tone, and said no more. She knew no words to phrase what was in her mind.
"Yes, dear," said her mother gently. She looked at her daughter anxiously, expectantly, with a passion of yearning in her eyes, but she said no more than those two words.
There was a silence. Sylvia was struggling for expression. They continued to walk swiftly through the cold, ruddy, sunset air, the hard-frozen road ringing beneath their rapid advance. Sylvia clasped her hands together hard in her muff. She felt that something in her heart was dying, was suffocating for lack of air, and yet that it would die if she brought it to light. She could find no words at all to ask for help, agonizing in a shy reticence impossible for an adult to conceive. Finally, beginning at random, very hurriedly, looking away, she brought out, faltering, "Mother,isit true that all men are—that when a girl marries she must expect to—aren't thereanymen who—" She stopped, burying her burning face in her muff.
Her words, her tone, the quaver of desperate sincerity in her accent, brought her mother up short. She stopped abruptly and faced the girl. "Sylvia, look at me!" she said in a commanding voice which rang loud in the frosty silences about them. Sylvia started and looked into her mother's face. It was moved so darkly and so deeply from its usual serene composure that she would have recoiled in fear, had she not been seized upon and held motionless by the other's compelling eyes.
"Sylvia," said her mother, in a strong, clear voice, acutely contrasted to Sylvia's muffled tones, "Sylvia, it's a lie that men are nothing but sensual! There's nothing in marriage that a good girl honestly in love with a good man need fear."
"But—but—" began Sylvia, startled out of her shyness.
Her mother cut her short. "Anything that's felt by decent men in love is felt just as truly, though maybe not always so strongly, by women in love. And if a woman doesn't feel that answer in her heart to what he feels—why, he's no mate for her. Anything's better for her than going on. And, Sylvia, you mustn't get the wrong idea. Sensual feeling isn't bad in itself. It's in the world because we have bodies as well as minds—it's like the root of a plant. But it oughtn't to be a very big part of the plant. And it must be the root of the woman's feeling as well as the man's, or everything's all wrong."
"But how can youtell!" burst out Sylvia.
"You can tell by the way you feel, if you don't lie to yourself, or let things like money or social position count. If an honest girl shrinks from a man instinctively, there's something not right—sensuality is too big a part of what the man feels for her—and look here, Sylvia, that's not always the man's fault. Women don't realize as they ought how base it is to try to attract men by their bodies," she made her position clear with relentless precision, "when they wear very low-necked dresses, for instance—" At this chance thrust, a wave of scarlet burst up suddenly over Sylvia's face, but she could not withdraw her eyes from her mother's searching, honest gaze, which, even more than her words, spoke to the girl's soul. The strong, grave voice went on unhesitatingly. For once in her life Mrs. Marshall was speaking out. She was like one who welcomes the opportunity to make a confession of faith. "There's no healthy life possible without some sensual feeling between the husband and wife, but there's nothing in the world more awful than married life when it's the only common ground."
Sylvia gazed with wide eyes at the older woman's face, ardent, compelling, inspired, feeling too deeply, to realize it wholly, the vital and momentous character of the moment. She seemed to see nothing, to be aware of nothing but her mother's heroic eyes of truth; but the whole scene was printed on her mind for all her life—the hard, brown road they stood on, the grayed old rail-fence back of Mrs. Marshall, a field of brown stubble, a distant grove of beech-trees, and beyond and around them the immense sweeping circle of the horizon. The very breath of the pure, scentless winter air was to come back to her nostrils in after years.
"Sylvia," her mother went on, "it is one of the responsibilities of men and women to help each other to meet on a high plane and not on a low one. And on the whole—health's the rule of the world—on the whole, that's the way the larger number of husbands and wives, imperfect as they are, do live together. Family life wouldn't be possible a day if they didn't."
Like a strong and beneficent magician, she built up again and illuminated Sylvia's black and shattered world. "Your father is just as pure a man as I am a woman, and I would be ashamed to look any child of mine in the face if he were not. You know no men who are not decent—except two—and those you did not meet in your parents' home."
For the first time she moved from her commanding attitude of prophetic dignity. She came closer to Sylvia, but although she looked at her with a sudden sweetness which affected Sylvia like a caress, she but made one more impersonal statement: "Sylvia dear, don't let anything make you believe that there are not as many decent men in the world as women, and they're just as decent. Life isn't worth living unless you know that—and it's true." Apparently she had said all she had to say, for she now kissed Sylvia gently and began again to walk forward.
The sun had completely set, and the piled-up clouds on the horizon flamed and blazed. Sylvia stood still, looking at them fixedly. The great shining glory seemed reflected from her heart, and cast its light upon a regenerated world—a world which she seemed to see for the first time. Strange, in that moment of intensely personal life, how her memory was suddenly flooded with impersonal impressions of childhood, little regarded at the time and long since forgotten, but now recurring to her with the authentic and uncontrovertible brilliance which only firsthand experiences in life can bring with them—all those families of her public-school mates, the plain, ugly homes in and out of which she had come and gone, with eyes apparently oblivious of all but childish interests, but really recording life-facts which now in her hour of need stretched under her feet like a solid pathway across an oozing marsh. All those men and women whom she had seen in a thousand unpremeditated acts, those tired-faced, kind-eyed, unlettered fathers and mothers were not breathing poisoned air, were not harboring in their simple lives a ghastly devouring wild-beast. She recalled with a great indrawn breath all the farmer-neighbors, parents working together for the children, the people she knew so well from long observation of their lives, whose mediocre, struggling existence had filled her with scornful pity, but whom now she recalled with a great gratitude for the explicitness of the revelations made by their untutored plainness. For all she could ever know, the Drapers and the Fiskes and the others of their world might be anything, under the discreet reticence of their sophistication; but they did not make up all the world. She knew, from having breathed it herself, the wind of health which blew about those other lives, bare and open to the view, as less artless lives were not. There was some other answer to the riddle, beside Mrs. Draper's.
Sylvia was only eighteen years old and had the childish immaturity of her age, but her life had been so ordered that she was not, even at eighteen, entirely in the helpless position of a child who must depend on the word of others. She had accumulated, unknown to herself, quite apart from polished pebbles of book-information, a small treasury of living seeds of real knowledge of life, taken in at first-hand, knowledge of which no one could deprive her. The realization of this was a steadying ballast which righted the wildly rolling keel under her feet. She held up her head bravely against the first onslaught of the storm. She set her hand to the rudder!
Perceiving that her mother had passed on ahead of her she sprang forward in a run. She ran like a schoolboy, like a deer, like a man from whose limbs heavy shackles have been struck off. She felt so suddenly lightened of a great heaviness that she could have clapped her hands over her head and bounded into the air. She was, after all, but eighteen years old, and three years before had been a child.
She came up to her mother with a rush, radiating life. Mrs. Marshall looked at the glowing face and her own eyes, dry till then, filled with the tears so rare in her self-controlled life. She put out her hand, took Sylvia's, and they sped along through the quick-gathering dusk, hand-in-hand like sisters.
Judith and Lawrence had reached home before them, and the low brown house gleamed a cheerful welcome to them from shining windows. For the first time in her life, Sylvia did not take for granted her home, with all that it meant. For an instant it looked strangely sweet to her. She had a passing glimpse, soon afterwards lost in other impressions, of how in after years she would look back on the roof which had sheltered and guarded her youth.
She lay awake that night a long time, staring up into the cold blackness, her mind very active and restless in the intense stillness about her. She thought confusedly but intensely of many things—the months behind her, of Jerry, of Mrs. Draper, of her yellow dress, of her mother—of herself. In the lucidity of those silent hours of wakefulness she experienced for a time the piercing, regenerating thrust of self-knowledge. For a moment the full-beating pulses of her youth slackened, and between their throbs there penetrated to her perplexed young heart the rarest of human emotions, a sincere humility. If she had not burned the yellow dress at Mercerton, she would have arisen and burned it that night….
During the rest of the Christmas vacation she avoided being alone. She and Judith and Lawrence skated a great deal, and Sylvia learned at last to cut the grapevine pattern on the ice. She also mastered the first movement of the Sonata Pathétique, so that old Reinhardt was almost satisfied.
The day after the University opened for the winter term the Huberts announced the engagement of their daughter Eleanor to Jermain Fiske, Jr., the brilliant son of that distinguished warrior and statesman, Colonel Jermain Fiske. Sylvia read this announcement in the Society Column of the La ChanceMorning 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.
Judith had said to the family, taking no especial pains that her sister should not hear her, "Well, folks, now that Sylvia's got through with that horrid Fiske fellow, I do hope we'll all have some peace!" a remark which proved to be a prophecy. They all, including Sylvia herself, knew the tranquillity of an extended period of peace.
It began abruptly, like opening a door into a new room. Sylvia had dreaded the beginning of the winter term and the inevitable sight of Jerry, the enforced crossings of their paths. But Jerry never returned to his classes at all. The common talk was to the effect that the Colonel had "worked his pull" to have Jerry admitted to the bar without further preliminaries. After some weeks of relief, it occurred to Sylvia that perhaps Jerry had dreaded meeting her as much as she had seeing him. For whatever reason, the campus saw young Fiske no more, except on the day in May when he passed swiftly across it on his way to the Hubert house where Eleanor, very small and white-faced, waited for him under a crown of orange blossoms.
Sylvia did not go to the wedding, although an invitation had come, addressed economically and compendiously to "Professor and Mrs. Marshall and family." It was a glorious spring day and in her Greek history course they had just reached the battle of Salamis, at the magnificent recital of which Sylvia's sympathetic imagination leaped up rejoicing, as all sympathetic imaginations have for all these many centuries. She was thrilling to a remembered bit of "The Persians" as she passed by the Hubert house late that afternoon. She was chanting to herself, "The right wing, well marshaled, led on foremost in good order, and we heard a mighty shout—'Sons of the Greeks! On! Free your country!'" She did not notice that she trod swiftly across a trail of soiled rice in the Hubert driveway.
She was like a person recovered from a fever who finds mere health a condition of joy. She went back to her music, to her neglected books, with a singing heart. And in accordance with the curious ways of Providence, noted in the proverb relating the different fates of him who hath and him who hath not, there was at once added to her pleasure in the old elements of her life the very elements she had longed for unavailingly. Seeing her friendly and shining of face, friendliness went out to her. She had made many new acquaintances during her brief glittering flight and had innumerable more points of contact with the University life than before. She was invited to a quite sufficient number of hops and proms, had quite the normal number of masculine "callers," and was naïvely astonished and disillusioned to find that those factors in life were by no means as entirely desirable and amusing as her anguished yearning had fancied them. She joined one of the literary societies and took a leading part in their annual outdoor play. At the beginning of her Junior year, Judith entered as a Freshman and thereafter became a close companion. Sylvia devoured certain of her studies, history, and English, and Greek, with insatiable zest and cast aside certain others like political economy and physics, which bored her, mastering just enough of their elements to pass an examination and promptly forgetting them thereafter. She grew rapidly in intellectual agility and keenness, not at all in philosophical grasp, and emotionally remained as dormant as a potato in a cellar.
She continually looked forward with a bright, vague interest to "growing up," to the mastery of life which adolescents so trustfully associate with the arrival of adult years. She spent three more years in college, taking a Master's degree after her B.A., and during those three years, through the many-colored, shifting, kaleidoscopic, disorganized life of an immensely populous institution of learning, she fled with rapid feet, searching restlessly everywhere for that entity, as yet non-existent, her own soul.
She had, in short, a thoroughly usual experience of modern American education, emerging at the end with a vast amount of information, with very little notion of what it was all about, with Phi Beta Kappa and a great wonder what she was to do with herself.
Up to that moment almost every step of her life had been ordered and systematized, that she might the more quickly and surely arrive at the goal of her diploma. Rushing forward with the accumulated impetus of years of training in swiftly speeding effort, she flashed by the goal … and stopped short, finding herself in company with a majority of her feminine classmates in a blind alley. "Nowwhat?" 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. "Howcanthey!" 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 invitingSylvia 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!"
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. WhowasCapua, 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'stea!" 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 métier.' 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 takethataway 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'llgivehim 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. Whowasthis 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," saidMolly, "andIthink 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."
"Whatareyou, if a mere grandfather may venture to inquire?" askedMr. Sommerville deferentially.
"I'm afemme 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 youdodrive 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."
"Itisfascinating," 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 Idid! 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. "Yougo, Sylvia dear.I'llmake 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'sawfullygood of you, Molly darling!Youwon'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 supposeSylvia 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 youtalkingabout?" asked Sylvia, perhaps slightly overdoing her ignorance of his meaning.
"Why, it's a new thing forhim, 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, Imeanfish, 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. Ithasto 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 ofmoney," 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, "Gameandset!" and added in a generous tribute, "Say, you canplay!" 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 thematterwith 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 usethatargument?" said Sylvia, putting him down conclusively.
He spoke with a sudden heartfelt simplicity, "Damn 'f Iknow, 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, youknowI'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, itwouldbe 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 onyou!" 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, whydon'tyou 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'vealwaysliked 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.
"Aboutyou?" 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 nearestIever 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.
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'smorallythat 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 façade 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! Howisshe 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 justfine! 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 yousupposeshe does with her hair? She wears it in a great smooth braid all around her head. And she hassuchhair, 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, thatwillhang 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—sheisa 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 nocriticism, "I didn't know that anybody nowadays made such sillyVictorian generalizations about woman's cattiness,—anybody under oldMr. Sommerville's age, that is. And anyhow, Judith's mysister."
"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'shaveher 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 goodnessIknew 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 dowith. 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 tête-à-tête 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 boreyou, 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 getme! 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 whatyoufeel or don't feel about me … it's whatIfeel 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, theycanbe! 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 youcando 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 naïvely phrased, rashly innocent guess at a new possibility for humanity, "of course if the man's adecentman."
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, "youare!"
He made a quavering attempt to be whimsical. "I'd like to know whatyouknow about it!" he said.
"I know! Iknow!" 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'vedone…" said Sylvia … "it's what you are!"
"What Iam," 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'llbelieveme 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'tunderstandmuch 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 … Iknow!" 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 withthat, would you? And I don't see how it did. Oh, I don't mean I don't dearly love pretty dresses now. Ido. 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 hedidn'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, Idon't!I've been getting sicker and sicker over everything. What the devilamI 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, JudithMarshall!" cried Sylvia, falling upon her breathlessly."However in the world did you gethere!"
Arnold said nothing. He had fallen back a step and now looked at the new-comer with a fixed, dazzled gaze.