Sylvia, as unused as her mother to conversational traps, fell into this one with an eager promptness. "Oh yes, indeed; I know him by sight very well," she said and stopped, flushing again at a significant laugh from Mrs. Draper. "I mean," she went on with dignity, "that Mr. Fiske has always been so prominent in college--football and all, you know--and his father being one of our State Senators so long--I suppose everybody on the campus knows him by sight." Mrs. Draper patted the girl's shoulder propitiatingly. "Yes, yes, of course," she a.s.sented. She added, "He's ever so good-looking, don't you think--like a great Viking with his yellow hair and bright blue eyes?"

"I never noticed his eyes," said Sylvia stiffly, suspicious of ridicule in the air.

"Well, you'll have a chance to this afternoon," answered her hostess, "for he's the only other person who's to be admitted to the house. I had a great time excusing myself to Eleanor--she was coming to take me out driving--but of course it wouldn't do--for her own sake--the poor darling--to have her here today!"

Sylvia thought she could not have rightly understood the significance of this speech, and looked uncomfortable. Mrs. Draper said: "Oh, you needn't mind cutting Eleanor out--she's only a dear baby who can't feel anything very deeply. It's Mamma Hubert who's so mad about catching Jerry. Since she's heard he's to have the Fiske estate at Mercerton as soon as he graduates from Law School, she's like a wild creature! If Eleanor weren't the most unconscious little bait that ever hung on a hook Jerry'd have turned away in disgust long ago. He may not be so very acute, but Mamma Hubert and her manoeuvers are not millstones for seeing through!"

The doorbell rang, one long and one short tap. "That's Jerry's ring,"

said Mrs. Draper composedly, as though she had been speaking of her husband. In an instant the heavy portieres were flung back by a vigorous arm, and a very tall, broad-shouldered, clean-shaven young man, in a well-tailored brown suit, stepped in. He accosted his hostess with easy a.s.surance, but went through his introduction to Sylvia in a rather awkward silence.

"Now we'll have tea," said Mrs. Draper at once, pressing a b.u.t.ton. In a moment a maid brought in a tray shining with silver and porcelain, set it down on the table in front of Mrs. Draper, and then wheeled in a little circular table with shelves, a glorified edition in gleaming mahogany of the homely, white-painted wheeled-tray of Sylvia's home.

On the shelves was a large a.s.sortment of delicate, small cakes and paper-thin sandwiches. While she poured out the amber-colored tea into the translucent cups, Mrs. Draper kept up with the new-comer a lively monologue of personalities, in which Sylvia, for very ignorance of the people involved, could take no part. She sat silent, watching with concentration the two people before her, the singularly handsome man, certainly the handsomest man she had ever seen, and the far from handsome but singularly alluring woman who faced him, making such a display of her two good points, her rich figure and her fine dark eyes, that for an instant the rest of her person seemed non-existent.

"How do you like your tea, dear?" The mistress of the house brought her stranded guest back into the current of talk with this well-worn hook.

"Oh, it doesn't make any difference," said Sylvia, who, as it happened, did not like the taste of tea.

"You really ought to have it nectar; with whipped ambrosia on top."

Mrs. Draper troweled this statement on with a dashing smear, saving Sylvia from being forced to answer, by adding lightly to the man, "Is ambrosia anything that will whip, do you suppose?"

"Never heard of it before," he answered, breaking his silence with a carefree absence of shame at his confession of ignorance. "Sounds like one of those labels on a soda-water fountain that n.o.body ever samples."

Mrs. Draper made a humorously exaggerated gesture of despair and turned to Sylvia. "Well, it's just as well, my dear, that you should know at the very beginning what a perfect monster of illiteracy he is!

You needn't expect anything from him but his stupid good-looks, and money and fascination. Otherwise he's a Cave-Man for ignorance. You must take him in hand!" She turned back to the man. "Sylvia, you know, is as clever as she is beautiful. She had the highest rank but three in her cla.s.s last year."

Sylvia was overcome with astonishment by this knowledge of a fact which had seemed to make no impression on the world of the year before. "Why, how could you know that!" she cried.

Mrs. Draper laughed. "Just hear her!" she appealed to the young man.

Her method of promoting the acquaintance of the two young people seemed to consist in talking to each of the other. "Just hear her! She converses as she fences--one bright flash, and you're skewered against the wall--no parryings possible!" She faced Sylvia again: "Why, my dear, in answer to your rapier-like question, I must simply confess that this morning, being much struck with Jerry's being struck with you, I went over to the registrar's office and looked you up. I know that you pa.s.sed supremely well in mathematics and French (what a quaint combination!), very well indeed in history and chemistry, and moderately in botany. What's the matter with botany? I have always found Professor Cross a very obliging little man."

"He doesn't make me see any sense to botany," explained Sylvia, taking the question seriously. "I don't seem to get hold of any real reason for studying it at all. What difference does it make if a bush is a hawthorn or not?--and anyhow, I know it's a hawthorn without studying botany."

The young man spoke for himself now, with a keen relish for Sylvia's words. He faced her for the first time. "Now you're _shouting_, Miss Marshall!" he said. "That's the most sensible thing I ever heard said.

That's just what I always felt about the whole B.A. course, anyhow!

What's the diff? Who cares whether Charlemagne lived in six hundred or sixteen hundred? It all happened before we were born. What's it all _to_ us?"

Sylvia looked squarely at him, a little startled at his directly addressing her, not hearing a word of what he said in the vividness of her first-hand impression of his personality, his brilliant blue eyes, his full, very red lips, his boldly handsome face and carriage, his air of confidence. In spite of his verbal agreement with her opinion, his look crossed hers dashingly, like a challenge, a novelty in the amicable harmony which had been the tradition of her life. She felt that tradition to be not without its monotony, and her young blood warmed. She gazed back at him silently, wonderingly, frankly.

With her radiantly sensuous youth in the first splendor of its opening, with this frank, direct look, she had a moment of brilliance to make the eyes of age shade themselves as against a dazzling brightness. The eyes of the man opposite her were not those of age.

They rested on her, roused, kindling to heat. His head went up like a stag's. She felt a momentary hot throb of excitement, as though her body were one great fiddle-string, tw.a.n.ging under a vigorously plucking thumb. It was thrilling, it was startling, it was not altogether pleasant. The corners of her sensitive mouth twitched uncertainly.

Mrs. Draper, observing from under her down-drooped lids this silent pa.s.sage between the two, murmured amusedly to herself, "Ah, now you're shouting, my children!"

CHAPTER XVI

PLAYING WITH MATCHES

There was much that was acrid about the sweetness of triumph which the next months brought Sylvia. The sudden change in her life had not come until there was an acc.u.mulation of bitterness in her heart the venting of which was the strongest emotion of that period of strong emotions.

As she drove about the campus, perched on the high seat of the red-wheeled dog-cart, her lovely face looked down with none of Eleanor Hubert's gentleness into the envying eyes of the other girls. A high color burned in her cheeks, and her bright eyes were not soft. She looked continually excited.

At home she was hard to live with, quick to take offense at the least breath of the adverse criticism which she felt, unspoken and forbearing but thick in the air about her. She neglected her music, she neglected her studies; she spent long hours of feverish toil over Aunt Victoria's chiffons and silks. There was need for many toilets now, for the incessantly recurring social events to which she went with young Fiske, chaperoned by Mrs. Draper, who had for her old rival and enemy, Mrs. Hubert, the most mocking of friendly smiles, as she entered a ballroom, the acknowledged sponsor of the brilliant young sensation of the college season.

At these dances Sylvia had the grim satisfaction, not infrequently the experience of intelligent young ladies, of being surrounded by crowds of admiring young men, for whom she had no admiration, the barren sterility of whose conversation filled her with astonishment, even in her fever of exultation. She knew the delights of frequently "splitting" her dances so that there might be enough to go around. She was plunged headlong into the torrent of excitement which is the life of a social favorite at a large State University, that breathless whirl of one engagement after another for every evening and for most of the days, which is one of the oddest developments of the academic life as planned and provided for by the pioneer fathers of those great Western commonwealths; and she savored every moment of it, for during every moment she drank deep at the bitter fountain of personal vindication. She went to all the affairs which had ignored her the year before, to all the dances given by the "swell men's fraternities," to the Soph.o.m.ore hop, to the "Football Dance," at the end of the season, to the big reception given to the Freshman cla.s.s by the Seniors. And in addition to these evening affairs, she appeared beside Jerry Fiske at every football game, at the first Glee Club Concert, at the outdoor play given by the Literary Societies, and very frequently at the weekly receptions to the students tendered by the ladies of the faculty.

These affairs were always spoken of by the faculty as an attempt to create a h.o.m.ogeneous social atmosphere on the campus; but this attempt had ended, as such efforts usually do, in adding to the bewildering plethora of social life of those students who already had too much, and in being an added sting to the solitude and ostracism of those who had none. Naturally enough, the ladies of the faculty who took most interest in these afternoon functions were the ones who cared most for society life, and there was only too obvious a contrast between their manner of kindly, vague, condescending interest shown to one of the "rough-neck" students, and the easy familiarity shown to one of those socially "possible." The "rough-necks" seldom sought out more than once the prettily decorated tables spread every Friday afternoon in the Faculty Room, off the reading-room of the Library. Sylvia especially had, on the only occasion when she had ventured into this charming scene, suffered too intensely from the difference of treatment accorded her and that given Eleanor Hubert to feel anything but angry resentment. After that experience, she had pa.s.sed along the halls with the other outsiders, books in hand, her head held proudly high, and never turned even to glance in at the gleaming tables, the lighted candles, and the little groups of easily self-confident fraternity men and girls laughing and talking over their teacups, and revenging vicariously the rest of the ignored student-body by the calm young insolence with which they in their turn ignored their presumptive hostesses, the faculty ladies.

Mrs. Draper changed all this for Sylvia with a wave of her wand. She took the greatest pains to introduce her protegee into this phase of the social life of the University. On these occasions, as beautiful and as over-dressed as any girl in the room, with Jermain Fiske in obvious attendance; with the exclusive Mrs. Draper setting in a rich frame of commentary any remark she happened to make (Sylvia was acquiring a reputation for great wit); with Eleanor Hubert, eclipsed, sitting in a corner, quite deserted save for a funny countrified freak a.s.sistant in chemistry; with all the "swellest frat men" in college rushing to get her tea and sandwiches; with Mrs. Hubert plunged obviously into acute unhappiness, Sylvia knew as ugly moments of mean satisfaction as often fall to the lot even of very pretty young women.

At home she knew no moments of satisfaction of any variety, although there was no disapprobation expressed by any one, except in one or two characteristically recondite comments by Professor Kennedy, who was taking a rather uneasy triumph in the proof of an old theory of his as to Sylvia's character. One afternoon, at a football game, he came up to her on the grandstand, shook hands with Jermain Fiske, whom he had flunked innumerable times in algebra, and remarked in his most acid voice that he wished to congratulate the young man on being the perfect specimen of the dolichocephalic blond whose arrival in Sylvia's life he had predicted years before. Sylvia, belligerently aware of the att.i.tude of her home world, and ready to resent criticism, took the liveliest offense at this obscure comment, which she perfectly understood. She flushed indignantly and glared in silence with the eyes of an angry young G.o.ddess.

Young Fiske, who found the remark, or any other made by a college prof, quite as unintelligible as it was unimportant, laughed with careless impudence in the old man's face; and Mrs. Draper, for all her keenness, could make nothing of it. It sounded, however, so quite like a dictum which she herself would have liked to make, that she cross-questioned Sylvia afterwards as to its meaning; but Sylvia lied fluently, a.s.serting that it was just some of Professor Kennedy's mathematical gibberish which had no meaning.

In the growing acquaintance of Sylvia and Jermain, Mrs. Draper acted a.s.siduously as chaperon, a refinement of sophisticated society which was, as a rule, but vaguely observed in the chaotic flux of State University social life, and she so managed affairs that they were seldom together alone. For obvious reasons Sylvia preferred to see the young man elsewhere than in her own home, where indeed he made almost no appearance, beyond standing at the door of an evening, very handsome and distinguished in his evening dress, waiting for Sylvia to put on her wraps and go out with him to the carriage where Mrs. Draper sat expectant, furred and velvet-wrapped. This discreet manager made no objection to Sylvia's driving about the campus in the daytime alone with Jermain, but to his proposal to drive the girl out to the country-club for dinner one evening she added blandly the imperious proviso that she be of the party; and she discouraged with firmness any projects for solitary walks together through the woods near the campus, although this was a recognized form of co-educational amus.e.m.e.nt at that inst.i.tution of learning.

For all her air of free-and-easy equality with the young man, she had at times a certain blighting glance which, turned on him suddenly, always brought him to an agreement with her opinion, an agreement which might obviously ring but verbal on his tongue, but which was nevertheless the acknowledged basis of action. As for Sylvia, she acquiesced, with an eagerness which she did not try to understand, in any arrangement which precluded tete-a-tetes with Jerry.

She did not, as a matter of fact, try to understand anything of what was happening to her. She was by no means sure that she liked it, but was stiffened into a stubborn resistance to any doubts by the unvoiced objection to it all at home. With an instinct against disproportion, perverse perhaps in this case, but with a germ of soundness in it, she felt confusedly and resentfully that since her home circle was so patently narrow and exaggerated in its standard of personality, she would just have to even things up by being a little less fastidious than was her instinct; and on the one or two occasions when a sudden sight of Jerry sent through her a strange, unpleasant stir of all her flesh, she crushed the feeling out of sight under her determination to a.s.sert her own judgment and standards against those which had (she now felt) so tyrannically influenced her childhood. But for the most part she did little thinking, shaking as loudly as possible the reverberating rattle of physical excitement.

Thus everything progressed smoothly under Mrs. Draper's management.

The young couple met each other usually in the rather close air of her candle-lighted living-room, drinking a great deal of tea, consuming large numbers of delicate, strangely compounded sandwiches, and listening to an endless flow of somewhat startlingly frank personalities from the magnetic mistress of the house. Sylvia and Jermain did not talk much on these occasions. They listened with edification to the racy remarks of their hostess, voicing that theoretical "broadness" of opinion as to the conduct of life which, quite as much as the perfume which she always used, was a specialty of her provocative personality; they spoke now and then, to be sure, as she drew them into conversation, but their real intercourse was almost altogether silent. They eyed each other across the table, breathing quickly, and flushing or paling if their hands chanced to touch in the services of the tea-table. Once the young man came in earlier than usual and found Sylvia alone for a moment in the silent, glowing, perfumed room. He took her hand, apparently for the ordinary handclasp of greeting, but with a surge of his blood retained it, pressing it so fiercely that his ring cut into her finger, causing a tiny drop of bright red to show on the youthful smoothness of her skin. At this living ruby they both stared fixedly for an instant; then Mrs. Draper came hastily into the room, saying chidingly, "Come, come, children!"

and looking with displeasure at the man's darkly flushed face. Sylvia was paler than usual for the rest of the afternoon, and could not swallow a mouthful of the appetizing food, which as a rule she devoured with the frank satisfaction of a hungry child. She sat, rather white, not talking much, avoiding Jerry's eyes for no reason that she could a.n.a.lyze, and, in the pauses of the conversation, could hear the blood singing loudly in her ears.

Yet, although she felt the oddest relief, as after one more escape, at the end of each of these afternoons with her new acquaintances, afternoons in which the three seemed perpetually gliding down a steep incline and as perpetually being arrested on the brink of some unexplained plunge, she found that their atmosphere had spoiled entirely her relish for the atmosphere of her home. The home supper-table seemed to her singularly flat and distasteful with its commonplace fare--hot chocolate and creamed potatoes and apple sauce, and its brisk, impersonal talk of socialism, and politics, and small home events, and music. As it happened, the quartet had the lack of intuition to play a great deal of Haydn that autumn, and to Sylvia the cheerful, obvious tap-tap-tap of the hearty old master seemed to typify the bald, unsubtle obtuseness of the home att.i.tude towards life. She herself took to playing the less difficult of the Chopin nocturnes with a languorous over-accentuation of their softness which she was careful to keep from the ears of old Reinhardt. But one evening he came in, unheard, listened to her performance of the B-flat minor nocturne with a frown, and pulled her away from the piano before she had finished. "Not true music, not true love, not true anydings!"

he said, speaking however with an unexpected gentleness, and patting her on the shoulder with a dirty old hand. "Listen!" He clapped his fiddle under his chin and played the air of the andante from the Kreutzer Sonata with so singing and heavenly a tone that Sylvia, as helpless an instrument in his skilful hands as the violin itself, felt the nervous tears stinging her eyelids.

This did not prevent her making a long detour the next day to avoid meeting the uncomely old musician on the street and being obliged to recognize him publicly. She lived in perpetual dread of being thus forced, when in the company of Mrs. Draper or Jermain, to acknowledge her connection with him, or with Cousin Parnelia, or with any of the eccentrics who frequented her parents' home, and whom it was physically impossible to imagine drinking tea at Mrs. Draper's table.

It was beside this same table that she met, one day in early December, Jermain Fiske's distinguished father. He explained that he was in La Chance for a day on his way from Washington to Mercerton, where the Fiske family was collecting for its annual Christmas house-party, and had dropped in on Mrs. Draper quite unexpectedly. He was, he added, delighted that it happened to be a day when he could meet the lovely Miss Marshall of whom (with a heavy accent of jocose significance) he had heard so much. Sylvia was a little confused by the pointed attentions of this gallant old warrior, oddly in contrast with the manner of other elderly men she knew; but she thought him very handsome, with his sweeping white mustache, his bright blue eyes, so like his son's, and she was much impressed with his frock-coat, fitting snugly around his well-knit, erect figure, and with the silk hat which she noticed on the table in the hall as she went in.

Frock-coats and silk hats were objects seldom encountered in La Chance, except in ill.u.s.trations to magazine-stories, or in photographs of life in New York or Washington. But of course, she reflected, Colonel Fiske lived most of his life in Washington, about the cosmopolitan delights of which he talked most eloquently to the two ladies.

As was inevitable, Sylvia also met Eleanor Hubert more or less at Mrs.

Draper's. Sylvia had been rendered acutely self-conscious in that direction by Mrs. Draper's very open comments on her role in the life of the other girl, and at first had been so smitten by embarra.s.sment as positively to be awkward, a rare event in her life: but she was soon set at ease by the other girl's gentle friendliness, so simple and sincere that even Sylvia's suspicious vanity could not feel it to be condescension. Eleanor's sweet eyes shone so kindly on her successful rival, and she showed so frank and unenvious an admiration of Sylvia's wit and learning, displayed perhaps a trifle ostentatiously by that young lady in the ensuing conversation with Mrs. Draper, that Sylvia had a fresh, healing impulse of shame for her own recently acquired att.i.tude of triumphing hostility towards the world.

At the same time she felt a surprised contempt for the other girl's ignorance and almost illiteracy. Whatever else Eleanor had learned in the exclusive and expensive girls' school in New York, she had not learned to hold her own in a conversation on the most ordinary topics; and as for Mrs. Draper's highly spiced comments on life and folk, her young friend made not the slightest attempt to cope with them or even to understand them. The alluring mistress of the house might talk of s.e.x-antagonism and the hatefulness of the puritanical elements of American life as much as she pleased. It all pa.s.sed over the head of the lovely, fair girl, sipping her tea and raising her candid eyes to meet with a trustful smile, perhaps a little blank, the glance of whomever chanced to be looking at her. It was significant that she had the same smile for each of the three very dissimilar persons who sat about the tea-table. Of all the circle into which Sylvia's changed life had plunged her, Eleanor, the type of the conventional society bud, was, oddly enough, the only one she cared to talk about in her own extremely unconventional home. But even on this topic she felt herself bruised and jarred by the severity, the unpicturesque austerity of the home standards. As she was trying to give her mother some idea of Eleanor's character, she quoted one day a remark of Mrs.

Draper's, to the effect that "Eleanor no more knows the meaning of her beauty than a rose the meaning of its perfume." Mrs. Marshall kept a forbidding silence for a moment and then said: "I don't take much stock in that sort of unconsciousness. Eleanor isn't a rose, she isn't even a child. She's a woman. The sooner girls learn that distinction, the better off they'll be, and the fewer chances they'll run of being horribly misunderstood."

Sylvia felt very angry with her mother for this unsympathetic treatment of a pretty phrase, and thought with resentment that it was not _her_ fault if she were becoming more and more alienated from her family.

This was a feeling adroitly fostered by Mrs. Draper, who, in her endless talks with Sylvia and Jermain about themselves, had hit upon an expression and a turn of phrase which was to have more influence on Sylvia's development than its brevity seemed to warrant. She had, one day, called Sylvia a little Athenian, growing up, by the oddest of mistakes, in Sparta. Sylvia, who was in the Pater-reading stage of development, caught at her friend's phrase as at the longed-for key to her situation. It explained everything. It made everything appear in the light she wished for. Above all it enabled her to clarify her att.i.tude towards her home. Now she understood. One did not scorn Sparta. One respected it, it was a n.o.ble influence in life; but for an Athenian, for whom amenity and beauty and suavity were as essential as food, Sparta was death. As was natural to her age and temperament, she sucked a vast amount of pleasure out of this pitying a.n.a.lysis of her subtle, complicated needs and the bare crudity of her surroundings.

She now read Pater more a.s.siduously than ever, always carrying a volume about with her text-books, and feeding on this delicate fare in such unlikely and dissimilar places as on the trolley-cars, in the kitchen, in the intervals of preparing a meal, or in Mrs. Draper's living-room, waiting for the problematical entrance of that erratic luminary.

There was none of Mrs. Draper's habits of life which made more of an impression on Sylvia's imagination than her custom of disregarding engagements and appointments, of coming and going, appearing and disappearing quite as she pleased. To the daughter of a scrupulously exact family, which regarded tardiness as a fault, and breaking an appointment as a crime, this high-handed flexibility in dealing with time and bonds and promises had an exciting quality of freedom.

On a good many occasions these periods of waiting chanced to be shared by Eleanor Hubert, for whom, after the first two or three encounters, Sylvia came to have a rather condescending sympathy, singularly in contrast to the uneasy envy with which she had regarded her only a few months before. However, as regards dress, Eleanor was still a phenomenon of the greatest interest, and Sylvia never saw her without getting an idea or two, although it was plain to any one who knew Eleanor that this mastery of the technique of modern American costume was no achievement of her own, that she was merely the lovely and plastic material molded, perhaps to slightly over-complicated effects, by her mother's hands.