The Bent Twig Part 15

HIGHER EDUCATION

To any one who is familiar with State University life, the color of Sylvia's Freshman year will be vividly conveyed by the simple statement that she was not invited to join a fraternity. To any one who does not know State University life, no description can convey anything approaching an adequate notion of the terribly determinative significance of that fact.

The statement that she was invited to join no sorority is not literally true, for in the second semester when it was apparent that none of the three leading fraternities intended to take her in, there came a late "bid" from one of the third-rate sororities, of recent date, composed of girls like Sylvia who had not been included in the members.h.i.+p of the older, socially distinguished organizations. Cut to the quick by her exclusion from the others, Sylvia refused this tardy invitation with remorseless ingrat.i.tude. If she were not to form one of the "swell" set of college, at least she would not proclaim herself one of the "jays," the "grinds," the queer girls, who wore their hair straight back from their foreheads, who invariably carried off Phi Beta Kappa, whose skirts hung badly, whose shoe-heels turned over as they walked, who stood first in their cla.s.ses, whose belts behind made a practice of revealing large white safety-pins; and whose hats, even disa.s.sociated from their dowdy wearers, and hanging in the cloakroom, were of an almost British eccentricity.

Nothing of this sort could be alleged against Sylvia's appearance, which she felt, as she arrayed herself every morning, to be all that the most swagger frat could ask of a member. Aunt Victoria's boxes of clothing, her own nimble fingers and pa.s.sionate attention to the subject, combined to turn her out a copy, not to be distinguished from the original, of the daughter of a man with an income five times that of her father. As she consulted her mirror, it occurred to her also, as but an honest recognition of a conspicuous fact, that her suitable and harmonious toilets adorned a person as pleasing to the eye as any of her cla.s.smates.

During the last year of her life at home she had shot up very fast, and she was now a tall, slender presence, preserved from even the usual touching and delightful awkwardness of seventeen by the trained dexterity and strength with which she handled her body, as muscular, for all its rounded slimness, as a boy's. Her hair was beautiful, a bright chestnut brown with a good deal of red, its brilliant gloss broken into innumerable high-lights by the ripple of its waviness; and she had one other positive beauty, the clearly penciled line of her long, dark eyebrows, which ran up a trifle at the outer ends with a little quirk, giving an indescribable air of alertness and vivacity to her expression. Otherwise she was not at that age, nor did she ever become, so explicitly handsome as her sister Judith, who had at every period of her life a head as beautiful as that on a Greek coin.

But when the two were together, although the perfectly adjusted proportions of Judith's proud, dark face brought out the irregularities of Sylvia's, disclosed the tilt of her small nose, made more apparent the disproportionate width between her eyes, and showed her chin to be of no mold in particular, yet a modern eye rested with far more pleasure on the older sister's face. A bright, quivering mobility like suns.h.i.+ne on water, gave it a charm which was not dependent on the more obvious prettinesses of a fine-grained, white skin, extremely clear brown eyes, and a mouth quick to laugh and quiver, with pure, sharply cut outline and deeply sunk corners. Even in repose, Sylvia's face made Judith's seem unresponsive, and when it lighted up in talk and laughter, it seemed to give out a visible light. In contrast Judith's beautiful countenance seemed carved out of some very hard and indestructible stone.

And yet, in spite of this undeniably satisfactory physical outfit, and pre-eminent ability in athletics, Sylvia was not invited to join any of the best fraternities. It is not surprising that there was mingled with her bitterness on the subject a justifiable amount of bewilderment. What _did_ they want? They recruited, from her very side in cla.s.ses, girls without half her looks or cleverness. What _was_ the matter with her? She would not for her life have given a sign to her family of her mental sufferings as, during that first autumn, day after day went by with no sign of welcome from the social leaders of her new world; but a mark was left on her character by her affronted recognition of her total lack of success in this, her first appearance outside the sheltering walls of her home; her first trial by the real standards of the actual world of real people.

The fact, which would have been balm to Sylvia's vanity, had she ever had the least knowledge of it, was that upon her appearance in the Freshman cla.s.s she had been the occasion of violent discussion and almost of dissension in the councils of the two "best" fraternities.

Her beauty, her charm, and the rumors of her excellence in tennis had made a flutter in the first fraternity meetings after the opening of the autumn term. The younger members of both Sigma Beta and Alpha Kappa counseled early and enthusiastic "rus.h.i.+ng" of the new prize, but the Juniors and Seniors, wise in their day and generation, brought out a number of d.a.m.ning facts which would need to be taken into consideration if Sylvia wore their pin.

There were, in both fraternities, daughters of other faculty families, who were naturally called upon to furnish inside information. They had been brought up from childhood on the tradition of the Marshalls'

hopeless queerness, and their collective statement of the Marshalls'

position ran somewhat as follows: "The only professors who have anything to do with them are some of the jay young profs from the West, with no families; the funny old La Rues--you know what a hopeless dowd Madame La Rue is--and Professor Kennedy, and though he comes from a swell family he's an awful freak himself. They live on a farm, like farmers, at the ends of the earth from anybody that anybody knows. They are never asked to be patrons of any swell college functions. None of the faculty ladies with any social position ever call on Mrs. Marshall--and no wonder. She doesn't keep any help, and when the doorbell rings she's as apt to come running in from the chicken house with rubber boots on, and a basket of eggs--and the _queerest_ clothes! Like a costume out of a book; and they never have anybody to wait on the table, just jump up and down themselves--you can imagine what kind of a frat tea or banquet Sylvia would give in such a home--and of course if we took her in, we couldn't very well _tell_ her her family's so impossible we wouldn't want their connection with the frat known--and the students who go there are a perfect collection of all the jays and grinds and freaks in college.

It's enough to mark you one to be seen there--you meet all the crazy guys you see in cla.s.ses and never anywhere else--and of course that wouldn't stop when Sylvia's frat sisters began going there. And their house wouldn't do at _all_ to entertain in--it's queer--no rugs--dingy old furniture--nothing but books everywhere, even in their subst.i.tute for a parlor--and you're likely to meet not only college freaks, but worse ones from goodness knows where. There's a beer-drinking old monster who goes there every Sunday to play the fiddle that you wouldn't have speak to you on the street for anything in the world.

And the way they entertain! My, in such a countrified way! Some of the company go out into the kitchen to help Mrs. Marshall serve up the refreshments--and everything homemade--and they play charades, and n.o.body knows what else--bean-bag, or spelling-down maybe--"

This appalling picture, which in justice to the young delineators must be conceded to be not in the least overdrawn, was quite enough to give pause to those impetuous and immature young Soph.o.m.ores who had lacked the philosophical breadth of vision to see that Sylvia was not an isolated phenomenon, but (since her family live in La Chance) an inseparable part of her background. After all, the sororities made no claim to be anything but social organizations. Their standing in the college world depended upon their social background, and of course this could only be made up of a composite mingling of those of their individual members.

Fraternities did not wish to number more than sixteen or eighteen undergraduates. That meant only four or five to be chosen from each Freshman cla.s.s, and that number of "nice" girls was not hard to find, girls who were not only well dressed, and lively and agreeable in themselves, but who came from large, well-kept, well-furnished houses on the right streets of La Chance; with presentable, card-playing, call-paying, reception-giving mothers, who hired caterers for their entertainments; and respectably absentee fathers with sizable pocketbooks and a habit of cash liberality. The social standing of the co-eds in State Universities was already precarious enough, without running the risk of acquiring dubious social connections.

If Sylvia had been a boy, it is almost certain that the deficiencies of her family would have been overlooked in consideration of her potentialities in the athletic world. Success in athletics was to the men's fraternities what social standing was to the girls'. It must be remarked parenthetically that neither cla.s.s of these organizations had the slightest prejudice against high scholastic standing. On the contrary it was regarded very kindly by fraternity members, as a desirable though not indispensable addition to social standing and physical prowess.

But Sylvia was not a boy, and her fine, promising game of tennis, her excellence in the swimming-pool, and her success on the gymnasium floor and on the flying rings, served no purpose but to bring to her the admiration of the duffers among the girls, whom she despised, and the unspoken envy of the fraternity girls, whose overtures at superficial friendliness she constantly rebuffed with stern, wounded pride.

The sharpest stab to her pride came from the inevitable publicity of her ordeal. For, though her family knew nothing of what that first year out in the world meant to her, she had not the consolation of hoping that her condition was not perfectly apparent to every one else in the college world. At the first of the year, all gatherings of undergraduates not in fraternities hummed and buzzed with speculations about who would or would not be "taken" by the leading fraternities.

For every girl who was at all possible, each day was a long suspense, beginning in hope and ending in listlessness; and for Sylvia in an added shrinking from the eyes of her mates, which were, she knew, fixed on her with a relentless curiosity which was torture to one of her temperament. She had been considered almost sure to be early invited to join Alpha Kappa, the frat to which most of the faculty daughters belonged, and all during the autumn she was aware that when she took off her jacket in the cloakroom, a hundred glances swept her to see if she wore at last the coveted emblem of the "pledged" girl; and when an Alpha Kappa girl chanced to come near her with a casual remark, she seemed to hear a significant hush among the other girls, followed by an equally significant buzz of whispered comment when the fraternity member moved away again. This atmosphere would have made no impression on a nature either more st.u.r.dily philosophic, or more unimaginative than Sylvia's (Judith, for instance, was not in the least affected by the experience), but it came to be a morbid obsession of this strong, healthy, active-minded young creature.

It tinged with bitterness and blackness what should have been the crystal-clear cup holding her youth and intelligence and health. She fancied that every one despised her. She imagined that people who were in reality quite unaware of her existence were looking at her and whispering together a wondering discussion as to why she was not "in the swim" as such a girl ought to be--all girls worth their salt were.

Above all she was stung into a sort of speechless rage by her impotence to do anything to regain the decent minimum of personal dignity which she felt was stripped from her by this constant play of bald speculation about whether she would or would not be considered "good enough" to be invited into a sorority. If only something definite would happen! If there were only an occasion on which she might in some way proudly proclaim her utter indifference to fraternities and their actions! If only the miserable business were not so endlessly drawn out! She threw herself with a pa.s.sionate absorption into her studies, her music, and her gymnasium work, cut off both from the "elect" and from the mult.i.tude, a proudly self-acknowledged maverick. She never lacked admiring followers among less brilliant girls who would have been adorers if she had not held them off at arm's length, but her vanity, far from being omnivorous, required more delicate food. She wished to be able to cry aloud to her world that she thought nothing and cared nothing about fraternities, and by incessant inner absorption in this conception she did to a considerable extent impose it upon the collective mind of her contemporaries. She, the yearningly friendly, sympathetic, sensitive, praise-craving Sylvia, came to be known, half respected and half disliked, as proud and clever, and "high-brow," and offish, and conceited, and so "queer" that she cared nothing for the ordinary pleasures of ordinary girls.

This reputation for a high-browed indifference to commonplace mortals was naturally not a recommendation to the masculine undergraduates of the University. These young men, under the influence of reports of what was done at Cornell and other more eastern co-educational inst.i.tutions, were already strongly inclined to ignore the co-eds as much as possible. The tradition was growing rapidly that the proper thing was to invite the "town-girls" to the college proms and dances, and to sit beside them in the grandstand during football games. As yet, however, this tendency had not gone so far but that those co-eds who were members of a socially recognized fraternity were automatically saved from the neglect which enveloped all other but exceptionally flirtatious and undiscriminating girls. Each girls'

fraternity, like the masculine organizations, gave one big hop in the course of the season and several smaller dances, as well as lawn-parties and teas and stage-coach parties to the football games.

The young men naturally wished to be invited to these functions, the increasing elaborateness of which kept pace with the increasing sophistication of life in La Chance and the increasing cost of which made the parents of the girls groan. Consequently each masculine fraternity took care that it did not incur the enmity of the organized and socially powerful sororities. But Sylvia was not protected by this aegis. She was not invited during her Freshman year to the dances given by either the sororities or the fraternities; and the large scattering crowd of masculine undergraduates were frightened away from the handsome girl by her supposed haughty intellectual tastes.

Here again her isolation was partly the result of her own wish. The raw-boned, badly dressed farmers' lads, with red hands and rough hair, she quite as sn.o.bbishly ignored as she was ignored in her turn by the well-set-up, fas.h.i.+onably dressed young swells of the University, with their white hands, with their thin, gaudy socks tautly pulled over their ankle-bones, and their s.h.i.+ning hair glistening like lacquer on their skulls (that being the desideratum in youthful masculine society of the place and time). Sylvia snubbed the masculine jays of college partly because it was a breath of life to her battered vanity to be able to snub some one, and partly because they seemed to her, in comparison with the smart set, seen from afar, quite and utterly undesirable. She would rather have no masculine attentions at all than such poor provender for her feminine desire to conquer.

Thus she trod the leafy walks of the beautiful campus alone, ignoring and ignored, keenly alive under her sh.e.l.l of indifference to the brilliant young men and their chosen few feminine companions.

CHAPTER XV

MRS. DRAPER BLOWS THE COALS

The most brilliant of these couples were Jermain Fiske, Jr., and Eleanor Hubert. The first was the son of the well-known and distinguished Colonel Jermain Fiske, one of the trustees of the University, ex-Senator from the State. He belonged to the old, free-handed, speech-making type of American statesmen, and, with his florid good looks, his great stature, his loud, resonant, challenging voice, and his picturesque reputation for highly successful double-dealing, he was one of the most talked-of men in the State, despite his advanced years. His enemies, who were not few, said that the shrewdest action of his surpa.s.singly shrewd life had been his voluntary retirement from the Senate and from political activities at the first low murmur heralding the muck-raking cyclone which was to devastate public life as men of his type understood it. But every inhabitant of the State, including his enemies, took an odd pride in his fiercely debonair defiance to old age, in his grandiloquent, too fluent public addresses, and in the manner in which, despite his dubious private reputation, he held open to him, by sheer will-power, sanctimonious doors which were closed to other less robust bad examples to youth.

This typical specimen of an American cla.s.s now pa.s.sing away, had sent his son to the State University instead of to an expensive Eastern college because of his carefully avowed att.i.tude of bluff acceptance of a place among the plain people of the region. The presence of Jermain, Jr., in the cla.s.srooms of the State University had been capital for many a swelling phrase on his father's part--"What's good enough for the farmers' boys of my State is good enough for my boy,"

etc., etc.

As far as the young man in question was concerned, he certainly showed no signs whatever of feeling himself sacrificed for his father's advantage, and apparently considered that a leisurely sojourn for seven years (he took both the B.A. and the three-year Law course) in a city the size of La Chance was by no means a hards.h.i.+p for a young man in the best of health, provided with ample funds, and never questioned as to the disposition of his time. He had had at first a reputation for dissipation which, together with his prowess on the football field, had made him as much talked of on the campus as his father in the State; but during his later years, those spent in the Law School, he had, as the college phrase ran, "taken it out in being swagger,"

had discarded his former shady a.s.sociates, had two rooms in the finest frat house on the campus, and was the only student of the University to drive two horses tandem to a high, red-wheeled dog-cart. His fine physique and reputation for quick a.s.sertion of his rights saved him from the occasional taunt of dandyism which would have been flung at any other student indulging in so unusual a freak of fas.h.i.+on.

During Sylvia's Freshman year there usually sat beside him, on the lofty seat of this equipage, a sweet-faced, gentle-browed young lady, the lovely flower blooming out of the little girl who had so innocently asked her mother some ten years ago what was a drunken reinhardt. The oldest daughter of the professor of European History was almost precisely Sylvia's age, but now, when Sylvia was laboring over her books in the very beginning of her college life, Eleanor Hubert was a finished product, a graduate of an exclusive, expensive girls' boarding-school in New York, and a that-year's debutante in La Chance society. Her name was constantly in the items of the society columns, she wore the most profusely varied costumes, and she drove about the campus swaying like a lily beside the wealthiest undergraduate. Sylvia's mind was naturally too alert and vigorous, and now too thoroughly awakened to intellectual interests, not to seize with interest on the subjects she studied that year; but enjoy as much as she tried to do, and did, this tonic mental discipline, there were many moments when the sight of Eleanor Hubert made her wonder if after all higher mathematics and history were of any real value.

During this wretched year of stifled unhappiness, she not only studied with extreme concentration, but, with a healthy instinct, spent a great deal of time in the gymnasium. It was a delight to her to be able to swim in the winter-time, she organized the first water-polo team among the co-eds, and she began to learn fencing from the Commandant of the University Battalion. He had been a crack with the foils at West Point, and never ceased trying to arouse an interest in what seemed to him the only rational form of exercise; but fencing at that time had no intercollegiate vogue, and of all the young men and women at the State University, Sylvia alone took up his standing offer of free instruction to any one who cared to give the time to learn; and even Sylvia took up fencing primarily because it promised to give her one more occupation, left her less time for loneliness. As it turned out, however, these lessons proved far more to her than a temporary anodyne: they brought her a positive pleasure. She delighted the dumpy little captain with her aptness, and he took the greatest pains in his instruction. Before the end of her Freshman year she twice succeeded in getting through his guard and landing a thrust on his well-rounded figure; and though to keep down her conceit he told her that he must be losing, along with his slenderness, some of his youthful agility, he confessed to his wife that teaching Miss Marshall was the best fun he had had in years. The girl was as quick as a cat, and had a natural-born fencer's wrist.

During the summer vacation she kept up her practice with her father, who remembered enough of his early training in Paris to be more than a match for her, and in the autumn of her Soph.o.m.ore year, at the annual Gymnasium exhibition, she gave with the Commandant a public bout with the foils in which she notably distinguished herself. The astonished and long-continued applause for this new feature of the exhibition was a draught of nectar to her embittered young heart, but she acknowledged it with not the smallest sign of pleasure, showing an impa.s.sive face as she stood by the portly captain, slim and tall and young and haughty, joining him in a sweeping, ceremonious salute with her foil to the enthusiastic audience, and turning on her heel with a brusqueness as military as his own, to march firmly with high-held head beside him back to the ranks of blue-bloomered girls who stood watching her.

The younger girls in Alpha Kappa and Sigma Beta were seizing this opportunity to renew an old quarrel with their elders in the fraternities and were acrimoniously hoping that the older ones were quite satisfied with their loss of a brilliant member. These accusations met with no ready answer from the somewhat crestfallen elders, whose only defense was the entire unexpectedness of the way in which Sylvia was distinguis.h.i.+ng herself. Who ever heard before of a girl doing anything remarkable in athletics? And anyhow, now in her Soph.o.m.ore year it was too late to do anything. A girl so notoriously proud would certainly not consider a tardy invitation, and it would not do to run the risk of being refused. It is not too much to say that to have overheard a conversation like this would have changed the course of Sylvia's development, but of such colloquies she could know nothing, attributing to the fraternities, with all an outsider's resentful overestimation of their importance, an arrogant solidarity of opinion and firmness of purpose which they were very far from possessing.

Professor and Mrs. Marshall and Lawrence and Judith, up in the front row of chairs set for the audience about the running track, followed this exploit of Sylvia's with navely open pride and sympathy, applauding even more heartily than did their neighbors. Lawrence, as usual, began to compose a poem, the first line of which ran,

"Splendid, she wields her gleaming sword--"

The most immediate result of this first public success of Sylvia's was the call paid to Mrs. Marshall on the day following by Mrs. Draper, the wife of the professor of Greek. Although there had never been any formal social intercourse between the two ladies, they had for a good many years met each other casually on the campus, and Mrs. Draper, with the extremely graceful manner of a.s.surance which was her especial accomplishment, made it seem quite natural that she should call to congratulate Sylvia's mother on the girl's skill and beauty as shown in her prowess on the evening before. Mrs. Marshall prided herself on her undeceived view of life, but she was as ready to hear praise of her spirited and talented daughter as any other mother, and quite melted to Mrs. Draper, although her observations from afar of the other woman's career in La Chance had never before inclined her to tolerance. So that when Mrs. Draper rose to go and asked casually if Sylvia couldn't run in at five that afternoon to have a cup of tea at her house with a very few of her favorites among the young people, Mrs. Marshall, rather inflexible by nature and quite unused to the subtleties of social intercourse, found herself unable to retreat quickly enough from her reflected tone of cordiality to refuse the invitation for her daughter.

When Sylvia came back to lunch she was vastly fluttered and pleased by the invitation, and as she ate, her mind leaped from one possible sartorial combination to another. Whatever she wore must be exactly right to be worthy of such a hostess: for Mrs. Draper was a conspicuous figure in faculty society. She had acquired, through years of extremely intelligent manoeuvering, a reputation for choice exclusiveness which was accepted even in the most venerable of the old families of La Chance, those whose founders had built their log huts there as long as fifty years before. In faculty circles she occupied a unique position, envied and feared and admired and distrusted and copiously gossiped about by the faculty ladies, who accepted with eagerness any invitations to entertainments in her small, aesthetic, and perfectly appointed house. She was envied even by women with much more than her income:--for of course Professor Draper had an independent income; it was hardly possible to be anybody unless one belonged to that minority of the faculty families with resources beyond the salary granted by the State.

Faculty ladies were, however, not favored with a great number of invitations to Mrs. Draper's select and amusing teas and dinners, as that lady had a great fancy for surrounding herself with youth, meaning, for the most part, naturally enough, masculine youth. With an unerring and practised eye she picked out from each cla.s.s the few young men who were to her purpose, and proclaiming with the most express lack of reticence the forty-three years which she by no means looked, she took these chosen few under a wing frankly maternal, giving them, in the course of an intimate acquaintance with her and the dim and twilight ways of her house and life, an enlightening experience of a civilization which she herself said, with a humorous appreciation of her own value, quite made over the young, unlicked cubs. This statement of her influence on most of the young men drawn into her circle was perhaps not much exaggerated.

From time to time she also admitted into this charmed circle a young girl or two, though almost never one of the University girls, of whom she made the jolliest possible fun. Her favorites were the daughters of good La Chance families who at seventeen had "finished" at Miss Home's Select School for Young Ladies, and who came out in society not later than eighteen. She seemed able, as long as she cared to do it, to exercise as irresistible a fascination over these youthful members of her own s.e.x as over the older masculine undergraduates of the University. They copied their friend's hats and neckwear and shoes and her mannerisms of speech, were miserable if she neglected them for a day, furiously jealous of each other, and raised to the seventh heaven by attention from her. Just at present the only girl admitted frequently to Mrs. Draper's intimacy was Eleanor Hubert.

On the day following the Gymnasium exhibition, when Sylvia, promptly at five, entered the picturesque vine-covered Draper house, she found it occupied by none of the usual habitues of the place. The white-capped, black-garbed maid who opened the door to the girl held aside for her a pair of heavy brown-velvet portieres which veiled the entrance to the drawing-room. The utter silence of this servitor seemed portentous and inhuman to the young guest, unused to the polite convention that servants cast no shadow and do not exist save when serving their superiors.

She found herself in a room as unlike any she had ever seen as though she had stepped into a new planet. The light here was as yellow as gold, and came from a great many candles which, in sconces and candelabra, stood about the room, their oblong yellow flame as steady in the breathless quiet of the air as though they burned in a vault underground. There was not a book in the room, except one in a yellow cover lying beside a box of candy on the mantelpiece, but every ledge, table, projection, or shelf was covered with small, queerly fas.h.i.+oned, dully gleaming objects of ivory, or silver, or bra.s.s, or carved wood, or porcelain.

The mistress of the room now came in. She was in a loose garment of smoke-brown chiffon, held in place occasionally about her luxuriously rounded figure by a heavy cord of brown silk. She advanced to Sylvia with both hands outstretched, and took the girl's slim, rather hard young fingers in the softest of melting palms. "Aren't you a _dear_, to be so exactly on time!" she exclaimed.

Sylvia was a little surprised. She had thought it axiomatic that people kept their appointments promptly. "Oh, I'm always on time," she answered simply.

Mrs. Draper laughed and pulled her down on the sofa. "You clear-eyed young Diana, you won't allow me even an instant's illusion that you were eager to come to see _me_!"

"Oh yes, I _was_!" said Sylvia hastily, fearing that she might have said something rude.

Mrs. Draper laughed again and gave the hand she still held a squeeze.

"You're adorable, that's what _you_ are!" She exploded this pointblank charge in Sylvia's face with nonchalant ease, and went on with another. "Jerry Fiske is quite right about you. I suppose you know that you're here today so that Jerry can meet you."

As there was obviously not the faintest possibility of Sylvia's having heard this save through her present informant, she could only look what she felt, very much at a loss, and rather blank, with a heightened color. Mrs. Draper eyed her with an intentness at variance with the lightness of her tone, as she continued: "I do think Jerry'd have burned up in one flare, like a torch, if he couldn't have seen you at once! After you'd fenced and disappeared again into that stupid crowd of graceless girls, he kept track of you every minute with his opera-gla.s.ses, and kept saying: 'She's a G.o.ddess! Good Lord! how she carries herself!' It was rather hard on poor Eleanor right there beside him, but I don't blame him. Eleanor's a sweet thing, but she'd be sugar and water compared to champagne if she stood up by you."

For a good many months Sylvia had been craving praise with a starved appet.i.te, and although she found this downpour of it rather drenching, she could not sufficiently collect herself to make the conventional decent pretense that it was unwelcome. She flushed deeply and looked at her hostess with dazzled eyes. Mrs. Draper affected to see in her silence a blankness as to the subject of the talk, and interrupted the flow of personalities to cry out, with a pretense of horror, "You don't mean to say you don't know who Jerry Fiske _is_!"