Up to that moment almost every step of her life had been ordered and systematized, that she might the more quickly and surely arrive at the goal of her diploma. Rushing forward with the accumulated impetus of years of training in swiftly speeding effort, she flashed by the goal … and stopped short, finding herself in company with a majority of her feminine classmates in a blind alley. "Now what?" they asked each other with sinking hearts. Judith looked over their heads with steady eyes which saw but one straight and narrow path in life, and passed on by them into the hospital where she began her nurse's training. Sylvia began to teach music to a few children, to take on some of Reinhardt's work as he grew older. She practised assiduously, advanced greatly in skill in music, read much, thought acutely, rebelliously and not deeply, helped Lawrence with his studies … and watched the clock.
For there was no denying that the clock stood still. She was not going forward to any settled goal now, she was not going forward at all. She was as far from suspecting any ordered pattern in the facts of life as when she had been in college, surrounded by the conspiracy of silence about a pattern in facts which university professors so conscientiously keep up before their students. She was slowly revolving in an eddy. Sometimes she looked at the deep, glowing content of her father and mother with a fierce resentment. "How can they!" she cried to herself. At other times she tried to chide herself for not being as contented herself, "… but it's their life they're living," she said moodily, "and I haven't any to live. I can't live on their happiness any more than the beefsteaks somebody else has eaten can keep me from starving to death."
The tradition of her life was that work and plenty of it would keep off all uneasiness, that it was a foolishness, not to say a downright crime, to feel uneasiness. So she practised many hours a day, and took a post-graduate course in early Latin. But the clock stood still.
One of the assistants in her father's department proposed to her. She refused him automatically, with a wondering astonishment at his trembling hands and white lips. Decidedly the wheels of the clock would never begin to revolve.
And then it struck an hour, loudly. Aunt Victoria wrote inviting
Sylvia to spend a few weeks with her during the summer at Lydford.
Sylvia read this letter aloud to her mother on the vine-covered porch where she had sat so many years before, and repeated "star-light, star-bright" until she had remembered Aunt Victoria. Mrs. Marshall watched her daughter's face as she read, and through the tones of the clear eager voice she heard the clock striking. It sounded to her remarkably like a tolling bell, but she gave no sign beyond a slight paling. She told herself instantly that the slowly ticking clock had counted her out several years of grace beyond what a mother may expect. When Sylvia finished and looked up, the dulled look of resignation swept from her face by the light of adventurous change, her mother achieved the final feat of nodding her head in prompt, cheerful assent.
But when Sylvia went away, light-hearted, fleeting forward to new scenes, there was in her mother's farewell kiss a solemnity which she could not hide. "Oh, Mother dear!" protested Sylvia, preferring as always to skim over the depths which her mother so dauntlessly plumbed. "Oh, Mother darling! How can you be so—when it's only for a few weeks!"