"I'm not eighteen, I'm twenty-three," said Sylvia. "The difference is enormous. And if I don't know more about plain unvarnished human nature than you, I miss my guess! You haven't gone through five years at a State University, rubbing shoulders with folks who haven't enough sophistication to pretend to be different from what they are. You haven't taught music for three years in the middle-class families of a small Western city!" She broke off to laugh an apologetic depreciation of her own heat. "You'd think I was addressing a meeting," she said in her usual tone. "I got rather carried away because this is the first time I ever really spoke out about it. There are so few who could understand. If I ever tried to explain it to Father and Mother, I'd be sure to find them so deep in a discussion of the relation between Socrates and Christ that they couldn't pay any attention! Professor Kennedy could understand—but he's such a fanatic on the other side."
Morrison looked a quick suspicion. "Who is Professor Kennedy?" he inquired; and was frankly relieved when Sylvia explained: "He's the head of the Mathematics Department, about seventy years old, and the crossest, cantankerousest old misanthrope you ever saw. And thinks himself immensely clever for being so! He just loathes people—the way they really are—and he dotes on Mother and Judith because they're not like anybody else. And he hates me because they couldn't all hypnotize me into looking through their eyes. He thinks it low of me to realize that if you're going to live at all, you've got to live with people, and you can't just calmly brush their values on one side. He said once that any sane person in this world was like a civilized man with plenty of gold coin, cast away on a desert island with a tribe of savages who only valued beads and calico, and buttons and junk. And I said (I knew perfectly well he was hitting at me) that if he was really cast away and couldn't get to another island, I thought the civilized man would be an idiot to starve to death, when he could buy food of the savages by selling them junk. And I thought he just wasted his breath by swearing at the savages for not knowing about the value of gold. There I was hitting at him! He's spoiled his digestion, hating the way people are made. And Professor Kennedy said something nasty and neat (he's awfully clever) about that being rather a low occupation for a civilized being—taking advantage of the idiocies of savages—he meant me, of course—and he's right, it is a mean business; I hate it. And that's why I've always wanted to get on another island—not an uninhabited island, like the one Father and Mother have—but one where—well, this is one!" she waved her hand about the lovely room, "this is just one! Where everything's beautiful—costly too—but not just costly; where all the horrid, necessary consequences of things are taken care of without one's bothering—where flowers are taken out of the vases when they wilt and fresh ones put in; and dishes get themselves washed invisibly, inaudibly—and litter just vanishes without our lifting a hand. Of course the people who live so always, can rejoice with a clear mind in sunsets and bright talk. That's what I meant the other day—the day Judith came—when I said I'd arrived in Capua at last; when old Mr. Sommerville thought me so materialistic and cynical. If he did that, on just that phrase—what must you think, after all this confession intime d'un enfant du siècle?" She stopped with a graceful pretense of dreading his judgment, although she knew that she had been talking well, and read nothing but admiration in his very expressive face.
"But all this means, you extraordinary young person, that you're not in the least an enfant du siècle!" he cried. "It means that you're dropped down in this groaning, heavy-spirited twentieth century, troubled about many things, from the exact year that was the golden climax of the Renaissance; that you're a perfect specimen of the high-hearted, glorious …" he qualified on a second thought, "unless your astonishing capacity to analyze it all, comes from the nineteenth century?"
"No, that comes from Father," explained Sylvia, laughing. "Isn't it funny, using the tool Father taught me to handle, against his ideas! He's just great on analysis. As soon as we were old enough to think at all, he was always practising us on analysis—especially of what made us want things, or not like them. It's one of his sayings—he's always getting it off to his University classes—that if you have once really called an emotion or an ambition by its right name, you have it by the tail, so to speak—that if you know, for instance, that it's your vanity and not your love that's wounded by something, you'll stop caring. But I never noticed that it really worked if you cared hard enough. Diagnosing a disease doesn't help you any, if you keep right on being sick with it."
"My dear! My dear!" cried the man, leaning towards her again, and looking—dazzled—into the beauty and intelligence of her eyes, "the idea that you are afflicted with any disease could only occur to the morbid mind of the bluest-nosed Puritan who ever cut down a May-pole! You're wonderfully, you're terrifyingly, you are superbly sound and vigorous!"
Breaking in upon this speech, there came the quick, smooth purr of an automobile with all its parts functioning perfectly, a streak of dark gray past the shutters, the sigh of an engine stopped suddenly—Molly Sommerville sprang from behind the steering wheel and ran into the house. She was exquisitely flushed and eager when she came in, but when she saw the two alone in the great, cool, dusky room, filled to its remotest corners with the ineffable aroma of long, intimate, and interrupted talk, she was brought up short. She faltered for an instant and then continued to advance, her eyes on Sylvia. "It's so hot," she said, at random, "and I thought I'd run over for tea—"
"Oh, of course," said Sylvia, jumping up in haste, "it's late! I'd forgotten it was time for tea! Blame me! Since I've been here, Aunt Victoria has left it to me—where shall I say to have it set?"
"The pergola's lovely," suggested Molly. She took her close motor-hat from the pure gold of her hair with a rather listless air.
"All right—the pergola!" agreed Sylvia, perhaps a little too anxiously. In spite of herself, she gave, and she knew she was giving, the effect of needing somehow to make something up to Molly….