"May I tag along?" said Page, strolling off beside her with the ease of familiarity.
Sylvia turned to wave a careless farewell to the two thus left somewhat unceremoniously in the pergola. She was in brown corduroy with suede leather sailor collar and broad belt, a costume which brought out vividly the pure, clear coloring of her face. "Good-bye," she called to them with a pointedly casual accent, nodding her gleaming head.
"She's a very pretty girl, isn't she?" commented Mrs. Marshall-Smith. Morrison, looking after the retreating figures, agreed with her briefly. "Yes, very. Extraordinarily perfect specimen of her type." His tone was dry.
Mrs. Marshall-Smith looked with annoyance across the stretch of lawn to the house. "I think I would better go to see where Arnold is," she said. Her tone seemed to signify more to the man than her colorless words. He frowned and said, "Oh, is Arnold …?"
She gave a fatigued gesture. "No—not yet—but for the last two or three days …"
He began impatiently, "Why can't you get him off this time before he…."
"An excellent idea," she broke in, with some impatience of her own.
"But slightly difficult of execution."
CHAPTER XXXI
SYLVIA MEETS WITH PITY
Under the scarlet glory of frost-touched maples, beside the river strolled Sylvia, conscious of looking very well and being admired; but contrary to the age-old belief about her sex and age, the sensation of looking very well and being admired by no means filled the entire field of her consciousness. In fact, the corner occupied by the sensation was so small that occasional efforts on her part to escape to it from the less agreeable contents of her mind were lamentable failures. Aloud, in terms as felicitous as she could make them, she was commenting on the beauty of the glass-smooth river, with the sumptuously colored autumn trees casting down into it the imperial gold and crimson of their reflections. Silently she was struggling to master and dominate and suppress a confusion of contradictory mental processes. At almost regular intervals, like a hollow stroke on a brazen gong, her brain resounded to the reverberations of "The wedding is on the twenty-first." And each time that she thrust that away, there sprang up with a faint hissing note of doubt and suspicion, "Why does Aunt Victoria want Arnold married?" A murmur, always drowned out but incessantly recurring, ran: "What about Father and Mother? What about their absurd, impossible, cruel, unreal, and beautiful standards?" Contemptible little echoes from the silly self-consciousness of the adolescence so recently left behind her … "I must think of something clever to say. I must try to seem different and original and independent and yet must attract," mingled with an occasional fine sincerity of appreciation and respect for the humanity of the man beside her. Like a perfume borne in gusts came reaction to the glorious color about her. Quickly recurring and quickly gone, a sharp cymbal-clap of alarm … "What shall I do if Austin Page now … today … or tomorrow … tells me …!" And grotesquely, the companion cymbal on which this smote, gave forth an antiphonal alarm of, "What shall I do if he does not!" While, unheard of her conscious ear, but coloring everything with its fundamental note of sincerity, rose solemnly from the depths of her heart the old cry of desperate youth, "What am I to do with my life?"