Mrs. Marshall-Smith ventured to express some skepticism as to the existence of volcanic feelings always so sedulously concealed. "After all, can you be so very sure that she is ever 'simply wild' if she never shows anything?"
"Oh, you're sure, all right, if you've lived with her—you feel it. And then, after about so long a time of keeping it down, she breaks loose and does something awful, that I'd never have the nerve to do, and tears into flinders anything she doesn't think is right. Why, when we were little girls and went to the public schools together, two of our little playmates, who turned out to have a little negro blood, we …" Sylvia stopped, suddenly warned by some instinct that Aunt Victoria would not be a sympathetic listener to that unforgotten episode of her childhood, that episode which had seemed to have no consequences, no sequel, but which ever since that day had insensibly affected the course of her growth, like a great rock fallen into the Current of her life.
Mrs. Marshall-Smith, deliberating with bated breath between broadcloth and blue panama, did not notice the pause. She did, however, add a final comment on the matter, some moments later, when she observed, "How any girl in her senses can go on studying, when she's engaged to a man who needs her as much as Arnold needs Judith!" To which Sylvia answered irrelevantly with a thought which had just struck her thrillingly, "But how perfectly fine of Arnold to tell her himself!"
"She must have hypnotized him," said Mrs. Marshall-Smith with conviction, "but then I don't pretend to understand the ways of young people nowadays." She was now forty-five, in the full bloom of a rarely preserved beauty, and could afford to make remarks about the younger generation. "At any rate," she went on, "it is a comfort to know that Judith has set her hand to the wheel. I have not in years crossed the ocean with so much peace of mind about Arnold as I shall have this time," said his stepmother. "No, leave that blue voile, Hélène, the collar never fitted."
"Oh, he doesn't spend the winters in Paris with you?" asked Sylvia.
"He's been staying here in Lydford of late—crazy as it sounds. He was simply so bored that he couldn't think of anything else to do. He has, besides, an absurd theory that he enjoys it more in winter than in summer. He says the natives are to be seen then. He's been here from his childhood. He knows a good many of them, I suppose. Now, Hélène, let's see the gloves and hats."
It came over Sylvia with a passing sense of great strangeness that she had been in this spot for four months and, with the exception of the men at the fire, she had not met, had not spoken to, had not even consciously seen a single inhabitant of the place.
And in the end, she went away in precisely the same state of ignorance. On the day they drove to the station she did, indeed, give one fleeting glimpse over the edge of her narrow prison-house of self-centered interest. Surrounded by a great many strapped and buckled pieces of baggage, with Hélène, fascinatingly ugly in her serf's uniform, holding the black leather bag containing Aunt Victoria's jewels, they passed along the street for the last time, under the great elms already almost wintry with their bare boughs. Now that it was too late, Sylvia felt a momentary curiosity about the unseen humanity which had been so near her all the summer. She looked out curiously at the shabby vehicles (it seemed to her that there were more of them than in the height of the season), at the straight-standing, plainly dressed, briskly walking women and children (there seemed to be a new air of life and animation about the street now that most of the summer cottages were empty), and at the lounging, indifferent, powerfully built men. She wondered, for a moment, what they were like, with what fortitude their eager human hearts bore the annual display of splendor they might never share. They looked, in that last glimpse, somehow quite strong, as though they would care less than she would in their places. Perhaps they were only hostile, not envious.
"I dare say," said Aunt Victoria, glancing out at a buck-board, very muddy as to wheels, crowded with children, "that it's very forlorn for the natives to have the life all go out of the village when the summer people leave. They must feel desolate enough!"
Sylvia wondered.