From below came the angry voice, quite loud now, so that she caught every queer-sounding word—"righteous indignation indeed! What else did she do, I'd like to know, when she wanted money. The only difference was that she was cold-blooded enough to extract a legal status from the old reprobate she accosted."
Sylvia heard her mother's voice saying coldly, "You ought to be ashamed to use such a word!" and her father retort, "It's the only word that expresses it! You know as well as I do that she cared no more for Ephraim Smith than for the first man she might have solicited on the street—nor so much! God! It makes me sick to look at her and think of the price she paid for her present damn Olympian serenity."
Sylvia heard her mother begin to clear off the table. There was a rattle of dishes through which her voice rose impatiently. "Oh, Elliott, why be so melodramatic always, and spoil so much good language! She did only what every girl brought up as she was, would have done. And, anyhow, are you so very sure that in your heart you're not so awfully hard on her because you're envious of that very prosperity?"
He admitted, with acrimony, the justice of this thrust. "Very likely. Very likely!—everything base and mean in me, that you keep down, springs to life in me at her touch. I dare say I do envy her—I'm quite capable of that—am I not her brother, with the same—"
Mrs. Marshall said hastily: "Hush! Hush! Here's Judith. For Heaven's sake don't let the child hear you!"
For the first time the idea penetrated Sylvia's head that she ought not to have listened. Buddy was now soundly asleep: she detached her hand from his, and went soberly along the hall into her own room. She did not want to see her father just then.
A long time after, Mother called up to say that Aunt Victoria had come for her afternoon drive, and to leave Arnold. Sylvia opened the door a crack and asked, "Where's Father?"
"Oh, gone back to the University this long time," answered her mother in her usual tone. Sylvia came down the stairs slowly and took her seat in the carriage beside Aunt Victoria with none of her usual demonstrative show of pleasure.
"Don't you like my dress?" asked Aunt Victoria, as they drove away. "You don't even notice it, and I put it on 'specially to please you—you're the one discriminating critic in this town!" As Sylvia made no answer to this sally, she went on: "It's hard to get into alone, too. I had to ask the hotel chambermaid to hook it up on the shoulders."
Thus reminded of Pauline, Sylvia could have but inattentive eyes for the creation of amber silk and lace, and brown fur, which seductively clad the handsome body beside her.