Sylvia understood the accent and tone of this passage more than the exact words, but it summed up and brought home to her in a cruelly clarified form her own groping impressions. The moment was a terribly painful one for her. Her heart swelled, the tears came to her eyes, she clenched her fists. Her fine, lovely, and sensitive face darkened to a tragic intensity of resolve. She might have been the young Hannibal, vowing to avenge Carthage. What she was saying to herself passionately was, "When I get into the University, I will not be a jay!"
It was under these conditions that Sylvia passed from childhood, and emerged into the pains and delights and responsibilities of self-consciousness.
BOOK II
A FALSE START TO ATHENS
CHAPTER X
SYLVIA'S FIRST GLIMPSE OF MODERN CIVILIZATION
Although there was not the slightest actual connection between the two, the trip to Chicago was always in Sylvia's mind like the beginning of her University course. It is true that the journey, practically the first in Sylvia's life, was undertaken shortly before her matriculation as a Freshman, but this fortuitous chronological connection could not account for Sylvia's sense of a deeper unity between the two experiences. The days in Chicago, few as they were, were as charged with significance for her as the successive acts in a drama, and that significance was of the substance and marrow of the following and longer passage in her life.
The fact that her father and her mother disagreed about the advisability of the trip was one of the salient points in the beginning. When Aunt Victoria, breaking a long silence with one of her infrequent letters, wrote to say that she was to be in Chicago "on business" during the last week of September, and would be very glad to have her sister-in-law bring her two nieces to see her there, Professor Marshall said, with his usual snort: "Business nothing! She never has any business. She won't come to see them here, that's all. The idea's preposterous." But Mrs. Marshall, breaking a long silence of her own, said vigorously: "She is your sister, and you and your family are the only blood-kin she has in the world. I've a notion—I have had for some time—that she was somehow terribly hurt on that last visit here. It would be ungenerous not to go half-way to meet her now."
Sylvia, anxiously hanging on her father's response, was surprised when he made no protest beyond, "Well, do as you please. I can keep Lawrence all right. She only speaks of seeing you and the girls." It did not occur to Sylvia, astonished at this sudden capitulation, that there might be a discrepancy between her father's habit of vehement speech and his real feeling in this instance.
It was enough for her, however, that they were going to take a long journey on the train overnight, that they were going to see a great city, that they were going to see Aunt Victoria, about whom her imagination had always hovered with a constancy enhanced by the odd silence concerning her which was the rule in the Marshall house.