During the summer vacation she kept up her practice with her father, who remembered enough of his early training in Paris to be more than a match for her, and in the autumn of her Sophomore year, at the annual Gymnasium exhibition, she gave with the Commandant a public bout with the foils in which she notably distinguished herself. The astonished and long-continued applause for this new feature of the exhibition was a draught of nectar to her embittered young heart, but she acknowledged it with not the smallest sign of pleasure, showing an impassive face as she stood by the portly captain, slim and tall and young and haughty, joining him in a sweeping, ceremonious salute with her foil to the enthusiastic audience, and turning on her heel with a brusqueness as military as his own, to march firmly with high-held head beside him back to the ranks of blue-bloomered girls who stood watching her.
The younger girls in Alpha Kappa and Sigma Beta were seizing this opportunity to renew an old quarrel with their elders in the fraternities and were acrimoniously hoping that the older ones were quite satisfied with their loss of a brilliant member. These accusations met with no ready answer from the somewhat crestfallen elders, whose only defense was the entire unexpectedness of the way in which Sylvia was distinguishing herself. Who ever heard before of a girl doing anything remarkable in athletics? And anyhow, now in her Sophomore year it was too late to do anything. A girl so notoriously proud would certainly not consider a tardy invitation, and it would not do to run the risk of being refused. It is not too much to say that to have overheard a conversation like this would have changed the course of Sylvia's development, but of such colloquies she could know nothing, attributing to the fraternities, with all an outsider's resentful overestimation of their importance, an arrogant solidarity of opinion and firmness of purpose which they were very far from possessing.
Professor and Mrs. Marshall and Lawrence and Judith, up in the front row of chairs set for the audience about the running track, followed this exploit of Sylvia's with naïvely open pride and sympathy, applauding even more heartily than did their neighbors. Lawrence, as usual, began to compose a poem, the first line of which ran,
"Splendid, she wields her gleaming sword—"
The most immediate result of this first public success of Sylvia's was the call paid to Mrs. Marshall on the day following by Mrs. Draper, the wife of the professor of Greek. Although there had never been any formal social intercourse between the two ladies, they had for a good many years met each other casually on the campus, and Mrs. Draper, with the extremely graceful manner of assurance which was her especial accomplishment, made it seem quite natural that she should call to congratulate Sylvia's mother on the girl's skill and beauty as shown in her prowess on the evening before. Mrs. Marshall prided herself on her undeceived view of life, but she was as ready to hear praise of her spirited and talented daughter as any other mother, and quite melted to Mrs. Draper, although her observations from afar of the other woman's career in La Chance had never before inclined her to tolerance. So that when Mrs. Draper rose to go and asked casually if Sylvia couldn't run in at five that afternoon to have a cup of tea at her house with a very few of her favorites among the young people, Mrs. Marshall, rather inflexible by nature and quite unused to the subtleties of social intercourse, found herself unable to retreat quickly enough from her reflected tone of cordiality to refuse the invitation for her daughter.
When Sylvia came back to lunch she was vastly fluttered and pleased by the invitation, and as she ate, her mind leaped from one possible sartorial combination to another. Whatever she wore must be exactly right to be worthy of such a hostess: for Mrs. Draper was a conspicuous figure in faculty society. She had acquired, through years of extremely intelligent manoeuvering, a reputation for choice exclusiveness which was accepted even in the most venerable of the old families of La Chance, those whose founders had built their log huts there as long as fifty years before. In faculty circles she occupied a unique position, envied and feared and admired and distrusted and copiously gossiped about by the faculty ladies, who accepted with eagerness any invitations to entertainments in her small, aesthetic, and perfectly appointed house. She was envied even by women with much more than her income:—for of course Professor Draper had an independent income; it was hardly possible to be anybody unless one belonged to that minority of the faculty families with resources beyond the salary granted by the State.
Faculty ladies were, however, not favored with a great number of invitations to Mrs. Draper's select and amusing teas and dinners, as that lady had a great fancy for surrounding herself with youth, meaning, for the most part, naturally enough, masculine youth. With an unerring and practised eye she picked out from each class the few young men who were to her purpose, and proclaiming with the most express lack of reticence the forty-three years which she by no means looked, she took these chosen few under a wing frankly maternal, giving them, in the course of an intimate acquaintance with her and the dim and twilight ways of her house and life, an enlightening experience of a civilization which she herself said, with a humorous appreciation of her own value, quite made over the young, unlicked cubs. This statement of her influence on most of the young men drawn into her circle was perhaps not much exaggerated.
From time to time she also admitted into this charmed circle a young girl or two, though almost never one of the University girls, of whom she made the jolliest possible fun. Her favorites were the daughters of good La Chance families who at seventeen had "finished" at Miss Home's Select School for Young Ladies, and who came out in society not later than eighteen. She seemed able, as long as she cared to do it, to exercise as irresistible a fascination over these youthful members of her own sex as over the older masculine undergraduates of the University. They copied their friend's hats and neckwear and shoes and her mannerisms of speech, were miserable if she neglected them for a day, furiously jealous of each other, and raised to the seventh heaven by attention from her. Just at present the only girl admitted frequently to Mrs. Draper's intimacy was Eleanor Hubert.
On the day following the Gymnasium exhibition, when Sylvia, promptly at five, entered the picturesque vine-covered Draper house, she found it occupied by none of the usual habitués of the place. The white-capped, black-garbed maid who opened the door to the girl held aside for her a pair of heavy brown-velvet portières which veiled the entrance to the drawing-room. The utter silence of this servitor seemed portentous and inhuman to the young guest, unused to the polite convention that servants cast no shadow and do not exist save when serving their superiors.
She found herself in a room as unlike any she had ever seen as though she had stepped into a new planet. The light here was as yellow as gold, and came from a great many candles which, in sconces and candelabra, stood about the room, their oblong yellow flame as steady in the breathless quiet of the air as though they burned in a vault underground. There was not a book in the room, except one in a yellow cover lying beside a box of candy on the mantelpiece, but every ledge, table, projection, or shelf was covered with small, queerly fashioned, dully gleaming objects of ivory, or silver, or brass, or carved wood, or porcelain.