Professor Marshall sprang up, with clenched hands, tall, powerful, helpless. "It's outrageous, Barbara, for all your talk! We're responsible! We ought to shut her up under lock and key—"
"So many girls have been deterred from a mistake by being shut up under lock and key!" commented Mrs. Marshall, with an ironical accent.
"But, good Heavens! Think of her going to that old scoundrel's—how can I look people in the face, when they all know my opinion of him—how I've opposed his being a Trustee and—"
"Ah,—!" remarked his wife significantly, "that's the trouble, is it?"
Professor Marshall flushed, and for a moment made no rejoinder. Then, shifting his ground, he said bitterly: "I think you're forgetting that I've had a disillusionizing experience in this sort of thing which you were spared. You forget that Sylvia is closely related to my sister."
"I don't forget that—but I don't forget either that Sylvia has had a very different sort of early life from poor Victoria's. She has breathed pure air always—I trust her to recognize its opposite."
He made an impatient gesture of exasperation. "But she'll be in it—it'll be too late—"
"It's never too late." She spoke quickly, but her unwavering opposition began to have in it a note of tension.
"She'll be caught—she'll have to go on because it'll be too hard to get out—"
"The same vigor that makes her resist us now will give her strength then—she's not Eleanor Hubert."