She was battling so obviously for calm that Sylvia remembered, with sudden compunction, that Mamma was the last of her generation, after all, and that—it was no secret!—she had certainly once, if not twice, been engaged to marry Roger Fleming. Sylvia exchanged a significant warning look with David, and they immediately guided the conversation into safer channels. But David was shocked and astonished to notice a few minutes later that his aunt’s forehead, under the festive crimping of the gray hair, was wet.
That was all of that. Nobody apparently paid any more attention to the trivial episode, unless Gay felt an odd and indefinable satisfaction in being thought like Uncle Roger, in being thus included in the Fleming ranks.
She was trying to see this likeness at her own mirror an hour later, when Sylvia, brushing her hair and in a red wrapper infinitely becoming, came in.
“The girls are asleep,” reported Sylvia, “and I don’t like to light my lamp because Gwen is in with me. I stayed downstairs a few minutes to talk to David—I see him so little nowadays.”
A sharp stiletto twisted in Gay’s heart. She could see them lingering in the darkened room, by the dying fire: Sylvia so beautiful, with her glossy black coils of hair drooping, and her face glowing with firelight and winter roses, and David looking down at her with that kindly, half-amused, half-admiring look. Just a few moments’ intimate talk, perhaps only of Sylvia’s affairs, perhaps only of her mother’s health, but binding these two together in that old friendship, kinship, utter ease and understanding, mutual liking and admiration.
Despair came suddenly upon Gabrielle, and she wanted to get away—away from Sylvia’s superiorities and advantages, away from Sylvia’s long outdistancing upon the road to David’s friendship. Gay thought, braiding and brushing her own long hair, that she did not want Sylvia’s money, she did not want anything that Sylvia had, she only wanted to be where she need not hear about it!
“They all say such kind things of you, Gay,” Sylvia told her, with that pleasantness that was quite unconsciously, and only faintly, tinged with patronage.
It was then that Gay, aware of little pin-pricks of hurt pride, said something of the delightful quality of the guests.
“The Sisters had the idea that all college girls are either terrible bobbed-haired flappers who smoke cigarettes,” Gay said, laughing, “or blue-stockings who think science can disprove all that religion has ever claimed!”
Sylvia smiled at her through the mirror.