Flora, diverted, asked him his meaning, and Sylvia thought she took a surprising amount of interest in the immature affair. Young Du Spain had told her he would inherit something, Flora said, and he seemed a nice, cheerful young fellow. It seemed a great pity that they were not older—that something definite might not come of it!
“Even now,” Flora argued, knitting fast, “if he really got a position, through his father—Gay will have something—I would certainly not let her go to him entirely empty-handed,” she went on, half aloud, as if reasoning with herself. David remembered suddenly that, after all, he and she were administrators of the estate until mid-June; they would solve Gay’s problem somehow before that; he hardly imagined Sylvia afterward disputing or changing any arrangement that they made about Gay.
Perhaps Sylvia remembered this, too, and decided that her only policy was a waiting one, until her full inheritance and liberty should be put into her hands. She fell into kindly desultory talk about Gay, how pretty the girl had grown, and how nicely mannered she was.
But when Flora, who seemed nervous and disturbed, presently got up and went out of the room, Sylvia said to David:
“What I really have in the back of my head is that Mamma and I shall have a long holiday in Europe next winter. I’ve never been, and it would be wonderful to see England in the fall, and Paris, with all the chestnuts turning red, and then settle down somewhere for two or three months, perhaps, on the Riviera. It would do her a world of good, and she seems upset of late. I think Gay’s being here,” Sylvia added, thoughtfully, looking straight up into David’s eyes now, as they stood together before the hearth, “has roused old, sad memories, and I feel that I—well, I owe Mamma this holiday, after these years when I’ve seen so little of her! I’ll get all my new responsibilities here straightened out as soon as I can, graduate, perhaps get paperers and furnace men working here, under Hedda and Trude, before we go, and then have a real vacation before we come back,” she finished, smiling, “to be the Flemings of Wastewater for the next forty or fifty years!”
“And of course there’s one more responsibility I hope you’ll decide to assume, Sylvia,” David said, significantly, quite unexpectedly to himself, but with his pleasant even voice and smile unchanged.
She understood him instantly and flushed rosily.
“Perhaps I will!” she answered, bravely.
“Be thinking it over?” he pursued.
Sylvia looked down at the pretty foot she had rested on the bright brass and iron fire rods.