So musing, David thought with deep satisfaction of the future. Only a few weeks before he had felt it would be an injustice to speak to Sylvia, Sylvia the beauty, the heiress, barely of age. But Sylvia had been brought into his own zone, in some strange manner, during these Christmas holidays; for the first time in her life David had seen her as perhaps needing affectionate guidance, sympathetic advice, as indeed the young girl she really was, for all her superiorities. College was all very well, thought David, for the nice, ordinary sort of girl like Gwen or Laura Montallen; it helped them to form character, a sense of balance and proportion, to make them into real women. But Sylvia was different, she had been born balanced and conscientious and intelligent and industrious, she needed softening now, and the interruption of her own serene and unquestioned will. There was beginning to be just a hint of the pedant, just a suggestion of the rut, about her.
It was sweet to him to think that with his love for her, his knowledge of her affairs, his happy familiarity here at Wastewater, he might actually give to a marriage with Sylvia more than any other man was apt to give. That confident, straightforward decisiveness of hers was exactly what led so many fine women into ridiculous marriages. He could imagine Sylvia seriously telling him that she was about to marry some engaging penniless idler: “He’s a count, you know, David—one of the finest families in Europe!” Or perhaps she would not marry at all; she had said laughingly of some young admirer months ago, “Possibly he heard of Uncle Roger’s money, David!”
That wouldn’t do, either. Sylvia, pretty and spectacled, and entertaining other nice unmarried college women here twenty years from now was a dreadful thought.
For the world’s opinion of the proverbial guardian wedding with the heiress David cared nothing at all. He was largely indifferent to money; the little that he had sufficed him comfortably; his chief expenses were for canvases and oils, and Wastewater and Keyport supplied him with subjects the year round. Less than a dozen close friends, a city club, an occasional dress rehearsal or first night, and a seat alone five times a season at the opera were enough for David, and for the rest he liked his comfortable old painting clothes, the panorama of the seasons steadily moving onward—and always, behind and through and above the leisurely tenor of his ways, Wastewater.
He roused from his reverie after supper to see Gay smiling at him from the opposite chair.
“What are you thinking about, David? You looked so serious.”
“I was thinking very happy things about the future,” David answered, exchanging just the fleeting shadow of a half smile with Sylvia. “Look, Sylvia, I see a likeness to Uncle Roger in Gay now!” he added, interestedly. “It’s stronger in this picture than in the one downstairs!”
They all three looked up at the large portrait of Roger Fleming that was above the mantel in Flora’s upstairs sitting room. Gay was just below it, and she twisted her tawny head to look upward, too.
“I don’t see it!” Sylvia said, narrowing her eyes to scrutinize the painted face and the living one. “But yes, I do, the mouths are exactly alike!” she added, animatedly. “David, is mine like that?”
Flora was not in the room; they all glanced with instinctive caution at the door now, as it rattled in a rising wind, perfectly aware that to her nervous self-consciousness where all family discussions were concerned even this much would be unwelcome.