“Oh, yes!” responded Sylvia, narrowing her eyes, and speaking a little vaguely. And David saw that while her letter, a letter written in a charmingly frank fashion, and asking please—please to be free from any engagement to him for a little while, had made a romantic sort of impression upon her mind, his had scarcely registered upon her consciousness at all. In other words, Sylvia was her own whole world just at the moment, and the only things that mattered were her own moods, her own ideas, her own individual desires.
The highly distinguished and honourable conclusion of her school days, her youth, her beauty, her sense of closely impending power could not but be deliciously stimulating to a nature like Sylvia’s. She and David stopped two nights in Boston, Sylvia with a schoolmate, David at a hotel, met on the languid, warm spring mornings to explore the quiet shops and to discuss various plans for Wastewater: electric lighting for Wastewater, a furnace for Wastewater, a hot-water system for Wastewater. There was a delightful new, red, slim checkbook; there was an imposing balance at the bank. Sylvia bought herself one or two charming frocks as a sort of promissory note of the financial independence that was so soon to be, and she did not forget a broad lacy black hat for dear little Gabrielle, who had had such a sad year, and a lacy thin black afternoon gown to match it.
Gabrielle, when they reached Wastewater, met them all in white, and Sylvia gave her a warm kiss and murmured just the right phrase of sympathy as they went upstairs to find her mother. The gardens were exquisite in early June bloom; the whole house smelled of roses and summer weather; birds were flashing in and out of the cherry trees; John was on his knees beside the strawberry bed.
But Flora sat upstairs before the cold grate, with the windows shut, and her first words to Sylvia were broken by tears. Sylvia comforted her with a sort of loving impatience in her voice.
“Mamma, darling! Is this reasonable! Isn’t it after all a blessed solution for poor little Aunt Lily?”
“But I never thought it would be so!” Flora faltered, blowing her nose, sniffling, straightening her glasses with all the unlovely awkwardness of hard-fought grief. And immediately she regained her composure, almost with a sort of shame, and David could say truthfully to Sylvia a little later, when the three young persons were wandering through the garden, that Sylvia had done her mother good already.
Sylvia indeed did them all good; she was delighted with everything, appreciative and pleasant with the maids, and sisterly in her manner toward Gabrielle. David found her sensible and clever in the business conferences they had on the dreamy summer mornings in the little office downstairs, where perhaps the first mistress of Wastewater had transacted her business also, more than a hundred years before—the business of superintending stores and soap-making, weaving and dyeing, bartering in cocks and geese and the selling of lambs. Sylvia waived all unnecessary matters, was brightly receptive, and in every way businesslike and yet confident in David’s judgment. Later she would debate with John about fruit, with Trude about preserving, with Daisy about tablecloths, all in her own pleasantly unhesitating yet considerate manner. It was evident that she would assume her responsibilities thoroughly, yet with no jarring and disrupting of the accustomed course of things.
In one of the late evenings when Sylvia came into Gay’s room to brush her hair and to gossip, Gay broached her plan of going to a Boston convent as soon as the hot weather should be over, to look about her and find some sort of work. Sylvia listened thoughtfully and looked up with a kindly smile.
“You’d be happier so, Gabrielle?”
“I think so,” Gay answered.