"Same old Sylvia! You always did hit straight from the shoulder. What do you want me to do? There is more money in the family now than is good for us. What's the infernal use of my scrapping and scrambling for more? I'm a nincompoop at the business anyway."
"Then for goodness' sake find one you aren't a nincompoop at," retorted Sylvia.
"Easier said than done, young woman."
"Oh, I know," relented his mentor. "I haven't any right to preach till I find my own job."
"You! Girls don't need a job. Their job is to look pretty and get married."
Sylvia frowned at that.
"Heretic! That's not twentieth-century lingo. You are positively mediæval. I shall set Barb on you."
Jack smiled.
"Barb knows it's true just as well as I do for all her theories. She would marry the right man in a minute if he turned up and forget the suffrage stuff. She's by all odds the most domestic of the three of you."
Sylvia looked thoughtful. She remembered Barb's opinion about the "loveliness" of having babies and wondered. For all his inconsequence Jack had a somewhat startling habit at times of getting beneath the surface of things. She suspected he had hit upon a truth now but would not give him the satisfaction of acknowledging the fact. Therefore she said nothing, and her silence gave her companion the opening he had been waiting for. He had not brought Sylvia out in the moonlight to talk "twentieth-century lingo."