"Meaning?"
"Lots of things, but mostly why can't people--men and women--just be friends and not have anything else snarled up with it?"
"They can." Tom Daly's steady voice was like oil to the troubled waters of Sylvia's soul.
Nor did she guess that it cost him something of an effort to throw precisely the right amount of big-brotherness into his words. As he admitted, no man could safely boast that he had passed the fool limit, but he could and would be man enough himself to be sure no girl like Sylvia was going to be bothered by the folly.
"We can anyway," he smiled down at Sylvia to add in the old friendly way, a friendliness whose very familiarity was steadying.
She smiled back mistily.
"Of course we can. I'm a silly idiot to-day. Ghosts seem to walk even in the sunniest, most everyday places. Thank you, Doctor Tom. I don't know why I wept. My spirit isn't weepy. It was just my eyes. My spirit feels like singing 'Yankee Doodle' this minute."
"Let her go," he approved gayly, and directed the conversation through the rest of the ride so skillfully to safe and sane and neutral matters that long before they reached the Hill Sylvia had lost the last vestige of self-consciousness, and was her old, merry, natural self, with a good many of the "star sparkles" back in their places.
This process was so salutary that later when Tom and Lois were at the Hall to dinner it hardly seemed possible to Sylvia that she had had any queer feelings at all about the matter and teased and joked with the doctor in precisely her old merry, audacious way, exactly as she had been accustomed to doing since she was a naughty little schoolgirl at St. Anne's. When they were walking home together in the starlight Lois turned to her husband with a curious question.
"Tom, don't you ever wish you had waited for Sylvia? She is so lovely and full of life. She is much more your kind than I am."