“And pray, who is to suggest it to your father? Surely you couldn’t!”
“Why no,” said Sylvia, “perhaps not. But couldn’t Mamma?”
“Your mother would die first!” And Sylvia, remembering her “talk” with “Miss Margaret,” had to admit that this was probably true.
But still she could not give up her idea that something ought to be done. She took a couple of days more to think, and then made up her mind to write to her Uncle Basil. The family had sent him to talk with her about Frank’s misconduct, thus apparently indicating him as her proper adviser in delicate matters.
So she wrote, at some length—using most carefully veiled language, and tearing up many pages which contained words she could not endure seeing on paper. But she made her meaning clear—that she thought someone should approach her future husband on the subject.
Sylvia waited the necessary period for the Bishop’s reply, and read it with trembling fingers and flaming cheeks—although its language was even more carefully veiled than her own. The substance of it was that van Tuiver was a Christian gentleman, and this must be Sylvia’s guarantee that he would not bring any harm to the woman he so deeply revered. Surely, if Sylvia respected him enough to marry him, she could trust him in a matter like this! To approach him upon it would be to offer him a deadly insult.
Whereupon Sylvia took several days more to worry and wonder. She was not satisfied at all, and finally summoned her courage and wrote to the Bishop again. It was not merely a question of honor; if that were true, she would have to say that Beauregard Dabney was a scoundrel and she did not believe that. Might it not possibly be knowledge that was lacking? She begged her uncle to do her the favor of his life by writing to van Tuiver; and she intimated further that if he would not do it, she would have to put the matter before her father.
So there was another wait, and then came a letter from the Bishop, saying that he was writing as requested. Then, after a third wait, a letter with van Tuiver’s reply. He had taken the inquiry very magnanimously; he could understand, he said, how Sylvia had been upset by the sight of her friend’s illness. As to her own case, she might rest assured that there could be no such possibility. And so at last Sylvia’s fears were allayed, and she was free to be unhappy about other matters.
§ 26
You must not imagine that Sylvia was spending these days in moping; all her thinking had to be done in the odd moments of a strenuous career. Day and night she had to meet new people, and new people were always an irresistible stimulus to her curiosity. Not all of them were hall-boys and shop-clerks, falling instant victims to her charms; on the contrary, they were Knickerbocker “society”—people not infrequently as wealthy as her future husband, and having an equally great notion of their own importance. The tidings that Douglas van Tuiver had picked up a country girl had not thrilled them with sympathetic emotions. The details of the newspaper romance inspired them only with contempt. There had to be many a flash of Sylvia’s rapier-wit, and many a flash of Sylvia’s red-brown eyes, before these patrician plutocrats had been brought to acknowledge her an equal.