“What can you do then?” he asked.
“I’m going to betray them to you!” she cried. And as he looked puzzled, she went on, “I’m going to tell you about them! I’m going to tell you everything they’ve said and done, and everything they may say and do in the future!”
“And that,” said Frank to me, “was the most loving thing she ever said!” Such was the power, in Sylvia’s world, of the ideal of the Family!
BOOK II
Sylvia Lingers
§ 1
At the railroad station in Boston, on an afternoon in May, Sylvia Castleman and Mrs. Tuis were arriving from New York. You must picture Sylvia in a pale grey cloak, with a pale blue blouse; also a grey hat with broad brim and “bluets” on top. You can imagine, perhaps, how her colors shone from under it. She was meeting Frank for the first time in eight months.
The host of the occasion was Cousin Harley Chilton, now also a student at Harvard. It was mid-afternoon, and he had borrowed a motor-car to show her something of Cambridge. Their bags were sent to their hotel in the city, and Frank took his place by Sylvia’s side. They had to talk about commonplaces, but he could feel her delight and eagerness like an electric radiance. As they flew over the long bridge, he wrapped a robe about her. What a thrill went through him as he touched her! “Oh, I’m so happy! so happy!” she exclaimed, her eyes shining into his. He had given her a new name in his letters, and he whispered it now into her ear: “Lady Sunshine! Lady Sunshine!”
They came to a vista of dark stone buildings, buried in the foliage of enormous elms. “Here are the grounds,” he said; and Sylvia cried, “Oh Harley, go slowly. I want to see them.” Her cousin complied, and Frank began pointing out the various buildings by name.
But suddenly the car drew in by the curb and stopped. Harley leaned forward, remarking, “Spark-plug loose, I think.”
Now the sparking seemed to be all right, so far as Frank could judge, but he did not know very much about automobiles. In general he was a guileless nature, and did not understand that this was the beginning of Sylvia’s social career at Harvard. But Sylvia, who knew about automobiles, and still more about human nature, saw two men strolling in her direction, and now about twenty yards away—upper-classmen, clad in white flannel trousers, blue coats, huge straw hats like baskets, and ties knotted with that elaborately studied carelessness which means that the wearer has spent fifteen minutes before the mirror prior to emerging from his room.