The Bent Twig Part 18

"Do you really _know_ him at all?" asked her father pointedly.

"Of course I do--I know he's very handsome, and awfully good-natured, and he's given me the only good time I've had at the University. You just don't know how ghastly last year was to me! I'm awfully grateful to Jerry, and that's all there is to it!"

Before this second disclaimer, her parents were silent again, Sylvia looking down at her lap, picking at her fingers. Her expression was that of a naughty child--that is, with a considerable admixture of unhappiness in her wilfulness.

By this time Professor Marshall's expression was clearly one of downright anger, controlled by violent effort. Mrs. Marshall was the first one to speak. She went over to Sylvia and laid her hand on her shoulder. "Well, Sylvia dear, I'm sorry about--" She stopped and began again. "You know, dear, that we always believed in letting our children, as far as possible, make their own decisions, and we won't go back on that now. But I want you to understand that that puts a bigger responsibility on you than on most girls to make the _right_ decisions. We trust you--your good sense and right feeling--to keep you from being carried away by unworthy motives into a false position.

And, what's just as important, we trust to your being clear-headed enough to see what your motives really are."

"I don't see," began Sylvia, half crying, "why something horrid should come up just because I want a good time--other girls don't have to be all the time so solemn, and thinking about things!"

"There'd be more happy women if they did," remarked Mrs. Marshall, adding: "I don't believe we'd better talk any more about this now. You know how we feel, and you must take that into consideration. You think it over."

She spoke apparently with her usual calmness, but as she finished she put her arms about the girl's neck and kissed the flushed cheeks.

Caresses from Mrs. Marshall were unusual, and, even through her tense effort to resist, Sylvia was touched. "You're just worrying about nothing at all, Mother," she said, trying to speak lightly, but escaped from a possible rejoinder by hurriedly gathering up her text-books and following Judith and Lawrence upstairs.

Her father and mother confronted each other. "_Well!_" said Professor Marshall hotly, "of all the weak, inconclusive, modern parents--is _this_ what we've come to?"

Mrs. Marshall took up her sewing and said in the tone which always quelled her husband, "Yes, this is what we've come to."

His heat abated at once, though he went on combatively, "Oh, I know what you mean, reasonable authority and not tyranny and all that--yes, I believe in it--of course--but this goes beyond--" he ended. "Is there or is there not such a thing as parental authority?"

Mrs. Marshall answered with apparent irrelevance, "You remember what Cavour said?"

"Good Heaven! No, I don't remember!" cried Professor Marshall, with an impatience which might have been Sylvia's.

"He said, 'Any idiot can rule by martial law.'"

"Yes, of course, that theory is all right, but--"

"If a theory is all right, it ought to be acted upon."

Professor Marshall cried out in exasperation, "But see here, Barbara--here is a concrete fact--our daughter--our precious Sylvia--is making a horrible mistake--and because of a theory we mustn't reach out a hand to pull her back."

"We _can't_ pull her back by force," said his wife. "She's eighteen years old, and she has the habit of independent thought. We can't go back on that now."

"We don't seem to be pulling her back by force or in any other way! We seem to be just weakly sitting back and letting her do exactly as she pleases."

"If during all these years we've had her under our influence we haven't given her standards that--" began the mother.

"You heard how utterly she repudiated our influence and our standards and--"

"Oh, what she _says_--it's what she's made of that'll count--that's the _only_ thing that'll count when a crisis comes--"

Professor Marshall interrupted hastily: "When a crisis! What do you call _this_ but a crisis--she's like a child about to put her hand into the fire."

"I trust in the training she's had to give her firm enough nerves to pull it out again when she feels the heat," said her mother steadily.

Professor Marshall sprang up, with clenched hands, tall, powerful, helpless. "It's outrageous, Barbara, for all your talk! We're responsible! We ought to shut her up under lock and key--"

"So _many_ girls have been deterred from a mistake by being shut up under lock and key!" commented Mrs. Marshall, with an ironical accent.

"But, good Heavens! Think of her going to that old scoundrel's--how can I look people in the face, when they all know my opinion of him--how I've opposed his being a Trustee and--"

"_Ah_,--!" remarked his wife significantly, "that's the trouble, is it?"

Professor Marshall flushed, and for a moment made no rejoinder. Then, s.h.i.+fting his ground, he said bitterly: "I think you're forgetting that I've had a disillusionizing experience in this sort of thing which you were spared. You forget that Sylvia is closely related to my sister."

"I don't forget that--but I don't forget either that Sylvia has had a very different sort of early life from poor Victoria's. She has breathed pure air always--I trust her to recognize its opposite."

He made an impatient gesture of exasperation. "But she'll be _in_ it--it'll be too late--"

"It's never too late." She spoke quickly, but her unwavering opposition began to have in it a note of tension.

"She'll be caught--she'll have to go on because it'll be too hard to get out--"

"The same vigor that makes her resist us now will give her strength then--she's not Eleanor Hubert."

Her husband burst out upon her in a frightened, angry rush of reproach: "Barbara--how _can_ you! You make me turn cold! This isn't a matter of talk--of theories--we're confronted with--"

She faced him down with unflinching, unhappy eyes. "Oh, of course if we are to believe in liberty only so long as everything goes smoothly--" She tried to add something to this, but her voice broke and she was silent. Her husband looked at her, startled at her pallor and her trembling lips, immensely moved by the rare discomposure of that countenance. She said in a whisper, her voice shaking, "Our little Sylvia--my first baby--"

He flung himself down in the chair beside her and took her hand. "It's d.a.m.nable!" he said.

His wife answered slowly, with long pauses. "No--it's all right--it's part of the whole thing--of life. When you bring children into the world--when you live at all--you must accept the whole. It's not fair to rebel--to rebel at the pain--when--"

"Good G.o.d, it's not _our_ pain I'm shrinking from--!" he broke out.

"No--oh no--that would be easy--"

With an impulse of yearning, and protection, and need, he leaned to put his arms around her, his graying beard against her pale cheek.

They sat silent for a long time.

In the room above them, Sylvia bent over a problem in trigonometry, and rapidly planned a new evening-dress. After a time she got up and opened her box of treasures from Aunt Victoria. The yellow chiffon would do--Jerry had said he liked yellow--she could imagine how Mrs.

Hubert would expend herself on Eleanor's toilets for this great occasion--if she could only hit on a design which wouldn't look as though it came out of a woman's magazine--something really sophisticated--she could cover her old white slippers with that bit of gold-tissue off Aunt Victoria's hat--she shook out the chiffon and laid it over the bed, looking intently at its gleaming, s.h.i.+mmering folds and thinking, "How horrid of Father and Mother to go and try to spoil everything so!" She went back to the problem in trigonometry and covered a page with figures, at which she gazed unseeingly. She was by no means happy. She went as far as the door, meaning to go down and kiss her parents good-night, but turned back. They were not a family for surface demonstrations. If she could not yield her point--She began to undress rapidly, turned out the light, opened the windows, and sprang into bed. "If they only wouldn't take things so awfully _solemnly_!" she said to herself petulantly.

CHAPTER XVIII

SYLVIA SKATES MERRILY ON THIN ICE

The design for the yellow chiffon dropped almost literally at Sylvia's feet the next day, on the frontispiece of a theatrical magazine left by another pa.s.senger in the streetcar in which she chanced to be riding. Sylvia pounced on it with instant recognition of its value.

It was "different" and yet not "queer," it was artistic and yet fas.h.i.+onable, and with its flowing lines it would not be hard to construct. It was the creation of a Parisian boulevard actress, known widely for her costumes, for the extraordinary manner in which she dressed her hair, and for the rapidity of her succeeding emotional entanglements. Her name meant nothing to Sylvia. She tore out the page, folded it, and put it for safe-keeping between the pages of her text-book on Logic.

That afternoon she began work on it, running the long seams up on the machine with whirring rapidity, acutely aware of her mother's silent, uncommenting pa.s.sage back and forth through the sewing-room. With an impulse of secrecy which she did not a.n.a.lyze, she did the trying-on in her own room, craning and turning about before her own small mirror.

She knew that her mother would think the dress was cut too low, although, as she told herself, looking with complacency at the smooth, white, exquisitely fine-grained skin thus disclosed, it wasn't nearly as low cut as the dresses Eleanor Hubert wore to any little dance. She had long felt it to be countrified in the extreme to wear the mild compromises towards evening-dress which she and most of the State University girls adopted, as compared with the frankly disclosing gowns of the "town girls" whose clothes came from Chicago and New York. She knew from several outspoken comments that Jerry admired Eleanor's shoulders, and as she looked at her own, she was not sorry that he was to compare them to those of the other girl.