her husband was evidently about to cast at her. "Besides, how do
_you_ know?--one never knows how things will turn out--she may--she
may marry him, and he may have a life which will give him more leisure
for investigation than if--"

Professor Marshall wiped his lips violently on his napkin and stood
up. "Nothing would induce her to marry him--or any one else. She's
extracted from marriage all she wants of it. No, she'll just keep him
trailing along, in an ambiguous position, sickened and tantalized and
fevered, till all the temper is drawn out of him--and then hell be
dropped,"

He turned away with an impatient fling of his head. His wife stood up
now and looked at him anxiously. "Go play us something on the piano,"
she urged. This was not a common exhortation from her. She cared very
little for music, and with her usual honesty she showed, as a rule, a
very passive attitude towards it.

Professor Marshall glanced at her with a flash of anger. "Sometimes
you count too much on my childishness, Barbara," he said resentfully,
and went out of the door without further words.

Decidedly the discomposing effect of Aunt Victoria's visit lasted even
after she had gone away. But the next day was the beginning of the
school term, the busy, regular routine was taken up, Sylvia was
promoted to the 5A grade, and at home Father let her begin to learn
the Pilgrim's Chorus, from Tannhauser.

Life for the eager little girl moved quickly forward at its usual
brisk pace, through several years to come.

CHAPTER VII

"WE HOLD THESE TRUTHS TO BE SELF-EVIDENT ..."

The public school to which the Marshall children went as soon as they
were old enough was like any one of ten thousand public schools--a
large, square, many-windowed, extravagantly ugly building, once red
brick, but long ago darkened almost to black by soft-coal smoke. About
it, shaded by three or four big cottonwood-trees, was an inclosed
space of perhaps two acres of ground, beaten perfectly smooth by
hundreds of trampling little feet, a hard, bare earthen floor, so
entirely subdued to its fate that even in the long summer vacation no
spear of grass could penetrate its crust to remind it that it was made
of common stuff with fields and meadows.

School began at nine o'clock in the morning and, as a rule,
three-fourths of the children had passed through the front gate twenty
or thirty minutes earlier. Nobody knew why it should be considered
such a hideous crime