class-life, of
course; but there was a certain distinction involved in being educated
"differently." She might be queer, but since she was apparently fated
to be queer, she might as well not be "common" as well. Finally,
because she was still, at fourteen, very much of a child, the scale
was tipped by her thinking what fun it would be to go down-town on
errands in school hours. Charles Lamb, lost in painful wonder at his
own leisure after thirty-six years of incessant office-hours, could
savor no more acutely than an American school-child the exquisite
flavor of freedom at an hour formerly dedicated to imprisonment.

As a matter of fact, during the next three years Sylvia's time was
more constantly occupied than when there was a fixed time-limit to her
studies. Her teachers were always about her, and lightly as the new
yoke pressed, she wore it practically without intermission. Her
immersion in the ideals, the standards, the concepts of her parents
was complete, engulfing. Somebody was nearly always teaching her
something. She studied history and Latin with her father; mathematics
with her mother. She learned to swim, to play tennis, to ride in the
summer-time, and to skate on the frozen swimming-pool in winter, all
without stirring from home. Old Reinhardt was supposed to come twice
a week to give her a piano-lesson, but actually he dropped in almost
every day to smoke meditatively and keep a watchful ear on her
practising.

Although during those years she was almost literally rooted to the
Marshall soil, watered by Marshall convictions, and fed by Marshall
information, the usual miracle of irresistibly individual growth went
silently and unconsciously forward in her. She was growing up to be
herself, and not her mother or her father, little as any one in her
world suspected the presence of this unceasingly recurrent phenomenon
of growth. She was alive to all the impressions reflected so
insistently upon her, but she transmuted them into products which
would immensely have surprised her parents, they being under the
usual parental delusion that they knew every corner of her heart. Her
budding aversions, convictions, ambitions were not in the least the
aversions, convictions, and ambitions so loudly voiced about her; and
a good deal of her energy was taken up in a more or less conscious
reaction from the family catchwords, with especial emphasis laid on an
objection to the family habit of taking their convictions with