great
seriousness.

Her father would have been aghast if he could have felt the slightest
reflection from the heat of her detestation of his favorite,
Emersonian motto, which, now that he had reached five and forty, he
was apt to repeat with the iteration natural to his age, rousing in
Sylvia the rebellious exasperation felt by _her_ age for over-emphatic
moralizings.

On the occasion of one of the annual gatherings at the Marshall house
of the Seniors in her father's classes, she remarked fiercely to
Judith, "If Father gets off that old Emerson, 'What will you have,
quoth God. Take it and pay for it,' again tonight in his speech, I'm
going to get right up and scream."

Judith stared. The girls were in the kitchen, large aprons over their
best dresses, setting out rows of plates for the chicken salad which
was to come after the music. "I don't see anything to scream about in
that!" said Judith with a wondering contempt for Sylvia's notions.

"I'm so _sick_ of it!" cried Sylvia, tearing the lettuce-leaves apart
with venom. "Father never gets through any sort of a speech that he
doesn't work it in--and I hate it, anyhow! It makes me feel as though
somebody had banged a big door in my face and shut me up in prison."

"Well, for goodness' sakes!" cried Judith, who, at this period of
their lives, had remained rather more than her three years behind
Sylvia's intelligence. "How do you get all that out of _that_!"

"You haven't sense enough to know what it means, that's all!" retorted
Sylvia. "It means something perfectly hateful, the way Father uses it.
It means you've got to pay for every single thing you do or get in
this world! It's somebody tagging you round with an account-book,
seeing how big a bill you're running up. It's the perfectly horrid way
Father and Mother make us do, of _always_ washing up the dishes we
dirty, and _always_ picking up the things we drop. Seems as though I'd
die happy, if I could just step out of my nightgown in the morning and
_leave_ it there, and know that it would get hung up without my doing
it."

"Well, if that's all you want, to die happy," said Judith, the
literal-minded, "I will do that much for you!"

"Oh gracious, no! That wouldn't do any good! You know I couldn't take
any satisfaction letting _you_ do that!" objected Sylvia, peevishly,
fuming and fumbling helplessly before the baffling quality of her
desires. "I don't want just somebody to pick it up for me. I want it
pick