would
gladly have changed places with her in a moment.

That was, on the whole, the note of the Chicago trip, all the dazzling
lights and reflections of which focused, for Sylvia, upon Aunt
Victoria's radiant person. At times, the resultant beam was almost too
much for the young eyes; as, for example, on the next day when the
two made a momentous shopping expedition to the largest and finest
department store in the city. "I've a curiosity to see," Aunt Victoria
had declared carelessly, "what sort of things are sold in a big
Western shop, and besides I've some purchases to make for the Lydford
house. Things needs freshening up there. I've thought of wicker and
chintz for the living-room. It would be a change from what I've had.
Perhaps it would amuse the children to go along?"

At this, Judith, who had a boy's detestation of shopping, looked so
miserable that Aunt Victoria had laughed out, her frank, amused laugh,
and said, "Well, Sylvia and I alone, then!"

"Judith and I'll go to Lincoln Park to take a walk by the lake," said
Mrs. Marshall. "Our inland young folks have never seen so much water
all at once."

Sylvia had been, of course, in the two substantial and well-run
department stores of La Chance, when she went with her mother to make
their carefully considered purchases. They always went directly to
the department in question, where Mrs. Marshall's concise formula ran
usually along such lines as, "I would like to look at misses' coats,
size 16, blue or brown serge, moderate style, price somewhere between
ten and fifteen dollars." And then they looked at misses' coats, size
16, blue or brown serge, of the specified price; and picked out
one. Sylvia's mother was under the impression that she allowed her
daughters to select their own clothes because, after all these
defining and limiting preliminaries, she always, with a very genuine
indifference, abandoned them to their own choice between the four or
five garments offered.

Even when Sylvia, as she grew older, went by herself to make a small
purchase or two, she was so deeply under the influence of her mother's
example that she felt it unbecoming to loiter, or to examine anything
she knew she could not buy. Besides, nearly all the salespeople, who,
for the most part, had been at their posts for many years, knew her
from childhood, and if she stopped to look at a show-case of new
collars, or jabots, they always came pleasantly to pass the time of
day, and ask