e
meets.... _All_ the boys have tutors in vacation times to coach them
for the college-entrance examinations."

The face of the college professor's wife continued immovably grave
during this brief summary of an educational system. She inquired, "How
old is Arnold now?" learned that he was seventeen, remembered that, oh
yes, he was a year older than Sylvia, and allowed the subject to drop
into one of the abysmal silences for which she alone had the courage.
Her husband's sister was as little proof against it as her husband. As
it continued, Mrs. Marshall-Smith went through the manoeuvers which in
a less perfectly bred person would have been fidgeting....

No one paid any attention to Sylvia, who sat confronting herself in a
long mirror and despising every garment she wore.

CHAPTER XI

ARNOLD'S FUTURE IS CASUALLY DECIDED

The next day was to have been given up to really improving pursuits.
The morning in the Art Institute came off as planned. The girls were
marshaled through the sculpture and paintings and various art objects
with about the result which might have been expected. As blankly
inexperienced of painting and sculpture as any Bushmen, they
received this sudden enormous dose of those arts with an instant,
self-preservatory incapacity to swallow even a small amount of them.
It is true that the very first exhibits they saw, the lions outside
the building, the first paintings they encountered, made an
appreciable impression on them; but after this they followed their
elders through the interminable crowded halls of the museum, their
legs aching with the effort to keep their balance on the polished
floors, their eyes increasingly glazed and dull. For a time a few
eccentric faces or dresses among the other sightseers penetrated
through this merciful insensibility, but by noon the capacity for even
so much observation as this had left them. They set one foot before
the other, they directed their eyes upon the multitudinous objects
exhibited, they nodded their heads to comments made by the others, but
if asked suddenly what they had just seen in the room last visited,
neither of them could have made the faintest guess.

At half-past twelve, their aunt and mother, highly self-congratulatory
over the educational morning, voted that enough was as good as a
feast, and led their stunned and stupefied charges away to Aunt
Victoria's hotel for lunch.

It was while they were consuming this exceedingly appetizi