ured asperity. But there was relief in
her voice.

CHAPTER XIV

HIGHER EDUCATION

To any one who is familiar with State University life, the color
of Sylvia's Freshman year will be vividly conveyed by the simple
statement that she was not invited to join a fraternity. To any one
who does not know State University life, no description can convey
anything approaching an adequate notion of the terribly determinative
significance of that fact.

The statement that she was invited to join no sorority is not
literally true, for in the second semester when it was apparent that
none of the three leading fraternities intended to take her in, there
came a late "bid" from one of the third-rate sororities, of recent
date, composed of girls like Sylvia who had not been included in the
membership of the older, socially distinguished organizations. Cut to
the quick by her exclusion from the others, Sylvia refused this tardy
invitation with remorseless ingratitude. If she were not to form one
of the "swell" set of college, at least she would not proclaim herself
one of the "jays," the "grinds," the queer girls, who wore their hair
straight back from their foreheads, who invariably carried off Phi
Beta Kappa, whose skirts hung badly, whose shoe-heels turned over as
they walked, who stood first in their classes, whose belts behind made
a practice of revealing large white safety-pins; and whose hats, even
disassociated from their dowdy wearers, and hanging in the cloakroom,
were of an almost British eccentricity.

Nothing of this sort could be alleged against Sylvia's appearance,
which she felt, as she arrayed herself every morning, to be all that
the most swagger frat could ask of a member. Aunt Victoria's boxes
of clothing, her own nimble fingers and passionate attention to the
subject, combined to turn her out a copy, not to be distinguished from
the original, of the daughter of a man with an income five times that
of her father. As she consulted her mirror, it occurred to her also,
as but an honest recognition of a conspicuous fact, that her suitable
and harmonious toilets adorned a person as pleasing to the eye as any
of her classmates.

During the last year of her life at home she had shot up very fast,
and she was now a tall, slender presence, preserved from even the
usual touching and delightful awkwardness of seventeen by the trained
dexterity and strength with which she handled her body, as muscular,
for all its