nd
physical prowess.

But Sylvia was not a boy, and her fine, promising game of tennis, her
excellence in the swimming-pool, and her success on the gymnasium
floor and on the flying rings, served no purpose but to bring to her
the admiration of the duffers among the girls, whom she despised,
and the unspoken envy of the fraternity girls, whose overtures at
superficial friendliness she constantly rebuffed with stern, wounded
pride.

The sharpest stab to her pride came from the inevitable publicity of
her ordeal. For, though her family knew nothing of what that first
year out in the world meant to her, she had not the consolation of
hoping that her condition was not perfectly apparent to every one else
in the college world. At the first of the year, all gatherings of
undergraduates not in fraternities hummed and buzzed with speculations
about who would or would not be "taken" by the leading fraternities.
For every girl who was at all possible, each day was a long suspense,
beginning in hope and ending in listlessness; and for Sylvia in an
added shrinking from the eyes of her mates, which were, she knew,
fixed on her with a relentless curiosity which was torture to one
of her temperament. She had been considered almost sure to be early
invited to join Alpha Kappa, the frat to which most of the faculty
daughters belonged, and all during the autumn she was aware that when
she took off her jacket in the cloakroom, a hundred glances swept her
to see if she wore at last the coveted emblem of the "pledged" girl;
and when an Alpha Kappa girl chanced to come near her with a casual
remark, she seemed to hear a significant hush among the other girls,
followed by an equally significant buzz of whispered comment when the
fraternity member moved away again. This atmosphere would have made
no impression on a nature either more sturdily philosophic, or more
unimaginative than Sylvia's (Judith, for instance, was not in the
least affected by the experience), but it came to be a morbid
obsession of this strong, healthy, active-minded young creature.
It tinged with bitterness and blackness what should have been the
crystal-clear cup holding her youth and intelligence and health. She
fancied that every one despised her. She imagined that people who were
in reality quite unaware of her existence were looking at her and
whispering together a wondering discussion as to why she was not "in
the swim" as such a girl ought to be--all girls worth