alm young insolence with which they in their turn ignored their
presumptive hostesses, the faculty ladies.

Mrs. Draper changed all this for Sylvia with a wave of her wand. She
took the greatest pains to introduce her protegee into this phase of
the social life of the University. On these occasions, as beautiful
and as over-dressed as any girl in the room, with Jermain Fiske in
obvious attendance; with the exclusive Mrs. Draper setting in a rich
frame of commentary any remark she happened to make (Sylvia was
acquiring a reputation for great wit); with Eleanor Hubert, eclipsed,
sitting in a corner, quite deserted save for a funny countrified freak
assistant in chemistry; with all the "swellest frat men" in college
rushing to get her tea and sandwiches; with Mrs. Hubert plunged
obviously into acute unhappiness, Sylvia knew as ugly moments of mean
satisfaction as often fall to the lot even of very pretty young women.

At home she knew no moments of satisfaction of any variety, although
there was no disapprobation expressed by any one, except in one or two
characteristically recondite comments by Professor Kennedy, who was
taking a rather uneasy triumph in the proof of an old theory of his as
to Sylvia's character. One afternoon, at a football game, he came up
to her on the grandstand, shook hands with Jermain Fiske, whom he had
flunked innumerable times in algebra, and remarked in his most acid
voice that he wished to congratulate the young man on being the
perfect specimen of the dolichocephalic blond whose arrival in
Sylvia's life he had predicted years before. Sylvia, belligerently
aware of the attitude of her home world, and ready to resent
criticism, took the liveliest offense at this obscure comment, which
she perfectly understood. She flushed indignantly and glared in
silence with the eyes of an angry young goddess.

Young Fiske, who found the remark, or any other made by a college
prof, quite as unintelligible as it was unimportant, laughed with
careless impudence in the old man's face; and Mrs. Draper, for all her
keenness, could make nothing of it. It sounded, however, so quite
like a dictum which she herself would have liked to make, that she
cross-questioned Sylvia afterwards as to its meaning; but Sylvia lied
fluently, asserting that it was just some of Professor Kennedy's
mathematical gibberish which had no meaning.

In the growing acquaintance of Sylvia and Jermain, Mrs. Draper acted
assiduously as chape