ron, a refinement of sophisticated society which
was, as a rule, but vaguely observed in the chaotic flux of State
University social life, and she so managed affairs that they were
seldom together alone. For obvious reasons Sylvia preferred to see the
young man elsewhere than in her own home, where indeed he made almost
no appearance, beyond standing at the door of an evening, very
handsome and distinguished in his evening dress, waiting for Sylvia to
put on her wraps and go out with him to the carriage where Mrs. Draper
sat expectant, furred and velvet-wrapped. This discreet manager made
no objection to Sylvia's driving about the campus in the daytime
alone with Jermain, but to his proposal to drive the girl out to the
country-club for dinner one evening she added blandly the imperious
proviso that she be of the party; and she discouraged with firmness
any projects for solitary walks together through the woods near
the campus, although this was a recognized form of co-educational
amusement at that institution of learning.

For all her air of free-and-easy equality with the young man, she had
at times a certain blighting glance which, turned on him suddenly,
always brought him to an agreement with her opinion, an agreement
which might obviously ring but verbal on his tongue, but which was
nevertheless the acknowledged basis of action. As for Sylvia, she
acquiesced, with an eagerness which she did not try to understand, in
any arrangement which precluded tete-a-tetes with Jerry.

She did not, as a matter of fact, try to understand anything of what
was happening to her. She was by no means sure that she liked it, but
was stiffened into a stubborn resistance to any doubts by the unvoiced
objection to it all at home. With an instinct against disproportion,
perverse perhaps in this case, but with a germ of soundness in it,
she felt confusedly and resentfully that since her home circle was so
patently narrow and exaggerated in its standard of personality, she
would just have to even things up by being a little less fastidious
than was her instinct; and on the one or two occasions when a sudden
sight of Jerry sent through her a strange, unpleasant stir of all her
flesh, she crushed the feeling out of sight under her determination to
assert her own judgment and standards against those which had (she now
felt) so tyrannically influenced her childhood. But for the most
part she did little thinking, shaking as loudly as possible