t in her
own extremely unconventional home. But even on this topic she felt
herself bruised and jarred by the severity, the unpicturesque
austerity of the home standards. As she was trying to give her mother
some idea of Eleanor's character, she quoted one day a remark of Mrs.
Draper's, to the effect that "Eleanor no more knows the meaning of her
beauty than a rose the meaning of its perfume." Mrs. Marshall kept
a forbidding silence for a moment and then said: "I don't take much
stock in that sort of unconsciousness. Eleanor isn't a rose, she isn't
even a child. She's a woman. The sooner girls learn that distinction,
the better off they'll be, and the fewer chances they'll run of being
horribly misunderstood."

Sylvia felt very angry with her mother for this unsympathetic
treatment of a pretty phrase, and thought with resentment that it was
not _her_ fault if she were becoming more and more alienated from her
family.

This was a feeling adroitly fostered by Mrs. Draper, who, in her
endless talks with Sylvia and Jermain about themselves, had hit upon
an expression and a turn of phrase which was to have more influence on
Sylvia's development than its brevity seemed to warrant. She had, one
day, called Sylvia a little Athenian, growing up, by the oddest of
mistakes, in Sparta. Sylvia, who was in the Pater-reading stage of
development, caught at her friend's phrase as at the longed-for key to
her situation. It explained everything. It made everything appear in
the light she wished for. Above all it enabled her to clarify her
attitude towards her home. Now she understood. One did not scorn
Sparta. One respected it, it was a noble influence in life; but for an
Athenian, for whom amenity and beauty and suavity were as essential as
food, Sparta was death. As was natural to her age and temperament, she
sucked a vast amount of pleasure out of this pitying analysis of her
subtle, complicated needs and the bare crudity of her surroundings.
She now read Pater more assiduously than ever, always carrying a
volume about with her text-books, and feeding on this delicate fare
in such unlikely and dissimilar places as on the trolley-cars, in the
kitchen, in the intervals of preparing a meal, or in Mrs. Draper's
living-room, waiting for the problematical entrance of that erratic
luminary.

There was none of Mrs. Draper's habits of life which made more of an
impression on Sylvia's imagination than her custom of disregarding
engagements