importance to
her life by the trivial consideration which had, so frequently during
the progress of this affair, absorbed her mind to the exclusion of
everything else--the necessity for keeping up appearances. If the
Marshall tradition had made it easier for her to achieve this not very
elevated goal, she might have perceived more clearly where her rapid
feet were taking her. Just now, for example, there was nothing in her
consciousness but the embittered knowledge that there was no maid to
open the door when Mrs. Fiske should ring.

She was a keen-witted modern young woman of eighteen, with a
well-trained mind stored with innumerable facts of science, but it
must be admitted that at this moment she reverted with passionate
completeness to quite another type. She would have given--she would
have given a year of her life--one of her fingers--all her knowledge
of history--anything! if the Marshalls had possessed what she felt any
decently prosperous grocer's family ought to possess--a well-appointed
maid in the hall to open the door, take Mrs. Fiske's card, show her
into the living-room, and go decently and in order to summon the
mistress of the house. Instead she saw with envenomed foresight what
would happen. At the unusual sound of the bell, her mother, who was
playing dominoes with Lawrence in one of his convalescences, would
open the door with her apron still on, and her spectacles probably
pushed up, rustic fashion, on top of her head. And then their
illustrious visitor, used as of course she was to ceremony in social
matters, would not know whether this was the maid, or her hostess;
and Mrs. Marshall would frankly show her surprise at seeing a richly
dressed stranger on the doorstep, and would perhaps think she had made
a mistake in the house; and Mrs. Fiske would not know whether to hand
over the cards she held ready in her whitely gloved fingers--in the
interval between the clanging shut of the gate and the tinkle of the
doorbell Sylvia endured a sick reaction against life, as an altogether
hateful and horrid affair.

As a matter of fact, nothing of all this took place. When the bell
rang, her mother called out a tranquil request to her to go and open
the door, and so it was Sylvia herself who confronted the unexpected
visitor,--Sylvia a little flurried and breathless, but ushering the
guest into the house with her usual graceful charm of manner.

She had none of this as a moment later she went rather slowly