ment almost every step of her life had been ordered and
systematized, that she might the more quickly and surely arrive at the
goal of her diploma. Rushing forward with the accumulated impetus of
years of training in swiftly speeding effort, she flashed by the goal
... and stopped short, finding herself in company with a majority of
her feminine classmates in a blind alley. "_Now_ what?" they asked
each other with sinking hearts. Judith looked over their heads with
steady eyes which saw but one straight and narrow path in life, and
passed on by them into the hospital where she began her nurse's
training. Sylvia began to teach music to a few children, to take on
some of Reinhardt's work as he grew older. She practised assiduously,
advanced greatly in skill in music, read much, thought acutely,
rebelliously and not deeply, helped Lawrence with his studies ... and
watched the clock.

For there was no denying that the clock stood still. She was not going
forward to any settled goal now, she was not going forward at all. She
was as far from suspecting any ordered pattern in the facts of life as
when she had been in college, surrounded by the conspiracy of
silence about a pattern in facts which university professors so
conscientiously keep up before their students. She was slowly
revolving in an eddy. Sometimes she looked at the deep, glowing
content of her father and mother with a fierce resentment. "How _can_
they!" she cried to herself. At other times she tried to chide herself
for not being as contented herself, "... but it's their life they're
living," she said moodily, "and I haven't any to live. I can't live on
their happiness any more than the beefsteaks somebody else has eaten
can keep me from starving to death."

The tradition of her life was that work and plenty of it would keep
off all uneasiness, that it was a foolishness, not to say a downright
crime, to feel uneasiness. So she practised many hours a day, and took
a post-graduate course in early Latin. But the clock stood still.

One of the assistants in her father's department proposed to her.
She refused him automatically, with a wondering astonishment at his
trembling hands and white lips. Decidedly the wheels of the clock
would never begin to revolve.

And then it struck an hour, loudly. Aunt Victoria wrote inviting
Sylvia to spend a few weeks with her during the summer at Lydford.

Sylvia read this letter aloud to her mother on the vine-covered porch