occasion. Then, she and Mother and Judith
tiptoed out of the bedroom into Mother's room and there stood Father,
with his University clothes on and yet his hair rather rumpled up, as
though he had been teaching very hard. He had a pile of papers in his
hand and he said, "Barbara, are you awfully busy just now?"

Mother said, Oh no, she wasn't at all. (She never was busy when Father
asked her to do something, although Sylvia could not remember ever
once having seen her sit and do nothing, no, not even for a minute!)
Then Father said, "Well, if you _could_ run over these, I'd have time
to have some ball with the seminar after they're dismissed. These are
the papers the Freshmen handed in for that Economics quiz." Mother
said, "Sure she could," or the equivalent of that, and Father thanked
her, turned Judith upside-down and right-side-up again so quick that
she didn't know what had happened, and left them all laughing as they
usually were when Father ran down from the study for something.

So Sylvia and Judith, quite used to this procedure, sat down on the
floor with a book to keep them quiet until Mother should be through.
Neither of them could read, although Sylvia was beginning to learn,
but they had been told the stories so many times that they knew them
from the pictures. The book they looked at that day had the story of
the people who had rowed a great boat across the water to get a gold
sheepskin, and Sylvia told it to Judith, word for word, as Father
always told it. She glanced up at Mother from time to time to make
sure she was getting it right; and ever afterwards the mention of the
Argonauts brought up before Sylvia's eyes the picture of her mother
that day, sitting very straight, her strong brown fingers making an
occasional mark on the papers, as she turned them over with a crisp
rustle, her quiet face bent, in a calm fixity of attention, over the
pages.

Before they knew it, the work was done, Father had come for the
papers, and showed Sylvia one more twist in the acrobatic stunt they
were learning together. She could already take his hands and run up
to his shoulders in one squirrel-like dash; but she was to learn the
reverse and come down on the other side, and she still got tangled up
with which foot to put first. So they practised whenever they had, as
now, a minute or two to spare.

Then Judith was set to play with her blocks like the baby she still
was, while Sylvia and Mother had a lesson in readin