visits were angelic in their extreme rarity, and for Sylvia were
always a mixture of the beatific and the distressing. Only to look at
Aunt Victoria was a bright revelation of elegance and grace. And yet
the talk around table and hearth on the two or three occasions when
the beautiful young widow honored their roof with a sojourn was hard
on Sylvia's sensitive nerves.

It was not merely that a good deal of what was said was
unintelligible. The Marshall children were quite accustomed to
incessant conversations between their elders of which they could
gather but the vaguest glimmering. They played about, busy in
their own absorbing occupations, lending an absent but not wholly
unattentive ear to the gabble of their elders, full of odd and
ridiculous-sounding words like Single-tax, and contrapuntal
development, and root-propagation, and Benthamism, and Byzantine,
and nitrogenous fertilizers, and Alexandrine, and chiaroscuro, and
surviving archaisms, and diminishing utility--for to keep up such a
flood-tide of talk as streamed through the Marshall house required
contributions from many diverging rivers. Sylvia was entirely used to
this phenomenon and, although it occasionally annoyed her that good
attention was wasted on projects so much less vital than those of the
children, she bore it no grudge. But on the rare occasions when Aunt
Victoria was with them, there was a different and ominous note to the
talk which made Sylvia acutely uneasy, although she was quite unable
to follow what was said. This uncomfortable note did not at all come
from mere difference of opinion, for that too was a familiar element
in Sylvia's world. Indeed, it seemed to her that everybody who came to
the Marshall house disagreed with everybody else about everything.
The young men, students or younger professors, engaged in perpetual
discussions, carried on in acrimonious tones which nevertheless seemed
not in the least to impair the good feeling between them. When there
was nobody else there for Father to disagree with, he disagreed with
Mother, occasionally, to his great delight, rousing her from her
customary self-contained economy of words to a heat as voluble as his
own. Often as the two moved briskly about, preparing a meal together,
they shouted out from the dining-room to the kitchen a discussion on
some unintelligible topic such as the "anachronism of the competitive
system," so loudly voiced and so energetically pursued that when
they cam