breath of life without
Mother; and when it comes right down to _doing_ anything, what he
always does is what he knows will come up to her standard."

Morrison raised delightedly amused hands to heaven. "The Recording
Angel domiciled in the house!" he cried. "It had never occurred to me
before how appallingly discerning the eye of the modern offspring must
be. Go on, go on!"

Elated by the sensation of appearing clever, Sylvia continued with
a fresh flow of eloquence. "And there never was such a highly moral
bringing-up as we children have had. It's no fault of my family's if
I've turned out a grasping materialist! I was brought up"--she flamed
out suddenly as at some long-hoarded grievance--"I was brought up in a
moral hot-house, and I haven't yet recovered from the shock of being
transplanted into real earth in the real world."

Morrison paid instant tribute to her aroused and serious feeling by a
grave look of attention. "Won't you explain?" he asked. "I'm so dull I
don't follow you. But I haven't been so interested in years."

"Why, I mean," said Sylvia, trying hard to reduce to articulateness
a complicated conception, "I mean that Father and Mother just
deliberately represented values to me as different from what they
really are, with real folks! And now I find that _I'm_ real folks! I
can't help it. You are as you _are_, you know. They kept representing
to me always that the _best_ pleasures are the ones that are the most
important to folks--music, I mean, and Milton's poetry, and a fine
novel--and, in Mother's case, a fine sunset, or a perfect rose, or
things growing in the garden."

No old associate of Morrison's would have recognized the man's face,
shocked as it was by surprise and interest out of his usual habit
of conscious, acute, self-possessed observation. The angler had
inadvertently stepped off a ledge into deep water, and a very swift
current was tugging at him. He leaned forward, his eyes as eager with
curiosity as a boy's. "Do I understand you to say that you repudiate
those 'best pleasures'?"

"Of course you don't understand anything of the sort," said Sylvia
very earnestly. "They've soaked me so in music that I'm a regular
bond-slave to it. And a perfect rose is associated with so many lovely
recollections of Mother's wonderful silent joy in it, that I could
weep for pleasure. What I'm talking about--what I'm trying to tell
you, is the shock it was to me, when I got out of that artificially