suppress a confusion of contradictory mental
processes. At almost regular intervals, like a hollow stroke on a
brazen gong, her brain resounded to the reverberations of "The wedding
is on the twenty-first." And each time that she thrust that away,
there sprang up with a faint hissing note of doubt and suspicion, "Why
does Aunt Victoria want Arnold married?" A murmur, always drowned out
but incessantly recurring, ran: "What about Father and Mother?
What about their absurd, impossible, cruel, unreal, and
beautiful standards?" Contemptible little echoes from the silly
self-consciousness of the adolescence so recently left behind her ...
"I must think of something clever to say. I must try to seem different
and original and independent and yet must attract," mingled with an
occasional fine sincerity of appreciation and respect for the humanity
of the man beside her. Like a perfume borne in gusts came reaction to
the glorious color about her. Quickly recurring and quickly gone, a
sharp cymbal-clap of alarm ... "What shall I do if Austin Page now
... today ... or tomorrow ... tells me ...!" And grotesquely, the
companion cymbal on which this smote, gave forth an antiphonal alarm
of, "What shall I do if he does not!" While, unheard of her conscious
ear, but coloring everything with its fundamental note of sincerity,
rose solemnly from the depths of her heart the old cry of desperate
youth, "What am I to do with my life?"

No, the eminently successful brown corduroy, present though it was
to the mind of the handsome girl wearing it, was hardly the sure and
sufficient rock of refuge which tradition would have had it.

With an effort she turned her attention from this confused tumult in
her ears, and put out her hand, rather at random, for an introduction
to talk. "You spoke, back there in the pergola, of another kind of
beauty--I didn't know what you meant." He answered at once, with his
usual direct simplicity, which continued to have for Sylvia at
this period something suspiciously like the calmness of a reigning
sovereign who is above being embarrassed, who may speak, without
shamefacedness, of anything, even of moral values, that subject tabu
in sophisticated conversation. "Ah, just a notion of mine that perhaps
all this modern ferment of what's known as 'social conscience' or
'civic responsibility,' isn't a result of the sense of duty, but of
the old, old craving for beauty."

Sylvia looked at him, astonished. "Beauty?"