H ADO ...

The rest of October was a period never clear in Sylvia's head.
Everything that happened was confusing and almost everything was
painful; and a great deal happened. She had thought at the time that
nothing would ever blur in her mind the shock of finding Aunt Victoria
opposed to what seemed to her the first obvious necessity: writing
to Judith about Arnold. She had been trying for a long time now with
desperate sincerity to take the world as she found it, to see
people as they were with no fanatic intolerance, to realize her own
inexperience of life, to be broad, to take in without too much of a
wrench another point of view; but to Aunt Victoria's idea, held quite
simply and naturally by that lady, that Judith be kept in ignorance
of Arnold's habits until after marriage, Sylvia's mind closed as
automatically, as hermetically as an oyster-shell snaps shut. She
could not discuss it, she could not even attend with hearing ears to
Mrs. Marshall-Smith's very reasonable presentation of her case; the
long tradition as to the justifiability of such ignorance on a bride's
part; the impossibility that any woman should ever know all of any
man's character before marriage; the strong presumption that marriage
with a woman he adored would cure habits contracted only through
the inevitable aimlessness of too much wealth; the fact that, once
married, a woman like Judith would accept, and for the most part deal
competently with, facts which would frighten her in her raw girlish
state of ignorance and crudeness. Sylvia did not even hear these
arguments and many more like them, dignified with the sanction of
generations of women trying their best to deal with life. She had
never thought of the question before. It was the sort of thing from
which she had always averted her moral eyes with extreme distaste; but
now that it was forced on her, her reaction to it was instantaneous.
From the depths of her there rose up fresh in its original vigor,
never having been dulled by a single enforced compliance with a
convention running counter to a principle, the most irresistible
instinct against concealment. She did not argue; she could not. She
could only say with a breathless certainty against which there was no
holding out: "Judith must know! Judith must know!"

Mrs. Marshall-Smith, alarmed by the prospect of a passage-at-arms,
decreed quietly that they should both sleep on the question and take
it up the next morning. Sylvia had n