and sprang loyally to Judith's defense.
"Why, of course she takes it like a trained nurse, like a
doctor--feels it a purely medical affair--as I suppose it is. We might
have known she'd feel that way. But as to how she really feels inside,
personally, you can't tell anything by her letter! You probably
couldn't tell anything by her manner if she were here. You never can.
She may be simply wild about a thing inside, but you'd never guess."

Mrs. Marshall-Smith ventured to express some skepticism as to the
existence of volcanic feelings always so sedulously concealed. "After
all, can you be so very sure that she is ever 'simply wild' if she
never shows anything?"

"Oh, you're _sure_, all right, if you've lived with her--you feel it.
And then, after about so long a time of keeping it down, she breaks
loose and _does_ something awful, that I'd never have the nerve to do,
and tears into flinders anything she doesn't think is right. Why, when
we were little girls and went to the public schools together, two of
our little playmates, who turned out to have a little negro blood,
we ..." Sylvia stopped, suddenly warned by some instinct that Aunt
Victoria would not be a sympathetic listener to that unforgotten
episode of her childhood, that episode which had seemed to have no
consequences, no sequel, but which ever since that day had insensibly
affected the course of her growth, like a great rock fallen into the
Current of her life.

Mrs. Marshall-Smith, deliberating with bated breath between broadcloth
and blue panama, did not notice the pause. She did, however, add a
final comment on the matter, some moments later, when she observed,
"How any girl in her senses can go on studying, when she's engaged to
a man who needs her as much as Arnold needs Judith!" To which Sylvia
answered irrelevantly with a thought which had just struck her
thrillingly, "But how perfectly fine of Arnold to tell her himself!"

"She must have hypnotized him," said Mrs. Marshall-Smith with
conviction, "but then I don't pretend to understand the ways of young
people nowadays." She was now forty-five, in the full bloom of a
rarely preserved beauty, and could afford to make remarks about the
younger generation. "At any rate," she went on, "it is a comfort to
know that Judith has set her hand to the wheel. I have not in years
crossed the ocean with so much peace of mind about Arnold as I shall
have this time," said his stepmother. "No, leave that blue voil