who took tea under brightly striped, pagoda-shaped
tents, waited upon by slant-eyed Japanese (it seemed Aunt Victoria had
nothing but Japanese servants). The whole picture shimmered in the
confused imagination of the listening little girl, till it blended
indistinguishably with the enchantment of her fairy-stories. It all
seemed a background natural enough for Aunt Victoria, but Sylvia could
not fit her father into it.

"Ah, he's changed greatly--he's transformed--he is not the same
creature," Aunt Victoria told her gravely, speaking according to her
seductive habit with Sylvia, as though to an equal. "The year when
we lost our money and he married, altered all the world for us."
She linked the two events together, and was rewarded by seeing the
reference slide over Sylvia's head.

"Did you lose _your_ money, too?" asked Sylvia, astounded. It had
never occurred to her that Aunt Victoria might have been affected by
that event in her father's life, with which she was quite familiar
through his careless references to what he seemed to regard as an
interesting but negligible incident.

"All but the slightest portion of it, my dear--when I was twenty years
old. Your father was twenty-five."

Sylvia looked about her at the cut-glass and silver utensils on
the lace-covered dressing-table, at Aunt Victoria's pale lilac
crepe-de-chine negligee, at the neat, pretty young maid deft-handedly
rubbing the perfumed cream into the other woman's well-preserved face,
impassive as an idol's. "Why--why, I thought--" she began and stopped,
a native delicacy making her hesitate as Judith never did.

Aunt Victoria understood. "Mr. Smith had money," she explained
briefly. "I married when I was twenty-one."

"Oh," said Sylvia. It seemed an easy way out of difficulties. She
had never before chanced to hear Aunt Victoria mention her long-dead
husband.

CHAPTER V

SOMETHING ABOUT HUSBANDS

She did not by any means always sit in the hotel and watch
Pauline care for different portions of Aunt Victoria's body. Mrs.
Marshall-Smith took, on principle, a drive every day, and Sylvia was
her favorite companion. At first they went generally over the asphalt
and in front of the costly and incredibly differing "mansions" of
the "residential portion" of town, but later their drives took them
principally along the winding roads and under the thrifty young trees
of the State University campus. They often made an excuse of fetching
Professo