ed with care over their
poor belongings. Sylvia was acutely conscious of her significance in
the scene. She was also fully aware that Felix missed none of the
contrast she made with the other women. She felt at once enhanced and
protected by the ignobly dressed crowd about her. Felix was right--in
America there could be no distinction, there was no background for it.

The scene about them was theatrically magnificent. In the distance
Vesuvius towered, cloud-veiled and threatening, the harbor shone and
sparkled in the sun, the vivid, outreaching arms of Naples clasped
the jewel-like water. From it all Sylvia extracted the most perfect
distillation of traveler's joy. She felt the well-to-do tourist's
care-free detachment from the fundamentals of life, the tourist's
sense that everything exists for the purpose of being a sight for him
to see. She knew, and knew with delight, the wanderer's lightened,
emancipated sense of being at a distance from obligations, that
cheerful sense of an escape from the emprisoning solidarity of
humanity which furnishes the zest of life for the tourist and the
tramp, enabling the one light-heartedly to offend proprieties and
the other casually to commit murder. She was embarked upon a moral
vacation. She was out of the Bastile of right and wrong. She had a
vision of what freedom from entangling responsibilities is secured by
traveling. She understood her aunt's classing it as among the positive
goods of life.

A man in a shabby blue uniform, with a bundle of letters in his hand,
walked past them towards the boat.

"Oh, the mail," said Mrs. Marshall-Smith. "There may be some for us."
She beckoned the man to her, and said, "Marshall-Smith? Marshall?
Morrison?"

The man sorted over his pile. "Cable for Miss Marshall," he said,
presenting it to the younger lady with a bold, familiar look
of admiration. "Letter for F. Morrison: two letters for Mrs.
Marshall-Smith." Sylvia opened her envelope, spread out the folded
sheet of paper, and read what was scrawled on it, with no realization
of the meaning. She knew only that the paper, Felix, her aunt, the
crowd, vanished in thick blackness, through which, much later, with a
great roaring in her ears, she read, as though by jagged flashes of
lightning: "Mother very ill. Come home at once. Judith."

It seemed to her an incalculably long time between her first glance at
the words and her understanding of them, but when she emerged from the
blackness a