, but it was of the healthy sort that wastes no time on
trifling matters. She was curious about Sylvia, for Sylvia was a little
different from the young girls she knew. Quite naturally she was
comparing the slim, dark-eyed girl at her side with Marian Bassett.
Marian was altogether obvious; whereas Mrs. Owen felt the barriers of
reserve in Sylvia. Sylvia embodied questions in the Kelton family
history that she could not answer, though she had known Andrew Kelton
all his life, and remembered dimly his only daughter, who had
unaccountably vanished.

"Where do you go to school, Sylvia?" she asked.

"I don't go to school,--not to a real school,--but grandfather teaches
me; he has always taught me."

"And you are now about--how old?"

"Sixteen in October. I've been talking to grandfather about going to
college."

"They do send girls to college nowadays, don't they! We're beginning to
have some of these college women in our town here. I know some of 'em.
Let's see. What they say against colleges for women is that the girls
who go there learn too much, so that men are afraid to marry 'em. I
wonder how that is? But that's in favor of college, I think; don't you?"

Mrs. Owen answered her own question with a laugh; and having opened the
subject she went on to disclose her opinions further.

"I guess I'm too old to be one of these new women we're hearing so much
about. Even farming's got to be a science, and it keeps me hustling to
learn what the new words mean in the agricultural papers. I belong to a
generation of women who know how to sew rag carpets and make quilts and
stir soft soap in an iron kettle and darn socks; and I can still cure a
ham better than any Chicago factory does it," she added, raking a fly
from the back of the "off" sorrel with a neat turn of the whip. "And I
reckon I make 'em pay full price for my corn. Well, well; so you're
headed for college."

"I hope so," said Sylvia; "then after that I'm going to teach."

"Poor pay and hard work. I know lots of teachers; they're always having
nervous prostration. But you look healthy."

"Oh, I'm strong enough," replied Sylvia. "I think I should like
teaching."

"Marian was at Miss Waring's school last winter and I couldn't see what
she was interested in much but chasing to matinees. Are you crazy about
theatres?"

"Why, I've never been to one," Sylvia confessed.

"You're just as well off. Actors ain't what they used to be. When you
saw Edwin Booth in '