For a long time, until Sylvia’s individuality began to assert itself, the question of dress for the children was solved, with similar ease, by the typical Marshall expedient, most heartily resented by their faculty acquaintances, the mean-spirited expedient of getting along comfortably on inadequate means by not attempting to associate with people to whose society their brains and cultivation gave them the right—­that is to say, those families of La Chance whose incomes were from three to five times that of college professors.  The Marshall children played, for the most part, with the children of their neighbors, farmers, or small merchants, and continued this humble connection after they went into the public schools, where their parents sent them, instead of to “the” exclusive private school of town.  Consequently the plainest, simplest clothes made them indistinguishable from their fellows.  Sylvia and Judith also enjoyed the unfair advantage of being quite unusually pretty little girls (Judith being nothing less than a beauty), so that even on the few occasions when they were invited to a children’s party in the faculty circle their burnished, abundant hair, bright eyes, and fresh, alert faces made up for the plainness of their white dresses and thick shoes.

It was, moreover, not only in externals like clothes that the childhood of Sylvia and Judith and Lawrence differed from that of the other faculty children.  Their lives were untouched by the ominous black cloud familiar to academic households, the fear for the future, the fear which comes of living from hand to mouth, the dread of “being obliged to hand in one’s resignation,” a truly academic periphasis which is as dismally familiar to most faculty children as its blunt Anglo-Saxon equivalent of “losing your job” is to children of plainer workpeople.  Once, it is true, this possibility had loomed up large before the Marshalls, when a high-protection legislature objected loudly to the professor’s unreverent attitude towards the tariff.  But although the Marshall children knew all about this crisis, as they knew all about everything that happened to the family, they had had no experience of the anxious talks and heartsick consultations which would have gone on in any other faculty household.  Their father had been angry, and their mother resolute—­but there was nothing new in that.  There had been, on Professor Marshall’s part, belligerent, vociferous talk about “freedom of speech,” and on Mrs. Marshall’s a quiet estimate that, with her early training on a Vermont farm, and with the high state of cultivation under which she had brought their five acres, they could successfully go into the truck-farming business like their neighbors.  Besides this, they had the resource, extraordinary among University families, of an account in the savings-bank on which to fall back.  They had always been able to pay their debts and have a small surplus by the expedient of refusing to acknowledge a tenth part of the social obligations under which the rest of the faculty groaned and sweated with martyr’s pride.  Perfidiously refusing to do their share in the heart-breaking struggle to “keep up the dignity” of the academic profession, they were not overwhelmed by the super-human difficulties of that undertaking.