During Sylvia’s Freshman year there usually sat beside him, on the lofty seat of this equipage, a sweet-faced, gentle-browed young lady, the lovely flower blooming out of the little girl who had so innocently asked her mother some ten years ago what was a drunken reinhardt.  The oldest daughter of the professor of European History was almost precisely Sylvia’s age, but now, when Sylvia was laboring over her books in the very beginning of her college life, Eleanor Hubert was a finished product, a graduate of an exclusive, expensive girls’ boarding-school in New York, and a that-year’s debutante in La Chance society.  Her name was constantly in the items of the society columns, she wore the most profusely varied costumes, and she drove about the campus swaying like a lily beside the wealthiest undergraduate.  Sylvia’s mind was naturally too alert and vigorous, and now too thoroughly awakened to intellectual interests, not to seize with interest on the subjects she studied that year; but enjoy as much as she tried to do, and did, this tonic mental discipline, there were many moments when the sight of Eleanor Hubert made her wonder if after all higher mathematics and history were of any real value.

During this wretched year of stifled unhappiness, she not only studied with extreme concentration, but, with a healthy instinct, spent a great deal of time in the gymnasium.  It was a delight to her to be able to swim in the winter-time, she organized the first water-polo team among the co-eds, and she began to learn fencing from the Commandant of the University Battalion.  He had been a crack with the foils at West Point, and never ceased trying to arouse an interest in what seemed to him the only rational form of exercise; but fencing at that time had no intercollegiate vogue, and of all the young men and women at the State University, Sylvia alone took up his standing offer of free instruction to any one who cared to give the time to learn; and even Sylvia took up fencing primarily because it promised to give her one more occupation, left her less time for loneliness.  As it turned out, however, these lessons proved far more to her than a temporary anodyne:  they brought her a positive pleasure.  She delighted the dumpy little captain with her aptness, and he took the greatest pains in his instruction.  Before the end of her Freshman year she twice succeeded in getting through his guard and landing a thrust on his well-rounded figure; and though to keep down her conceit he told her that he must be losing, along with his slenderness, some of his youthful agility, he confessed to his wife that teaching Miss Marshall was the best fun he had had in years.  The girl was as quick as a cat, and had a natural-born fencer’s wrist.