Mrs. Draper laughed.  “Just hear her!” she appealed to the young man.  Her method of promoting the acquaintance of the two young people seemed to consist in talking to each of the other.  “Just hear her!  She converses as she fences—­one bright flash, and you’re skewered against the wall—­no parryings possible!” She faced Sylvia again:  “Why, my dear, in answer to your rapier-like question, I must simply confess that this morning, being much struck with Jerry’s being struck with you, I went over to the registrar’s office and looked you up.  I know that you passed supremely well in mathematics and French (what a quaint combination!), very well indeed in history and chemistry, and moderately in botany.  What’s the matter with botany?  I have always found Professor Cross a very obliging little man.”

“He doesn’t make me see any sense to botany,” explained Sylvia, taking the question seriously.  “I don’t seem to get hold of any real reason for studying it at all.  What difference does it make if a bush is a hawthorn or not?—­and anyhow, I know it’s a hawthorn without studying botany.”

The young man spoke for himself now, with a keen relish for Sylvia’s words.  He faced her for the first time.  “Now you’re shouting, Miss Marshall!” he said.  “That’s the most sensible thing I ever heard said.  That’s just what I always felt about the whole B.A. course, anyhow!  What’s the diff?  Who cares whether Charlemagne lived in six hundred or sixteen hundred?  It all happened before we were born.  What’s it all to us?”

Sylvia looked squarely at him, a little startled at his directly addressing her, not hearing a word of what he said in the vividness of her first-hand impression of his personality, his brilliant blue eyes, his full, very red lips, his boldly handsome face and carriage, his air of confidence.  In spite of his verbal agreement with her opinion, his look crossed hers dashingly, like a challenge, a novelty in the amicable harmony which had been the tradition of her life.  She felt that tradition to be not without its monotony, and her young blood warmed.  She gazed back at him silently, wonderingly, frankly.

With her radiantly sensuous youth in the first splendor of its opening, with this frank, direct look, she had a moment of brilliance to make the eyes of age shade themselves as against a dazzling brightness.  The eyes of the man opposite her were not those of age.  They rested on her, roused, kindling to heat.  His head went up like a stag’s.  She felt a momentary hot throb of excitement, as though her body were one great fiddle-string, twanging under a vigorously plucking thumb.  It was thrilling, it was startling, it was not altogether pleasant.  The corners of her sensitive mouth twitched uncertainly.

Mrs. Draper, observing from under her down-drooped lids this silent passage between the two, murmured amusedly to herself, “Ah, now you’re shouting, my children!”