Thus everything progressed smoothly under Mrs. Draper’s management.  The young couple met each other usually in the rather close air of her candle-lighted living-room, drinking a great deal of tea, consuming large numbers of delicate, strangely compounded sandwiches, and listening to an endless flow of somewhat startlingly frank personalities from the magnetic mistress of the house.  Sylvia and Jermain did not talk much on these occasions.  They listened with edification to the racy remarks of their hostess, voicing that theoretical “broadness” of opinion as to the conduct of life which, quite as much as the perfume which she always used, was a specialty of her provocative personality; they spoke now and then, to be sure, as she drew them into conversation, but their real intercourse was almost altogether silent.  They eyed each other across the table, breathing quickly, and flushing or paling if their hands chanced to touch in the services of the tea-table.  Once the young man came in earlier than usual and found Sylvia alone for a moment in the silent, glowing, perfumed room.  He took her hand, apparently for the ordinary handclasp of greeting, but with a surge of his blood retained it, pressing it so fiercely that his ring cut into her finger, causing a tiny drop of bright red to show on the youthful smoothness of her skin.  At this living ruby they both stared fixedly for an instant; then Mrs. Draper came hastily into the room, saying chidingly, “Come, come, children!” and looking with displeasure at the man’s darkly flushed face.  Sylvia was paler than usual for the rest of the afternoon, and could not swallow a mouthful of the appetizing food, which as a rule she devoured with the frank satisfaction of a hungry child.  She sat, rather white, not talking much, avoiding Jerry’s eyes for no reason that she could analyze, and, in the pauses of the conversation, could hear the blood singing loudly in her ears.

Yet, although she felt the oddest relief, as after one more escape, at the end of each of these afternoons with her new acquaintances, afternoons in which the three seemed perpetually gliding down a steep incline and as perpetually being arrested on the brink of some unexplained plunge, she found that their atmosphere had spoiled entirely her relish for the atmosphere of her home.  The home supper-table seemed to her singularly flat and distasteful with its commonplace fare—­hot chocolate and creamed potatoes and apple sauce, and its brisk, impersonal talk of socialism, and politics, and small home events, and music.  As it happened, the quartet had the lack of intuition to play a great deal of Haydn that autumn, and to Sylvia the cheerful, obvious tap-tap-tap of the hearty old master seemed to typify the bald, unsubtle obtuseness of the home attitude towards life.  She herself took to playing the less difficult of the Chopin nocturnes with a languorous over-accentuation of their softness which she was careful to keep from the ears of old Reinhardt.  But one evening he