At the same time she felt a surprised contempt for the other girl’s ignorance and almost illiteracy.  Whatever else Eleanor had learned in the exclusive and expensive girls’ school in New York, she had not learned to hold her own in a conversation on the most ordinary topics; and as for Mrs. Draper’s highly spiced comments on life and folk, her young friend made not the slightest attempt to cope with them or even to understand them.  The alluring mistress of the house might talk of sex-antagonism and the hatefulness of the puritanical elements of American life as much as she pleased.  It all passed over the head of the lovely, fair girl, sipping her tea and raising her candid eyes to meet with a trustful smile, perhaps a little blank, the glance of whomever chanced to be looking at her.  It was significant that she had the same smile for each of the three very dissimilar persons who sat about the tea-table.  Of all the circle into which Sylvia’s changed life had plunged her, Eleanor, the type of the conventional society bud, was, oddly enough, the only one she cared to talk about in her own extremely unconventional home.  But even on this topic she felt herself bruised and jarred by the severity, the unpicturesque austerity of the home standards.  As she was trying to give her mother some idea of Eleanor’s character, she quoted one day a remark of Mrs. Draper’s, to the effect that “Eleanor no more knows the meaning of her beauty than a rose the meaning of its perfume.”  Mrs. Marshall kept a forbidding silence for a moment and then said:  “I don’t take much stock in that sort of unconsciousness.  Eleanor isn’t a rose, she isn’t even a child.  She’s a woman.  The sooner girls learn that distinction, the better off they’ll be, and the fewer chances they’ll run of being horribly misunderstood.”

Sylvia felt very angry with her mother for this unsympathetic treatment of a pretty phrase, and thought with resentment that it was not her fault if she were becoming more and more alienated from her family.

This was a feeling adroitly fostered by Mrs. Draper, who, in her endless talks with Sylvia and Jermain about themselves, had hit upon an expression and a turn of phrase which was to have more influence on Sylvia’s development than its brevity seemed to warrant.  She had, one day, called Sylvia a little Athenian, growing up, by the oddest of mistakes, in Sparta.  Sylvia, who was in the Pater-reading stage of development, caught at her friend’s phrase as at the longed-for key to her situation.  It explained everything.  It made everything appear in the light she wished for.  Above all it enabled her to clarify her attitude towards her home.  Now she understood.  One did not scorn Sparta.  One respected it, it was a noble influence in life; but for an Athenian, for whom amenity and beauty and suavity were as essential as food, Sparta was death.  As was natural to her age and temperament, she sucked a vast amount of pleasure out of this pitying analysis of her subtle, complicated needs and the bare crudity of her surroundings.  She now read Pater more assiduously than ever, always carrying a volume about with her text-books, and feeding on this delicate fare in such unlikely and dissimilar places as on the trolley-cars, in the kitchen, in the intervals of preparing a meal, or in Mrs. Draper’s living-room, waiting for the problematical entrance of that erratic luminary.