CHAPTER XVII

MRS. MARSHALL STICKS TO HER PRINCIPLES

During the autumn and early winter it not only happened unfortunately that the quartet played altogether too much Haydn, but that Sylvia’s father, contrary to his usual custom, was away from home a great deal.  The State University had arrived at that stage of its career when, if its rapidly increasing needs and demands for State money were to be recognized by the Legislature, it must knit itself more closely to the rest of the State system of education, have a more intimate affiliation with the widely scattered public high schools, and weld into some sort of homegeneity their extremely various standards of scholarship.  This was a delicate undertaking, calling for much tact and an accurate knowledge of conditions in the State, especially in the rural districts.  Professor Marshall’s twenty years of popularity with the more serious element of the State University students (that popularity which meant so little to Sylvia, and which she so ignored) had given him a large acquaintance among the class which it was necessary to reach.  He knew the men who at the University had been the digs, and jays, and grinds, and who were now the prosperous farmers, the bankers, the school-trustees, the leading men in their communities; and his geniality, vivacity, and knack for informal public speaking made him eminently fitted to represent the University in the somewhat thankless task of coaxing and coercing backward communities to expend the necessary money and effort to bring their schools up to the State University standard.

If all this had happened a few years sooner, he undoubtedly would have taken Sylvia with him on many of these journeys into remote corners of the State, but Sylvia had her class-work to attend to, and the Professor shared to the fullest extent the academic prejudice against parents who broke in upon the course of their children’s regular instruction by lawless and casual junketings.  Instead, it was Judith who frequently accompanied him, Judith who was now undergoing that home-preparation for the University through which Sylvia had passed, and who, since her father was her principal instructor, could carry on her studies wherever he happened to be; as well as have the stimulating experience of coming in contact with a wide variety of people and conditions.  It is possible that Professor Marshall’s sociable nature not only shrank from the solitude which his wife would have endured with cheerfulness, but that he also wished to take advantage of this opportunity to come in closer touch with his second daughter, for whose self-contained and occasionally insensitive nature he had never felt the instinctive understanding he had for Sylvia’s moods.  It is certain that the result was a better feeling between the two than had existed before.  During the long hours of jolting over branch railroads back to remote settlements, or waiting at cheerless