“Good Heaven!  No, I don’t remember!” cried Professor Marshall, with an impatience which might have been Sylvia’s.

“He said, ‘Any idiot can rule by martial law.’”

“Yes, of course, that theory is all right, but—­”

“If a theory is all right, it ought to be acted upon.”

Professor Marshall cried out in exasperation, “But see here, Barbara—­here is a concrete fact—­our daughter—­our precious Sylvia—­is making a horrible mistake—­and because of a theory we mustn’t reach out a hand to pull her back.”

“We can’t pull her back by force,” said his wife.  “She’s eighteen years old, and she has the habit of independent thought.  We can’t go back on that now.”

“We don’t seem to be pulling her back by force or in any other way!  We seem to be just weakly sitting back and letting her do exactly as she pleases.”

“If during all these years we’ve had her under our influence we haven’t given her standards that—­” began the mother.

“You heard how utterly she repudiated our influence and our standards and—­”

“Oh, what she says—­it’s what she’s made of that’ll count—­that’s the only thing that’ll count when a crisis comes—­”

Professor Marshall interrupted hastily:  “When a crisis!  What do you call this but a crisis—­she’s like a child about to put her hand into the fire.”

“I trust in the training she’s had to give her firm enough nerves to pull it out again when she feels the heat,” said her mother steadily.

Professor Marshall sprang up, with clenched hands, tall, powerful, helpless.  “It’s outrageous, Barbara, for all your talk!  We’re responsible!  We ought to shut her up under lock and key—­”

“So many girls have been deterred from a mistake by being shut up under lock and key!” commented Mrs. Marshall, with an ironical accent.

“But, good Heavens!  Think of her going to that old scoundrel’s—­how can I look people in the face, when they all know my opinion of him—­how I’ve opposed his being a Trustee and—­”

“Ah,—!” remarked his wife significantly, “that’s the trouble, is it?”

Professor Marshall flushed, and for a moment made no rejoinder.  Then, shifting his ground, he said bitterly:  “I think you’re forgetting that I’ve had a disillusionizing experience in this sort of thing which you were spared.  You forget that Sylvia is closely related to my sister.”

“I don’t forget that—­but I don’t forget either that Sylvia has had a very different sort of early life from poor Victoria’s.  She has breathed pure air always—­I trust her to recognize its opposite.”

He made an impatient gesture of exasperation.  “But she’ll be in it—­it’ll be too late—­”

“It’s never too late.”  She spoke quickly, but her unwavering opposition began to have in it a note of tension.

“She’ll be caught—­she’ll have to go on because it’ll be too hard to get out—­”