“The same vigor that makes her resist us now will give her strength then—­she’s not Eleanor Hubert.”

Her husband burst out upon her in a frightened, angry rush of reproach:  “Barbara—­how can you!  You make me turn cold!  This isn’t a matter of talk—­of theories—­we’re confronted with—­”

She faced him down with unflinching, unhappy eyes.  “Oh, of course if we are to believe in liberty only so long as everything goes smoothly—­” She tried to add something to this, but her voice broke and she was silent.  Her husband looked at her, startled at her pallor and her trembling lips, immensely moved by the rare discomposure of that countenance.  She said in a whisper, her voice shaking, “Our little Sylvia—­my first baby—­”

He flung himself down in the chair beside her and took her hand.  “It’s damnable!” he said.

His wife answered slowly, with long pauses.  “No—­it’s all right—­it’s part of the whole thing—­of life.  When you bring children into the world—­when you live at all—­you must accept the whole.  It’s not fair to rebel—­to rebel at the pain—­when—­”

“Good God, it’s not our pain I’m shrinking from—!” he broke out.

“No—­oh no—­that would be easy—­”

With an impulse of yearning, and protection, and need, he leaned to put his arms around her, his graying beard against her pale cheek.  They sat silent for a long time.

In the room above them, Sylvia bent over a problem in trigonometry, and rapidly planned a new evening-dress.  After a time she got up and opened her box of treasures from Aunt Victoria.  The yellow chiffon would do—­Jerry had said he liked yellow—­she could imagine how Mrs. Hubert would expend herself on Eleanor’s toilets for this great occasion—­if she could only hit on a design which wouldn’t look as though it came out of a woman’s magazine—­something really sophisticated—­she could cover her old white slippers with that bit of gold-tissue off Aunt Victoria’s hat—­she shook out the chiffon and laid it over the bed, looking intently at its gleaming, shimmering folds and thinking, “How horrid of Father and Mother to go and try to spoil everything so!” She went back to the problem in trigonometry and covered a page with figures, at which she gazed unseeingly.  She was by no means happy.  She went as far as the door, meaning to go down and kiss her parents good-night, but turned back.  They were not a family for surface demonstrations.  If she could not yield her point—­She began to undress rapidly, turned out the light, opened the windows, and sprang into bed.  “If they only wouldn’t take things so awfully solemnly!” she said to herself petulantly.

CHAPTER XVIII

SYLVIA SKATES MERRILY ON THIN ICE