Sylvia was only eighteen years old and had the childish immaturity of her age, but her life had been so ordered that she was not, even at eighteen, entirely in the helpless position of a child who must depend on the word of others.  She had accumulated, unknown to herself, quite apart from polished pebbles of book-information, a small treasury of living seeds of real knowledge of life, taken in at first-hand, knowledge of which no one could deprive her.  The realization of this was a steadying ballast which righted the wildly rolling keel under her feet.  She held up her head bravely against the first onslaught of the storm.  She set her hand to the rudder!

Perceiving that her mother had passed on ahead of her she sprang forward in a run.  She ran like a schoolboy, like a deer, like a man from whose limbs heavy shackles have been struck off.  She felt so suddenly lightened of a great heaviness that she could have clapped her hands over her head and bounded into the air.  She was, after all, but eighteen years old, and three years before had been a child.

She came up to her mother with a rush, radiating life.  Mrs. Marshall looked at the glowing face and her own eyes, dry till then, filled with the tears so rare in her self-controlled life.  She put out her hand, took Sylvia’s, and they sped along through the quick-gathering dusk, hand-in-hand like sisters.

Judith and Lawrence had reached home before them, and the low brown house gleamed a cheerful welcome to them from shining windows.  For the first time in her life, Sylvia did not take for granted her home, with all that it meant.  For an instant it looked strangely sweet to her.  She had a passing glimpse, soon afterwards lost in other impressions, of how in after years she would look back on the roof which had sheltered and guarded her youth.

She lay awake that night a long time, staring up into the cold blackness, her mind very active and restless in the intense stillness about her.  She thought confusedly but intensely of many things—­the months behind her, of Jerry, of Mrs. Draper, of her yellow dress, of her mother—­of herself.  In the lucidity of those silent hours of wakefulness she experienced for a time the piercing, regenerating thrust of self-knowledge.  For a moment the full-beating pulses of her youth slackened, and between their throbs there penetrated to her perplexed young heart the rarest of human emotions, a sincere humility.  If she had not burned the yellow dress at Mercerton, she would have arisen and burned it that night....

During the rest of the Christmas vacation she avoided being alone.  She and Judith and Lawrence skated a great deal, and Sylvia learned at last to cut the grapevine pattern on the ice.  She also mastered the first movement of the Sonata Pathetique, so that old Reinhardt was almost satisfied.