Sylvia was smitten into silence by the other’s horrified tone and hung her head miserably, only murmuring, after a pause, in damning extenuation, “He’s never so very drunk!”

“Well, upon my word!” exclaimed Mrs. Hubert, in a widely spaced, emphatic phrase of condemnation.  To her sister she added, “It’s really not exaggeration then, what one hears about their home life.”  One of her daughters, a child about Sylvia’s age, turned a candid, blank little face up to hers, “Mother, what is a drunken reinhardt?” she asked in a thin little pipe.

Mrs. Hubert frowned, shook her head, and said in a tone of dark mystery:  “Never mind, darling, don’t think about it.  It’s something that nice little girls shouldn’t know anything about.  Come, Margery; come, Eleanor.”  She took their hands and began to draw them away without another look at Sylvia, who remained behind, drooping, ostracised, pierced momentarily with her first blighting misgiving about the order of things she had always known.

CHAPTER III

BROTHER AND SISTER

A fuller initiation into the kaleidoscopic divergencies of adult standards was given Sylvia during the visits of her Aunt Victoria.  These visits were angelic in their extreme rarity, and for Sylvia were always a mixture of the beatific and the distressing.  Only to look at Aunt Victoria was a bright revelation of elegance and grace.  And yet the talk around table and hearth on the two or three occasions when the beautiful young widow honored their roof with a sojourn was hard on Sylvia’s sensitive nerves.

It was not merely that a good deal of what was said was unintelligible.  The Marshall children were quite accustomed to incessant conversations between their elders of which they could gather but the vaguest glimmering.  They played about, busy in their own absorbing occupations, lending an absent but not wholly unattentive ear to the gabble of their elders, full of odd and ridiculous-sounding words like Single-tax, and contrapuntal development, and root-propagation, and Benthamism, and Byzantine, and nitrogenous fertilizers, and Alexandrine, and chiaroscuro, and surviving archaisms, and diminishing utility—­for to keep up such a flood-tide of talk as streamed through the Marshall house required contributions from many diverging rivers.  Sylvia was entirely used to this phenomenon and, although it occasionally annoyed her that good attention was wasted on projects so much less vital than those of the children, she bore it no grudge.  But on the rare occasions when Aunt Victoria was with them, there was a different and ominous note to the talk which made Sylvia acutely uneasy, although she was quite unable to follow what was said.  This uncomfortable note did not at all come from mere difference of opinion, for that too was a familiar element in Sylvia’s world.  Indeed, it seemed to her that everybody who came to the Marshall house disagreed with everybody