“Why, I mean,” said Sylvia, trying hard to reduce to articulateness a complicated conception, “I mean that Father and Mother just deliberately represented values to me as different from what they really are, with real folks!  And now I find that I’m real folks!  I can’t help it.  You are as you are, you know.  They kept representing to me always that the best pleasures are the ones that are the most important to folks—­music, I mean, and Milton’s poetry, and a fine novel—­and, in Mother’s case, a fine sunset, or a perfect rose, or things growing in the garden.”

No old associate of Morrison’s would have recognized the man’s face, shocked as it was by surprise and interest out of his usual habit of conscious, acute, self-possessed observation.  The angler had inadvertently stepped off a ledge into deep water, and a very swift current was tugging at him.  He leaned forward, his eyes as eager with curiosity as a boy’s.  “Do I understand you to say that you repudiate those ’best pleasures’?”

“Of course you don’t understand anything of the sort,” said Sylvia very earnestly.  “They’ve soaked me so in music that I’m a regular bond-slave to it.  And a perfect rose is associated with so many lovely recollections of Mother’s wonderful silent joy in it, that I could weep for pleasure.  What I’m talking about—­what I’m trying to tell you, is the shock it was to me, when I got out of that artificially unworldly atmosphere of home—­for there’s no use talking, it is artificial!—­to find that those pleasures aren’t the ones that are considered important and essential.  How did I find things in the real world?  Why, I find that people don’t give a thought to those ’best pleasures’ until they have a lot of other things first.  Everything I’d been trained to value and treasure was negligible, not worth bothering about.  But money—­position—­not having to work—­elegance—­those are vital—­prime!  Real people can’t enjoy hearing a concert if they know they’ve got to wash up a lot of dishes afterwards.  Hiring a girl to do that work is the first thing to do!  There isn’t another woman in the world, except my mother, who’d take any pleasure in a perfect rose if she thought her sleeves were so old-fashioned that people would stare at her.  Folks talk about liking to look at a fine sunset, but what they give their blood and bones for, is a fine house on the best street in town!”

“Well, but you’re not ‘people’ in that vulgar sense!” protested Morrison.  He spoke now without the slightest arriere-pensee of flattering her, and Sylvia in her sudden burst for self-expression was unconscious of him, save as an opponent in an argument.