“You just say that, in that superior way,” she flashed at him, “because you don’t have to bother your head about such matters, because you don’t have to associate with people who are fighting for those essentials.  For they are what everybody except Father and Mother—­every body feels to be the essentials—­a pretty house, handsome clothes, servants to do the unpleasant things, social life—­oh, plenty of money sums it all up, ‘vulgar’ as it sounds.  And I don’t believe you are different.  I don’t believe anybody you know is really a bit different!  Let Aunt Victoria, let old Mr. Sommerville, lose their money, and you’d see how unimportant Debussy and Masaccio would be to them, compared to having to black their own shoes!”

“Well, upon my word!” exclaimed Morrison.  “Are you at eighteen presuming to a greater knowledge of life than I at forty?”

“I’m not eighteen, I’m twenty-three,” said Sylvia.  “The difference is enormous.  And if I don’t know more about plain unvarnished human nature than you, I miss my guess! You haven’t gone through five years at a State University, rubbing shoulders with folks who haven’t enough sophistication to pretend to be different from what they are. You haven’t taught music for three years in the middle-class families of a small Western city!” She broke off to laugh an apologetic depreciation of her own heat.  “You’d think I was addressing a meeting,” she said in her usual tone.  “I got rather carried away because this is the first time I ever really spoke out about it.  There are so few who could understand.  If I ever tried to explain it to Father and Mother, I’d be sure to find them so deep in a discussion of the relation between Socrates and Christ that they couldn’t pay any attention!  Professor Kennedy could understand—­but he’s such a fanatic on the other side.”

Morrison looked a quick suspicion.  “Who is Professor Kennedy?” he inquired; and was frankly relieved when Sylvia explained:  “He’s the head of the Mathematics Department, about seventy years old, and the crossest, cantankerousest old misanthrope you ever saw.  And thinks himself immensely clever for being so!  He just loathes people—­the way they really are—­and he dotes on Mother and Judith because they’re not like anybody else.  And he hates me because they couldn’t all hypnotize me into looking through their eyes.  He thinks it low of me to realize that if you’re going to live at all, you’ve got to live with people, and you can’t just calmly brush their values on one side.  He said once that any sane person in this world was like a civilized man with plenty of gold coin, cast away on a desert island with a tribe of savages who only valued beads and calico, and buttons and junk.  And I said (I knew perfectly well he was hitting at me) that if he was really cast away and couldn’t get to another island, I thought the civilized man would be an idiot to starve to death, when he could buy food of the