She now took her place by the side of their host, and thought, looking at his outdoor aspect, that her guess at what to wear had been better than Aunt Victoria’s or Molly’s.  For the question of what to wear had been a burning one.  Pressure had been put on her to don just a lacy, garden-party toilette of lawn and net as now automatically barred both Aunt Victoria and Molly from the proposed expedition to the woods.  Nobody had had the least idea what was to be the color of the entertainment offered them, for the great significance of the affair was that it was the first time that Page had ever invited any one to the spot for which he evidently felt such an unaccountable affection.  Aunt Victoria had explained to Sylvia, “It’s always at the big Page estate in Lenox that he entertains, or rather that he gets his mother to do the absolutely indispensable entertaining for him.”  Morrison said laughingly:  “Isn’t it the very quintessence of quaintness to visit him there!  To watch his detached, whimsical air of not being in the least a part of all the magnificence which bears his name.  He insists, you know, that he doesn’t begin to know his way around that huge house!” “It was his father who built the Lenox place,” commented Mrs. Marshall-Smith.  “It suited his taste to perfection.  Austin seems to have a sort of Marie-Antoinette reaction towards a somewhat painfully achieved simplicity.  He’s not the man to take any sort of pose.  If he were, it would be impossible not to suspect him of a little pose in his fondness for going back to his farmer great-grandfather’s setting.”  Guided by this conversation, and by shrewd observations of her own, Sylvia had insisted, even to the point of strenuousness, upon wearing to this first housewarming a cloth skirt and coat, tempering the severity of this costume with a sufficiently feminine and beruffled blouse of silk.  As their car had swung up before the plain, square, big-chimneyed old house, and Page had come to meet them, dressed in khaki-colored forester’s garb, with puttees, Aunt Victoria had been generous enough to admit by an eye-flash to Sylvia that the girl knew her business very well.  There was not, of course, Sylvia reflected, the slightest pretense of obscurity between them as to what, under the circumstances, her business was.

All this lay back of the fact that, as Sylvia, her face bright with spontaneous interest in pine plantations and lumbering operations, stepped to the side of the man in puttees, her costume exactly suited his own.

From the midst of a daring and extremely becoming arrangement of black and white striped chiffon and emerald-green velvet, Molly’s beautiful face smiled on them approvingly.  For various reasons, the spectacle afforded her as much pleasure as it did extreme discomfort to her grandfather, and with her usual masterful grasp on a situation she began to arrange matters so that the investigation of pine plantations and lumber operations should be conducted