SYLVIA MEETS WITH PITY

Under the scarlet glory of frost-touched maples, beside the river strolled Sylvia, conscious of looking very well and being admired; but contrary to the age-old belief about her sex and age, the sensation of looking very well and being admired by no means filled the entire field of her consciousness.  In fact, the corner occupied by the sensation was so small that occasional efforts on her part to escape to it from the less agreeable contents of her mind were lamentable failures.  Aloud, in terms as felicitous as she could make them, she was commenting on the beauty of the glass-smooth river, with the sumptuously colored autumn trees casting down into it the imperial gold and crimson of their reflections.  Silently she was struggling to master and dominate and suppress a confusion of contradictory mental processes.  At almost regular intervals, like a hollow stroke on a brazen gong, her brain resounded to the reverberations of “The wedding is on the twenty-first.”  And each time that she thrust that away, there sprang up with a faint hissing note of doubt and suspicion, “Why does Aunt Victoria want Arnold married?” A murmur, always drowned out but incessantly recurring, ran:  “What about Father and Mother?  What about their absurd, impossible, cruel, unreal, and beautiful standards?” Contemptible little echoes from the silly self-consciousness of the adolescence so recently left behind her ...  “I must think of something clever to say.  I must try to seem different and original and independent and yet must attract,” mingled with an occasional fine sincerity of appreciation and respect for the humanity of the man beside her.  Like a perfume borne in gusts came reaction to the glorious color about her.  Quickly recurring and quickly gone, a sharp cymbal-clap of alarm ...  “What shall I do if Austin Page now ... today ... or tomorrow ... tells me ...!” And grotesquely, the companion cymbal on which this smote, gave forth an antiphonal alarm of, “What shall I do if he does not!” While, unheard of her conscious ear, but coloring everything with its fundamental note of sincerity, rose solemnly from the depths of her heart the old cry of desperate youth, “What am I to do with my life?”

No, the eminently successful brown corduroy, present though it was to the mind of the handsome girl wearing it, was hardly the sure and sufficient rock of refuge which tradition would have had it.

With an effort she turned her attention from this confused tumult in her ears, and put out her hand, rather at random, for an introduction to talk.  “You spoke, back there in the pergola, of another kind of beauty—­I didn’t know what you meant.”  He answered at once, with his usual direct simplicity, which continued to have for Sylvia at this period something suspiciously like the calmness of a reigning sovereign who is above being embarrassed, who may speak, without shamefacedness, of anything, even of moral values, that subject tabu in sophisticated conversation.  “Ah, just a notion of mine that perhaps all this modern ferment of what’s known as ‘social conscience’ or ‘civic responsibility,’ isn’t a result of the sense of duty, but of the old, old craving for beauty.”