When, only a moment or two later, Page’s car came swiftly down the driveway, and he sprang out, he found Sylvia sitting by the drunkard, the quiet tears streaming down her face.  She had wiped his mouth with her handkerchief, she held his limp hand in hers, his foolish staring face was hidden on her shoulder....

The two men lifted him bodily, an ignoble, sagging weight, into the car.  She stood beside him and, without a word, stooped and gently disposed his slackly hanging arms beside him.

Dark had quite fallen by this time.  They were all silent, shadowy forms.  She felt that Page was at her side.  He leaned to her.  Her hand was taken and kissed.

CHAPTER XXXII

MUCH ADO ...

The rest of October was a period never clear in Sylvia’s head.  Everything that happened was confusing and almost everything was painful; and a great deal happened.  She had thought at the time that nothing would ever blur in her mind the shock of finding Aunt Victoria opposed to what seemed to her the first obvious necessity:  writing to Judith about Arnold.  She had been trying for a long time now with desperate sincerity to take the world as she found it, to see people as they were with no fanatic intolerance, to realize her own inexperience of life, to be broad, to take in without too much of a wrench another point of view; but to Aunt Victoria’s idea, held quite simply and naturally by that lady, that Judith be kept in ignorance of Arnold’s habits until after marriage, Sylvia’s mind closed as automatically, as hermetically as an oyster-shell snaps shut.  She could not discuss it, she could not even attend with hearing ears to Mrs. Marshall-Smith’s very reasonable presentation of her case; the long tradition as to the justifiability of such ignorance on a bride’s part; the impossibility that any woman should ever know all of any man’s character before marriage; the strong presumption that marriage with a woman he adored would cure habits contracted only through the inevitable aimlessness of too much wealth; the fact that, once married, a woman like Judith would accept, and for the most part deal competently with, facts which would frighten her in her raw girlish state of ignorance and crudeness.  Sylvia did not even hear these arguments and many more like them, dignified with the sanction of generations of women trying their best to deal with life.  She had never thought of the question before.  It was the sort of thing from which she had always averted her moral eyes with extreme distaste; but now that it was forced on her, her reaction to it was instantaneous.  From the depths of her there rose up fresh in its original vigor, never having been dulled by a single enforced compliance with a convention running counter to a principle, the most irresistible instinct against concealment.  She did not argue; she could not.  She could only say with a breathless certainty against which there was no holding out:  “Judith must know!  Judith must know!”