Sylvia came closer to her and sat down on a straight-backed chair.  She was dressed for the street, and hatted, as though she herself had gone out to mail the letter.  “And now, Tantine,” she said, with the resolute air of one broaching a difficult subject, “I think I ought to be planning to go home very soon.”  It was a momentous speech, and a momentous pause followed it.  It had occurred to Sylvia, still shaken with the struggle over the question of secrecy, that she could, in decency, only offer to take herself away, after so violently antagonizing her hostess.  She realized with what crude intolerance she had attacked the other woman’s position, how absolutely with claw and talon she had demolished it.  She smarted with the sense that she had seemed oblivious of an “obligation.”  She detested the sense of obligation.  And having become aware of a debt due her dignity, she had paid it hastily, on the impulse of the moment.  But as the words still echoed in the air, she was struck to see how absolutely her immediate future, all her future, perhaps, depended on the outcome of that conversation she herself had begun.  She looked fixedly at her aunt, trying to prepare herself for anything.  But she was not prepared for what Mrs. Marshall-Smith did.

She swept the magazine from her lap to the floor and held out her arms to Sylvia.  “I had hoped—­I had hoped you were happy—­with me,” she said, and in her voice was that change of quality, that tremor of sincerity which Sylvia had always found profoundly moving.  The girl was overcome with astonishment and remorse—­and immense relief.  She ran to her.  “Oh, I am!  I am!  I was only thinking—­I’ve gone against your judgment.”  Her nerves, stretched with the sleepless night and the strain of writing the dreadful letter to Judith, gave way.  She broke into sobs.  She put her arms tightly around her aunt’s beautiful neck and laid her head on her shoulder, weeping, her heart swelling, her mind in a whirling mass of disconnected impressions.  Arnold—­Judith ... how strange it was that Aunt Victoria really cared for her—­did she really care for Aunt Victoria or only admire her?—­did she really care for anybody, since she was agreeing to stay longer away from her father and mother?—­how good it would be not to have to give up Helene’s services—­what a heartless, materialistic girl she was—­she cared for nothing but luxury and money—­she would be going abroad now to Paris—­Austin Page—­he had kissed her hand ... and yet she felt that he saw through her, saw through her mean little devices and stratagems—­how astonishing that he should be so very, very rich—­it seemed that a very, very rich man ought to be different from other men—­his powers were so unnaturally great—­girls could not feel naturally about him ...  And all the while that these varying reflections passed at lightning speed through her mind, her nervous sobs were continuing.