Aunt Victoria taking them, naturally enough, as signs of continued remorse, lifted her out of this supposed slough of despond with affectionate peremptoriness.  “Don’t feel so badly about it, darling.  We won’t have any more talk for the present about differing judgments, or of going away, or of anything uncomfortable”; and in this way, with nothing clearly understood, on a foundation indeed of misunderstanding, the decision was made, in the haphazard fashion which characterizes most human decisions.

The rest of the month was no more consecutive or logical.  Into the midst of the going-away confusion of a household about to remove itself half around the world, into a house distracted with packing, cheerless with linen-covers, desolate with rolled-up rugs and cold lunches and half-packed trunks, came, in a matter-of-fact manner characteristic of its writer, Judith’s answer to Sylvia’s letter.  Sylvia opened it, shrinking and fearful of what she would read.  She had, in the days since hers had been sent, imagined Judith’s answer in every possible form; but never in any form remotely resembling what Judith wrote.  The letter stated in Judith’s concise style that of course she agreed with Sylvia that there should be no secrets between betrothed lovers, nor, in this case, were there any.  Arnold had told her, the evening before she left Lydford, that he had inherited an alcoholic tendency from his father.  She had been in communication with a great specialist in Wisconsin about the case.  She knew of the sanitarium to which Arnold had been taken and did not like it.  The medical treatment there was not serious.  She hoped soon to have him transferred to the care of Dr. Rivedal.  If Arnold’s general constitution were still sound, there was every probability of a cure.  Doctors knew so much more about that sort of thing than they used to.  Had Sylvia heard that Madame La Rue was not a bit well, that old trouble with her heart, only worse?  They’d been obliged to hire a maid—­how in the world were the La Rues going to exist on American cooking?  Cousin Parnelia said she could cure Madame with some Sanopractic nonsense, a new fad that Cousin Parnelia had taken up lately.  Professor Kennedy had been elected vice-president of the American Mathematical Association, and it was funny to see him try to pretend that he wasn’t pleased.  Mother’s garden this autumn was ...

“Well!” ejaculated Sylvia, stopping short.  Mrs. Marshall-Smith had stopped to listen in the midst of the exhausting toil of telling Helene which dresses to pack and which to leave hanging in the Lydford house.  She now resumed her labors unflaggingly, waving away to the closet a mauve satin, and beckoning into a trunk a favorite black-and-white chiffon.  To Sylvia she said, “Now I know exactly how a balloon feels when it is pricked.”

Sylvia agreed ruefully.  “I might have known Judith would manage to make me feel flat if I got wrought up about it.  She hates a fuss made over anything, and she can always take you down if you make one.”  She remembered with a singular feeling of discomfiture the throbbing phrases of her letter, written under the high pressure of the quarrel with Aunt Victoria.  She could almost see the expression of austere distaste in the stern young beauty of Judith’s face.  Judith was always making her appear foolish!