She tried to tell Mother something of what was in her mind, but, though Mother listened in a sympathetic silence, it was evident that she could make nothing out of the incoherent account.  Sylvia thought that she would try to tell Father, the next chance she had.  Even at seven, although she loved her mother passionately and jealously, she was aware that her father’s mind was more like her own.  He understood some things that Mother didn’t, although Mother was always, always right, and Father wasn’t.  She fell into silence again, standing by her mother’s knee, staring out of the window and watching the clouds move steadily across the sky doing their share of the world’s work for all they looked so soft and lazy.  Her mother did not break in on this meditative contemplation.  She took up her sewing-basket and began busily to sew buttons on a small pair of half-finished night-drawers.  The sobered child beside her, gazing up at the blue-and-white infinity of the sky, heard faintly and distantly, for the first time in her life, the whirring reverberations of the great mystic wheel of change and motion and life.

Then, all at once, there was a scraping of chairs overhead in Father’s study, a clattering on the stairs, and the sound of a great many voices.  The Saturday seminar was over.  The door below opened, and the students came out, Father at the head, very tall, very straight, his ruddy hair shining in the late afternoon sun, his shirt-sleeves rolled up over his arms, and a baseball in his hand.  “Come on, folks,” Sylvia heard him call, as he had so many times before.  “Let’s have a couple of innings before you go!” Sylvia must have seen the picture a hundred times before, but that was the first time it impressed itself on her, the close-cut grass of their yard as lustrous as enamel, the big pine-trees standing high, the scattered players, laughing and running about, the young men casting off their coats and hats, the detached fielders running long-legged to their places.  At the first sound of the voices, Judith, always alert, never wasting time in reveries, had scampered down the stairs and out in the midst of the stir-about.  Judith was sure to be in the middle of whatever was going on.  She had attached herself to young Professor Saunders, a special favorite of the children, and now was dragging him from the field to play horse with her.  Father looked up to the window where Sylvia and Mother sat, and called:  “Come on, Barbara!  Come on and amuse Judith.  She won’t let Saunders pitch.”

Mother nodded, ran downstairs, coaxed Judith over beyond first base to play catch with a soft rubber ball; and Sylvia, carried away by the cheerful excitement, hopped about everywhere at once, screaming encouragement to the base runners, picking up foul balls, and sending them with proud importance back to the pitcher.