“But, Father said—­I thought—­he seemed to mean—­” Sylvia halted, not able to remember in her bewilderment what it had been that Father had said.  In a blur of doubt and clouded perceptions she lost all definite impression of what she had heard.  Evidently, as so often happened, she had grown-ups’ affairs all twisted up in her mind.  Aunt Victoria was touched with kindly amusement at the little girl’s face of perplexity, and told her, dismissing the subject:  “Never mind, dear, you evidently misunderstood something.  But I wonder what your father could have said to give you such a funny idea.”

Sylvia gave it up, shaking her head.  They turned into the main street of La Chance, and Aunt Victoria directed the coachman to drive them to “the” drug store of town, and offered Sylvia her choice of any soda water confection she might select.  This completed the “about-face” of the mobile little mind.  After several moments of blissful anguish of indecision, Sylvia decided on a peach ice-cream soda, and thereafter was nothing but sense of taste as she ecstatically drew through a straw the syrupy, foamy draught of nectar.  She took small sips at a time and held them in the back of her mouth till every minute bubble of gas had rendered up its delicious prickle to her tongue.  Her consciousness was filled to its uttermost limits with a voluptuous sense of present physical delight.

And yet it was precisely at this moment that from her subconscious mind, retracing with unaided travail a half-forgotten clue, there sprang into her memory a complete phrase of what her father had said.  She gave one more suck to the straw and laid it aside for a moment to say in quite a comfortable accent to her aunt:  “Oh yes, now I remember.  He said she didn’t care for him any more than for the first man she might have solicited in the street.”  For an instant the words came back as clearly as though they had just been uttered, and she repeated them fluently, returning thereupon at once to the charms of the tall, foam-filled frosted glass.

Evidently Aunt Victoria did not follow this sudden change of subject, for she asked blankly, “Who?  Who didn’t care for who?”

“Why, I supposed, Pauline for Ephraim Smith.  It was that that made Father so mad,” explained Sylvia, sucking dreamily, her eyes on the little maelstrom created in the foaming liquid by the straw, forgetting everything else.  The luxurious leisure in which she consumed her potation made it last a long time, and it was not until her suction made only a sterile rattling in the straw that she looked up at her aunt to thank her.

Mrs. Marshall-Smith’s face was averted and she did not turn it back as she said, “Just run along into the shop and leave your glass, Sylvia—­here is the money.”

After Sylvia took her seat again in the carriage, the coachman turned the horse’s head back up the Main Street.  “Aren’t you going to the campus?” asked Sylvia in surprise.