“What could you do?” asked her father quietly, “that would make things any better for Camilla?  If you were forty times as strong as you are, you couldn’t make the other girls want Camilla at the picnic.  It would only spoil the picnic and wouldn’t help Camilla a bit.”  Professor Marshall meditated a moment, and went on, “Of course I’m proud of my little daughters for being kind to friends who are unhappy through no fault of theirs” (Sylvia winced at this, and thought of confessing that she was very near running away and leaving Camilla to her fate), “and I hope you’ll go on being as nice to your unfortunate friends as ever—­”

Judith said:  “They aren’t friends of mine!  I don’t like them!”

As not infrequently happened, something about Judith’s attitude had been irritating her father, and he now said with some severity, “Then it’s a case where Sylvia’s loving heart can do more good than your anger, though you evidently think it very fine of you to feel that!”

Judith looked down in a stubborn silence, and Sylvia drooped miserably in the consciousness of receiving undeserved praise.  She opened her mouth to explain her vacillations of the morning, but her moral fiber was not equal to the effort.  She felt very unhappy to have Judith blamed and herself praised when things ought to have been reversed, but she could not bring herself to renounce her father’s good opinion.

Professor Marshall gave them both a kiss and set them down.  “It’s twenty minutes to one.  You’d better run along, dears,” he said.

After the children had gone out, his wife, who had preserved an unbroken silence, remarked dryly, “So that’s the stone we give them when they ask for bread.”

Professor Marshall made no attempt to defend himself.  “My dim generalities are pretty poor provender for honest children’s minds, I admit,” he said humbly, “but what else have we to give them that isn’t directly contradicted by our lives?  There’s no use telling children something that they never see put into practice.”

“It’s not impossible, I suppose, to change our lives,” suggested his wife uncompromisingly.

Professor Marshall drew a great breath of disheartenment.  “As long as I can live without thinking of that element in American life—­it’s all right.  But when anything brings it home—­like this today—­I feel that the mean compromise we all make must be a disintegrating moral force in the national character.  I feel like gathering up all of you, and going away—­away from the intolerable question—­to Europe—­and earning the family living by giving English lessons!”

Mrs. Marshall cried out, “It makes me feel like going out right here in La Chance with a bomb in one hand and a rifle in the other!”

From which difference of impression it may perhaps be seen that the two disputants were respectively the father and mother of Sylvia and Judith.

Mrs. Marshall rose and began clearing away the luncheon dishes.  As she disappeared into the kitchen, she paused a moment behind the door, a grim, invisible voice, remarking, “And what we shall do is, of course, simply nothing at all!”