Her life was, however, brimming with active interests which occupied her, mind and body.  There was rarely a day when a troop of children did not swarm over the Marshall house and barn, playing and playing and playing with that indomitable zest in life which is the birthright of humanity before the fevers and chills of adolescence begin.  Sylvia and Judith, moreover, were required to assume more and more of the responsibility of the housework, while their mother extracted from the Marshall five acres an ever increasing largesse of succulent food.  Sylvia’s seances with old Reinhardt and the piano were becoming serious affairs:  for it was now tentatively decided that she was to earn her living by teaching music.  There were many expeditions on foot with their mother, for Mrs. Marshall had become, little by little, chief nurse and adviser to all the families of the neighborhood; and on her errands of service one of her daughters was needed to carry supplies and act as assistant.  And finally, as the children grew older, and the family tradition of bookishness took hold of them, there were shelves and shelves to be devoured, a strange mixture—­Thackeray, Maeterlinck, Fielding, Hakluyt, Ibsen, Dickens, Ruskin, Shaw, Austen, Moliere, Defoe, Cervantes, Shakespeare,—­the children dipped, or tasted or swallowed whole, according to their temperaments and the books they happened on.

When Sylvia was thirteen, almost fourteen years old, she “graduated” from the eighth grade of the public schools and was ready to enter the High School.  But after a good many family councils, in most of which, after the unreticent Marshall manner, she herself was allowed to be present, it was decided not to send her to the huge new Central High School, which had cost La Chance such a big slice of its taxes, but to prepare her at home for her course at the State University.  She had been growing very fast, was a little thin and white, and had been outgrowing her strength.  This at least was the reason given out to inquirers.  In reality her father’s prejudice against High School life for adolescents was the determining cause.  In the course of his University work he was obliged to visit a good many High Schools, and had acquired a violent prejudice against the stirring social life characteristic of those institutions.

Sylvia’s feelings about this step aside from the beaten track were, like many of Sylvia’s feelings, decidedly mixed.  She was drawn towards the High School by the suction of the customary.  A large number of her classmates expected as a matter of course to pass on in the usual way; but, with an uneasy qualm, half pride and half apprehension, Sylvia was beginning to feel her difference from ordinary children.  She was not altogether sorry to say good-bye to her playmates, with whom she no longer had much in common.  She would miss the fun of class-life, of course; but there was a certain distinction involved in being educated “differently.”