Judith stared.  The girls were in the kitchen, large aprons over their best dresses, setting out rows of plates for the chicken salad which was to come after the music.  “I don’t see anything to scream about in that!” said Judith with a wondering contempt for Sylvia’s notions.

“I’m so sick of it!” cried Sylvia, tearing the lettuce-leaves apart with venom.  “Father never gets through any sort of a speech that he doesn’t work it in—­and I hate it, anyhow!  It makes me feel as though somebody had banged a big door in my face and shut me up in prison.”

“Well, for goodness’ sakes!” cried Judith, who, at this period of their lives, had remained rather more than her three years behind Sylvia’s intelligence.  “How do you get all that out of that!”

“You haven’t sense enough to know what it means, that’s all!” retorted Sylvia.  “It means something perfectly hateful, the way Father uses it.  It means you’ve got to pay for every single thing you do or get in this world!  It’s somebody tagging you round with an account-book, seeing how big a bill you’re running up.  It’s the perfectly horrid way Father and Mother make us do, of always washing up the dishes we dirty, and always picking up the things we drop.  Seems as though I’d die happy, if I could just step out of my nightgown in the morning and leave it there, and know that it would get hung up without my doing it.”

“Well, if that’s all you want, to die happy,” said Judith, the literal-minded, “I will do that much for you!”

“Oh gracious, no!  That wouldn’t do any good!  You know I couldn’t take any satisfaction letting you do that!” objected Sylvia, peevishly, fuming and fumbling helplessly before the baffling quality of her desires.  “I don’t want just somebody to pick it up for me.  I want it picked up by somebody that I don’t care about, that I don’t see, that I’d just as soon have do the tiresome things as not.  I want somebody to do it, and me to feel all right about having them do it!”

“Well, for goodness’ sakes!” Judith was reduced again to mere wonder.

Professor and Mrs. Marshall stepped into the kitchen for a moment to see that everything was progressing smoothly.  The professor had his viola in his hand and was plucking softly at the strings, a pleasant, tranquil anticipation of harmony on his face.  He looked affectionately at his daughters and thought what dear good children they were.  Judith appealed to her parents:  “Sylvia’s as crazy as a loon.  She says she wants somebody to do her work for her, and yet she wants to feel all right about shirking it!”

Mrs. Marshall did not follow, and did not care.  “What?” she said indifferently, tasting the chicken-salad in the big yellow bowl, and, with an expression of serious consideration, adding a little more salt to it.

But Sylvia’s father understood, “What you want to remember, daughter,” he said, addressing himself to his oldest child with a fond certainty of her quick apprehension, “is that fine saying of Emerson, ’What will you have, quoth—­’” A raw-boned assistant appeared in the doorway.  “Everybody here, I guess, Perfesser,” he said.