The girls put off their aprons and slipped into the big, low-ceilinged living-room, singing like a great sea-shell with thrilling violin-tones.  Old Reinhardt was playing the Kreutzer, with Professor Marshall at the piano.  Judith went quietly to sit near Professor Kennedy, and Sylvia sat down near a window, leaning her head against the pane as she listened, her eyes fixed on the blackness outside.  Her face cleared and brightened, like a cloudy liquor settling to limpidity in a crystal vase.  Her lips parted a little, her eyes were fixed on a point incalculably distant.  Her mind emptied itself of everything but her joy in the glorious cadences....

If she had been asked what she and Judith had been talking of, she could not have told; but when, after the second movement was finished, old Reinhardt put down his violin and began to loosen his bow (he never played the presto finale), it all came back to the girl as she looked around her at her father’s guests.  She hated the way the young men’s Adam’s apples showed through their too-widely opened collars, and she loathed the way the thin brown hair of one of the co-eds was strained back from her temples.  She received the President’s condescending, oleaginous hand-shake with a qualm at his loud oratorical voice and plebeian accent, and she headed Cousin Parnelia off from a second mediumistic attack, hating her badly adjusted false-front of hair as intensely as ever Loyola hated a heretic.  And this, although uncontrollably driven by her desire to please, to please even a roomful of such mediocrities, she bore to the outward eyes the most gracious aspect of friendly, smiling courtesy.  Professor Marshall looked at her several times, as she moved with her slim young grace among his students and friends, and thought how fortunate he was in his children.

After the chicken-salad and coffee had been successfully served and eaten, one of the Seniors stepped forward with an awkward crudeness and presented Professor Marshall with a silver-mounted blotting-pad.  The house was littered with such testimonials to the influence of the Professor on the young minds under his care, testimonials which his children took as absolutely for granted as they did everything else in the home life.  On this occasion Sylvia was so afflicted because the young rustic appointed to make the presentation speech, forgot most of what he had planned to say, that she felt nothing but the liveliest impatience with the whole proceeding.  But her father’s quick heart was touched, and more than half of his usual little speech of farewell to his Seniors was an expression of thanks to them.  Before he had finished the last part, which consisted of eloquent exhortations to the higher life, none the less sincerely heartfelt for being remarkably like similar speeches he had made during the last twenty years, he had quoted his favorite saying from Emerson.  Judith looked apprehensively at Sylvia; but she was not laughing.  She evidently was not hearing a