word her father said, being lost in the contemplation of the perfect evening costume of the newest assistant in Professor Marshall’s department.  He was a young man from Massachusetts, fresh from Harvard, who had come West to begin his teaching that year.  His was certainly the most modern dress-suit in the University faculty; and he wore it with a supercilious disregard for its perfections which greatly impressed Sylvia.

After these usual formalities were thus safely past, some one suggested a game of charades to end the evening.  Amid great laughter and joking from the few professors present and delighted response from the students who found it immensely entertaining to be on such familiar terms with their instructors, two leaders began to “choose sides.”  The young assistant from Harvard said in a low tone to his friend, not noticing Professor Marshall’s young daughter near them:  “They won’t really go on and do this fool, undignified, backwoods stunt, will they?  They don’t expect us to join in!”

“Oh yes, they will,” answered his friend, catching up his tone of sophisticated scorn.  He too was from Harvard, from an earlier class.  “You’ll be lucky if they don’t have a spelling-down match, later on.”

“Good Lord!” groaned the first young man.

“Oh, you mustn’t think all of the University society is like this!” protested the second.  “And anyhow, we can slope now, without being noticed,”

Sylvia understood the accent and tone of this passage more than the exact words, but it summed up and brought home to her in a cruelly clarified form her own groping impressions.  The moment was a terribly painful one for her.  Her heart swelled, the tears came to her eyes, she clenched her fists.  Her fine, lovely, and sensitive face darkened to a tragic intensity of resolve.  She might have been the young Hannibal, vowing to avenge Carthage.  What she was saying to herself passionately was, “When I get into the University, I will not be a jay!”

It was under these conditions that Sylvia passed from childhood, and emerged into the pains and delights and responsibilities of self-consciousness.

BOOK II

A FALSE START TO ATHENS

CHAPTER X

SYLVIA’S FIRST GLIMPSE OF MODERN CIVILIZATION

Although there was not the slightest actual connection between the two, the trip to Chicago was always in Sylvia’s mind like the beginning of her University course.  It is true that the journey, practically the first in Sylvia’s life, was undertaken shortly before her matriculation as a Freshman, but this fortuitous chronological connection could not account for Sylvia’s sense of a deeper unity between the two experiences.  The days in Chicago, few as they were, were as charged with significance for her as the successive acts in a drama, and that significance was of the substance and marrow of the following and longer passage in her life.