The fact that her father and her mother disagreed about the advisability of the trip was one of the salient points in the beginning.  When Aunt Victoria, breaking a long silence with one of her infrequent letters, wrote to say that she was to be in Chicago “on business” during the last week of September, and would be very glad to have her sister-in-law bring her two nieces to see her there, Professor Marshall said, with his usual snort:  “Business nothing!  She never has any business.  She won’t come to see them here, that’s all.  The idea’s preposterous.”  But Mrs. Marshall, breaking a long silence of her own, said vigorously:  “She is your sister, and you and your family are the only blood-kin she has in the world.  I’ve a notion—­I have had for some time—­that she was somehow terribly hurt on that last visit here.  It would be ungenerous not to go half-way to meet her now.”

Sylvia, anxiously hanging on her father’s response, was surprised when he made no protest beyond, “Well, do as you please.  I can keep Lawrence all right.  She only speaks of seeing you and the girls.”  It did not occur to Sylvia, astonished at this sudden capitulation, that there might be a discrepancy between her father’s habit of vehement speech and his real feeling in this instance.

It was enough for her, however, that they were going to take a long journey on the train overnight, that they were going to see a great city, that they were going to see Aunt Victoria, about whom her imagination had always hovered with a constancy enhanced by the odd silence concerning her which was the rule in the Marshall house.

She was immensely stirred by the prospect.  She made herself, in the brief interval between the decision and the beginning of the journey, a new shirt-waist of handkerchief linen.  It took the last cent of her allowance to buy the material, and she was obliged, by a secret arrangement with her father, to discount the future, in order to have some spending-money in the city.

Mrs. Marshall was quite disappointed by the dullness of Sylvia’s perceptions during that momentous first trip, which she had looked forward to as an occasion for widening the girls’ horizon to new interests.  Oddly enough it was Judith, usually so much less quick than Sylvia, who asked the intelligent questions and listened attentively to her mother’s explanations about the working of the air-brakes, and the switching systems in railroad yards, and the harvesting of the crops in the flat, rich country gliding past the windows.  It was quite evident that not a word of this highly instructive talk reached Sylvia, sitting motionless, absorbing every detail of her fellow-passengers’ aspect, in a sort of trance of receptivity.  She scarcely glanced out of the windows, except when the train stopped at the station in a large town, when she transferred her steady gaze to the people coming and going from the train.  “Just look, Sylvia, at those blast-furnaces!” cried her mother as they passed through the outskirts of an industrial town.  “They have to keep them going, you know, night and day.”