“Was the concert good?” asked Mrs. Marshall, yawning, and reaching out of bed to kiss Sylvia sleepily.  She laughed a little at their faces.  “Oh, music is a madness!  To spend a cheerful evening listening to death-music, and then come back looking like Moses before the Burning Bush!”

“Say, you ought to have seen the stunt they did with their lassos,” cried Judith, waking in the bed on the other side of the room, and sitting up with her black hair tousled about her face.  “I’m going to try it with the pinto when we get home.”

“I bet you’ll do it, too,” came from Lawrence the loyal, always sure of Judith’s strength, Judith’s skill.

Sylvia looked at her father over their heads and smiled faintly.  It was a good smile, from a full heart.

“Aunt Victoria sent our dresses,” said Judith, dropping back on the pillow.  “That big box over there.  Mine has pink ribbons, and yours are blue.”

Mrs. Marshall looked at the big box with disfavor, and then at Sylvia, now sunk in a chair, her hands clasped behind her head, her eyes dreamy and half closed.  Across the room the long pasteboard box displayed a frothy mass of white lace and pale shining ribbons.  Sylvia looked at it absently and made no move to examine it.  She closed her eyes again and beat an inaudible rhythm with her raised fingers.  All through her was ringing the upward-surging tide of sound at the end of “Death and Transfiguration.”

“Oh, go to bed, Sylvia; don’t sit there maundering over the concert,” said her mother, with a good-natured asperity.  But there was relief in her voice.

CHAPTER XIV

HIGHER EDUCATION

To any one who is familiar with State University life, the color of Sylvia’s Freshman year will be vividly conveyed by the simple statement that she was not invited to join a fraternity.  To any one who does not know State University life, no description can convey anything approaching an adequate notion of the terribly determinative significance of that fact.

The statement that she was invited to join no sorority is not literally true, for in the second semester when it was apparent that none of the three leading fraternities intended to take her in, there came a late “bid” from one of the third-rate sororities, of recent date, composed of girls like Sylvia who had not been included in the membership of the older, socially distinguished organizations.  Cut to the quick by her exclusion from the others, Sylvia refused this tardy invitation with remorseless ingratitude.  If she were not to form one of the “swell” set of college, at least she would not proclaim herself one of the “jays,” the “grinds,” the queer girls, who wore their hair straight back from their foreheads, who invariably carried off Phi Beta Kappa, whose skirts hung badly, whose shoe-heels turned over as they walked, who stood first in their classes, whose belts behind made a practice of revealing large white safety-pins; and whose hats, even disassociated from their dowdy wearers, and hanging in the cloakroom, were of an almost British eccentricity.