“That’s all done,” replied Sylvia.  “The matron told me to tell you so.”

“I’m about due to go over there and look over the linen,” remarked Mrs. Owen, with an air of making a memorandum of a duty neglected.

“Well, I guess it’s comfortable enough,” said Marian.  “But I should think you could do better than that, Sylvia.  You’ll have to eat at the same table with some typewriter pounder.  With all your education I should think it would bore you.”

“Sylvia will have to learn about it for herself, Marian,” said Mrs. Bassett.  “I’ve always understood that the executive board is very careful not to admit girls whose character isn’t above reproach.”

Mrs. Owen turned the key of her old-fashioned coffee urn sharply upon the cup she was filling and looked her niece in the eye.

“Oh, we’re careful, Hallie; we’re careful; but I tell ’em not to be too careful!”

“Well, of course the aim is to protect girls,” Mrs. Bassett replied, conscious of a disconcerting acidity in her aunt’s remark.

“I’m not afraid of contamination,” observed Sylvia.

“Of course not that,” rejoined Mrs. Bassett hastily.  “I think it’s fine that with your culture you will go and live in such a place; it shows a beautiful spirit of self-sacrifice.”

“Oh, please don’t say that!  I’m going there just because I want to go!” And then, smiling to ease the moment’s tension, “I expect to have the best of times at Elizabeth House.”

“Sylvia”—­remarked Mrs. Owen, drawling the name a trifle more than usual—­“Sylvia can do what she pleases anywhere.”

“I think,” said Bassett, who had not before entered into the discussion, “that Aunt Sally has struck the right word there.  In these days a girl can do as she likes; and we haven’t any business to discuss Miss Garrison’s right to live at Elizabeth House.”

“Of course, Sylvia, we didn’t mean to seem to criticize you.  You know that,” said Mrs. Bassett, flushing.

“You are my friends,” said Sylvia, glancing round the table, “and if there’s criticizing to be done, you have the first right.”

“If Sylvia is to be criticized,—­and I don’t understand that any one has tried it,” remarked Mrs. Owen,—­“I want the first chance at her myself.”  And with the snapping of her spectacle case they rose from the table.

They had barely settled themselves in the parlor when Harwood and Allen arrived in Allen’s motor.  Dan had expected his friend to resent his part in the convention, and he had sought Allen at Lueders’s shop to satisfy himself that their personal relations had not been disturbed.  He had found Allen, at the end of a day’s work, perched upon a bench discoursing to the workmen on the Great Experiment.  Allen had, it seemed, watched the convention from an obscure corner of the gallery.  He pronounced Dan’s speech “immense”; “perfectly bully”; he was extravagant in his praise of