no time on trifling matters.  She was curious about Sylvia, for Sylvia was a little different from the young girls she knew.  Quite naturally she was comparing the slim, dark-eyed girl at her side with Marian Bassett.  Marian was altogether obvious; whereas Mrs. Owen felt the barriers of reserve in Sylvia.  Sylvia embodied questions in the Kelton family history that she could not answer, though she had known Andrew Kelton all his life, and remembered dimly his only daughter, who had unaccountably vanished.

“Where do you go to school, Sylvia?” she asked.

“I don’t go to school,—­not to a real school,—­but grandfather teaches me; he has always taught me.”

“And you are now about—­how old?”

“Sixteen in October.  I’ve been talking to grandfather about going to college.”

“They do send girls to college nowadays, don’t they!  We’re beginning to have some of these college women in our town here.  I know some of ’em.  Let’s see.  What they say against colleges for women is that the girls who go there learn too much, so that men are afraid to marry ’em.  I wonder how that is?  But that’s in favor of college, I think; don’t you?”

Mrs. Owen answered her own question with a laugh; and having opened the subject she went on to disclose her opinions further.

“I guess I’m too old to be one of these new women we’re hearing so much about.  Even farming’s got to be a science, and it keeps me hustling to learn what the new words mean in the agricultural papers.  I belong to a generation of women who know how to sew rag carpets and make quilts and stir soft soap in an iron kettle and darn socks; and I can still cure a ham better than any Chicago factory does it,” she added, raking a fly from the back of the “off” sorrel with a neat turn of the whip.  “And I reckon I make ’em pay full price for my corn.  Well, well; so you’re headed for college.”

“I hope so,” said Sylvia; “then after that I’m going to teach.”

“Poor pay and hard work.  I know lots of teachers; they’re always having nervous prostration.  But you look healthy.”

“Oh, I’m strong enough,” replied Sylvia.  “I think I should like teaching.”

“Marian was at Miss Waring’s school last winter and I couldn’t see what she was interested in much but chasing to matinees.  Are you crazy about theatres?”

“Why, I’ve never been to one,” Sylvia confessed.

“You’re just as well off.  Actors ain’t what they used to be.  When you saw Edwin Booth in ‘Hamlet’ or Jefferson in ‘Rip,’ you saw acting.  I haven’t been in any theatre since I saw Jefferson in the ‘Rivals’ the last time he came round.  There used to be a stock company at the Metropolitan about war-time that beat any of these new actor folks.  I’d rather see a good circus any time than one of these singing pieces.  Sassafras tea and a circus every spring; I always take both.”