“No,” said Sylvia.  “Evidently she didn’t!” She sat staring at me, trying to get up the courage to go on with this plain speaking.

And at last the courage came.  “I think it is wrong,” she exclaimed.  “Girls ought not to be kept so ignorant!  They ought to know what such things mean.  Why, I didn’t even know what marriage meant!”

“Can that be true?” I asked.

“All my life I had thought of marriage, in a way; I had been trained to think of it with every eligible man I met—­but to me it meant a home, a place of my own to entertain people in.  I pictured myself going driving with my husband, giving dinner-parties to his friends.  I knew I’d have to let him kiss me, but beyond that—­I had a vague idea of something, but I didn’t think.  I had been deliberately trained not to let myself think—­to run away from every image that came to me.  And I went on dreaming of what I’d wear, and how I’d greet my husband when he came home in the evening.”

“Didn’t you think about children?”

“Yes—­but I thought of the CHILDREN.  I thought what they’d look like, and how they’d talk, and how I’d love them.  I don’t know if many young girls shut their minds up like that.”

She was speaking with agitation, and I was gazing into her eyes, reading more than she knew I was reading.  I was nearer to solving the problem that had been baffling me.  And I wanted to take her hands in mine, and say:  “You would never have married him if you’d understood!”

22.  Sylvia thought she ought to have been taught, but when she came to think of it she was unable to suggest who could have done the teaching.  “Your mother?” I asked, and she had to laugh, in spite of the seriousness of her mood.  “Poor dear mamma!  When they sent me up here to boarding school, she took me off and tried to tell me not to listen to vulgar talk from the girls.  She managed to make it clear that I mustn’t listen to something, and I managed not to listen.  I’m sure that even now she would rather have her tongue cut out than talk to me about such things.”

“I talked to my children,” I assured her.

“And you didn’t feel embarrassed?”

“I did in the beginning—­I had the same shrinkings to overcome.  But I had a tragedy behind me to push me on.”

I told her the story of my nephew, a shy and sensitive lad, who used to come to me for consolation, and became as dear to me as my own children.  When he was seventeen he grew moody and despondent; he ran away from home for six months and more, and then returned and was forgiven—­but that seemed to make no difference.  One night he came to see me, and I tried hard to get him to tell me what was wrong.  He wouldn’t, but went away, and several hours later I found a letter he had shoved under the table-cloth.  I read it, and rushed out and hitched up a horse and drove like mad to my brother-in-law’s, but I got there too late, the poor boy had taken a shot-gun