ore of the
responsibility of the housework, while their mother extracted from the
Marshall five acres an ever increasing largesse of succulent food.
Sylvia's seances with old Reinhardt and the piano were becoming
serious affairs: for it was now tentatively decided that she was to
earn her living by teaching music. There were many expeditions on foot
with their mother, for Mrs. Marshall had become, little by little,
chief nurse and adviser to all the families of the neighborhood; and
on her errands of service one of her daughters was needed to carry
supplies and act as assistant. And finally, as the children grew
older, and the family tradition of bookishness took hold of
them, there were shelves and shelves to be devoured, a strange
mixture--Thackeray, Maeterlinck, Fielding, Hakluyt, Ibsen, Dickens,
Ruskin, Shaw, Austen, Moliere, Defoe, Cervantes, Shakespeare,--the
children dipped, or tasted or swallowed whole, according to their
temperaments and the books they happened on.

When Sylvia was thirteen, almost fourteen years old, she "graduated"
from the eighth grade of the public schools and was ready to enter the
High School. But after a good many family councils, in most of which,
after the unreticent Marshall manner, she herself was allowed to be
present, it was decided not to send her to the huge new Central High
School, which had cost La Chance such a big slice of its taxes, but to
prepare her at home for her course at the State University. She had
been growing very fast, was a little thin and white, and had been
outgrowing her strength. This at least was the reason given out to
inquirers. In reality her father's prejudice against High School
life for adolescents was the determining cause. In the course of his
University work he was obliged to visit a good many High Schools, and
had acquired a violent prejudice against the stirring social life
characteristic of those institutions.

Sylvia's feelings about this step aside from the beaten track were,
like many of Sylvia's feelings, decidedly mixed. She was drawn towards
the High School by the suction of the customary. A large number of her
classmates expected as a matter of course to pass on in the usual way;
but, with an uneasy qualm, half pride and half apprehension, Sylvia
was beginning to feel her difference from ordinary children. She was
not altogether sorry to say good-bye to her playmates, with whom she
no longer had much in common. She would miss the fun of