he journey,
practically the first in Sylvia's life, was undertaken shortly before
her matriculation as a Freshman, but this fortuitous chronological
connection could not account for Sylvia's sense of a deeper unity
between the two experiences. The days in Chicago, few as they were,
were as charged with significance for her as the successive acts in a
drama, and that significance was of the substance and marrow of the
following and longer passage in her life.

The fact that her father and her mother disagreed about the
advisability of the trip was one of the salient points in the
beginning. When Aunt Victoria, breaking a long silence with one of her
infrequent letters, wrote to say that she was to be in Chicago "on
business" during the last week of September, and would be very glad
to have her sister-in-law bring her two nieces to see her there,
Professor Marshall said, with his usual snort: "Business nothing! She
never has any business. She won't come to see them _here_, that's all.
The idea's preposterous." But Mrs. Marshall, breaking a long silence
of her own, said vigorously: "She is your sister, and you and your
family are the only blood-kin she has in the world. I've a notion--I
have had for some time--that she was somehow terribly hurt on that
last visit here. It would be ungenerous not to go half-way to meet her
now."

Sylvia, anxiously hanging on her father's response, was surprised
when he made no protest beyond, "Well, do as you please. I can keep
Lawrence all right. She only speaks of seeing you and the girls." It
did not occur to Sylvia, astonished at this sudden capitulation, that
there might be a discrepancy between her father's habit of vehement
speech and his real feeling in this instance.

It was enough for her, however, that they were going to take a long
journey on the train overnight, that they were going to see a great
city, that they were going to see Aunt Victoria, about whom her
imagination had always hovered with a constancy enhanced by the odd
silence concerning her which was the rule in the Marshall house.

She was immensely stirred by the prospect. She made herself, in the
brief interval between the decision and the beginning of the journey,
a new shirt-waist of handkerchief linen. It took the last cent of
her allowance to buy the material, and she was obliged, by a secret
arrangement with her father, to discount the future, in order to have
some spending-money in the city.

Mrs. Marsh