g
folds and thinking, "How horrid of Father and Mother to go and try to
spoil everything so!" She went back to the problem in trigonometry and
covered a page with figures, at which she gazed unseeingly. She was by
no means happy. She went as far as the door, meaning to go down and
kiss her parents good-night, but turned back. They were not a family
for surface demonstrations. If she could not yield her point--She
began to undress rapidly, turned out the light, opened the windows,
and sprang into bed. "If they only wouldn't take things so awfully
_solemnly_!" she said to herself petulantly.

CHAPTER XVIII

SYLVIA SKATES MERRILY ON THIN ICE

The design for the yellow chiffon dropped almost literally at Sylvia's
feet the next day, on the frontispiece of a theatrical magazine left
by another passenger in the streetcar in which she chanced to be
riding. Sylvia pounced on it with instant recognition of its value.
It was "different" and yet not "queer," it was artistic and yet
fashionable, and with its flowing lines it would not be hard to
construct. It was the creation of a Parisian boulevard actress, known
widely for her costumes, for the extraordinary manner in which she
dressed her hair, and for the rapidity of her succeeding emotional
entanglements. Her name meant nothing to Sylvia. She tore out the
page, folded it, and put it for safe-keeping between the pages of her
text-book on Logic.

That afternoon she began work on it, running the long seams up on the
machine with whirring rapidity, acutely aware of her mother's silent,
uncommenting passage back and forth through the sewing-room. With an
impulse of secrecy which she did not analyze, she did the trying-on in
her own room, craning and turning about before her own small mirror.
She knew that her mother would think the dress was cut too low,
although, as she told herself, looking with complacency at the smooth,
white, exquisitely fine-grained skin thus disclosed, it wasn't nearly
as low cut as the dresses Eleanor Hubert wore to any little dance. She
had long felt it to be countrified in the extreme to wear the mild
compromises towards evening-dress which she and most of the State
University girls adopted, as compared with the frankly disclosing
gowns of the "town girls" whose clothes came from Chicago and New
York. She knew from several outspoken comments that Jerry admired
Eleanor's shoulders, and as she looked at her own, she was not sorry
that he was to