etier._' She has an uncanny instinct for
suiting everybody's taste."

Sylvia smiled brightly at him, exactly the brilliant smile which
suited her brilliant, frank face and clear, wide-open eyes. Under her
smile she was saying to herself, "If that's so, I wonder--not that I
care at all--but I really wonder why you don't like me."

Sylvia was encountering for the first time this summer a society
guided by tradition and formula, but she was not without excellent
preparation for almost any contact with her fellow-beings, a
preparation which in some ways served her better than that more
conscious preparation of young ladies bred up from childhood to
sit behind tea-tables and say the right things to tea-drinkers.
Association with the crude, outspoken youth at the State University
had been an education in human nature, especially masculine nature,
for her acute mind. Her unvarnished association with the other sex in
classroom and campus had taught her, by means of certain rough knocks
which more sheltered boarding-school girls never get, an accuracy
of estimate as to the actual feeling of men towards the women they
profess to admire unreservedly which (had he been able to conceive of
it) old Mr. Sommerville would have thought nothing less than cynical.

But he did not conceive of it, and now sat, mellowed by the
rightness of his tea, white-haired, smooth-shaven, pink-gilled,
white-waistcoated, the picture of old age at its best, as he smiled
gallantly at the extremely pretty girl behind the table. Unlike Sylvia
he knew exactly why he did not like her and he wasted no time in
thinking about it. "What were you laughing about, so delightfully, as
I came in, eh?" he asked, after the irretrievable first moment of joy
in gratified appetite had gone.

Sylvia had not the slightest backwardness about explaining. In fact
she always took the greatest pains to be explicit with old Mr.
Sommerville about the pit from which she had been digged. "Why, this
visit to Aunt Victoria is like stepping into another world for me.
Everything is so different from my home-life. I was just thinking, as
I sat there behind all this glorious clutter," she waved a slim hand
over the silver and porcelain of the tea-table, "what a change it
was from setting the table one's self and washing up the dishes
afterwards. That's what we always do at home. I hated it and I said
to Arnold, 'I've reached Capua at last!' and he said," she stopped to
laugh again, hea