from Mother the other day. Do you remember Professor Kennedy?
He has just given up his position to be professor emeritus. I suppose
now he'll write that book on the idiocy of the human race he's been
planning so long. And old Mr. Reinhardt, he's still the same, they say
... wonderful, isn't it, at his age?" She was running on, not knowing
what to say, and chattering rather foolishly in her embarrassment.
"Judith is a trained nurse; isn't that just the right thing for her?
I'm visiting Aunt Victoria here for a while. Lawrence is a Freshman at...."

He broke in, his hollow voice resounding in the immense, vault-like
spaces around them. "You'd better go home," he said. "I'd leave
tonight, if I were you." She looked at him startled, half-scared,
thinking that she had been right to fancy him out of his mind. She saw
with relief a burly attendant in a blue uniform lounging near a group
of statuary. She could call to him, if it became necessary.

"You'd better go away from her at once," went on the man, advancing
aimlessly from one bay of the frescoes to another.

Sylvia knew now of whom he was speaking, and as he continued talking
with a slow, dreary monotony, her mind raced back over the years,
picking up a scrap here, a half-forgotten phrase there, an intercepted
look between her father and mother, a recollection of her own, a
half-finished sentence of Arnold's ...

"She can't be fatal for you in the same way she has been for the
others, of course," the man was saying. "What she'll do for you is to
turn you into a woman like herself. I remember now, I have thought
many times, that you _were_ like her ... of the same clay. But you
have something else too, you have something that she'll take away from
you if you stay. You can't keep her from doing it. No one can get the
better of her. She doesn't fight. But she always takes life. She has
taken mine. She must have taken her bogie-husband's, she took young
Gilbert's, she took Gilbert's wife's, she took Arnold's in another
way.... God! think of leaving a young, growing, weak soul in the care
of a woman like Victoria! She took that poet's, I forget his name; I
suppose by this time Felix Morrison is ..."

At this name, a terrible contraction of the heart told Sylvia that she
was listening to what he said. "Felix Morrison!" she cried in stern,
angry protest. "I don't know what you're talking about--but if you
think that Aunt Victoria--if you think Felix Morrison--" She was
in