Even when they were quite little children, Sylvia and Judith, and
later, Lawrence, were allowed to sit up on Sunday evenings to
listen to the music. Judith nearly always slept, steadily; and not
infrequently after a long day of outdoor fun, stupefied with fresh
air and exercise, Lawrence, and Sylvia too, could not keep their eyes
open, and dozed and woke and dozed again, coiled like so many little
kittens among the cushions of the big divan. In all the intensely
enjoyed personal pleasures of her later youth, and these were many for
Sylvia, she was never to know a more utter sweetness than thus to fall
asleep, the music a far-off murmur in her ears, and to wake again to
the restrained, clarified ecstasy of the four concerted voices.
And yet it was in connection with this very quartet that she had her
first shocked vision of how her home-life appeared to other people.
She once chanced, when she was about eight years old, to go with her
father on a Saturday to his office at the University, where he had
forgotten some papers necessary for his seminar. There, sitting on
the front steps of the Main Building, waiting for her father, she had
encountered the wife of the professor of European History with her
beautiful young-lady sister from New York and her two daughters,
exquisite little girls in white serge, whose tailored, immaculate
perfection made Sylvia's heart heavy with a sense of the plebeian
inelegance of her own Saturday-morning play-clothes.
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