It's something
that nice little girls shouldn't know anything about. Come, Margery;
come, Eleanor." She took their hands and began to draw them away
without another look at Sylvia, who remained behind, drooping,
ostracised, pierced momentarily with her first blighting misgiving
about the order of things she had always known.
CHAPTER III
BROTHER AND SISTER
A fuller initiation into the kaleidoscopic divergencies of adult
standards was given Sylvia during the visits of her Aunt Victoria.
These visits were angelic in their extreme rarity, and for Sylvia were
always a mixture of the beatific and the distressing. Only to look at
Aunt Victoria was a bright revelation of elegance and grace. And yet
the talk around table and hearth on the two or three occasions when
the beautiful young widow honored their roof with a sojourn was hard
on Sylvia's sensitive nerves.
It was not merely that a good deal of what was said was
unintelligible. The Marshall children were quite accustomed to
incessant conversations between their elders of which they could
gather but the vaguest glimmering. They played about, busy in
their own absorbing occupations, lending an absent but not wholly
unattentive ear to the gabble of their elders, full of odd and
ridiculous-sounding words like Single-tax, and contrapuntal
development, and root-propagation, and Benthamism, and Byzantine,
and nitrogenous fertilizers, and Alexandrine, and chiaroscuro, and
surviving archaisms, and diminishing utility--for to keep up such a
flood-tide of talk as streamed through the Marshall house required
contributions from many diverging rivers.
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