Sylvia, go and make us some tea, won't you? Mrs. Fiske
must be cold after driving out here from town."
When Sylvia came back ten minutes later, she found the guest saying,
"My youngest is only nine months old, and he is having _such_ a time
with his teeth."
"Oh!" thought Sylvia scornfully, pouring out the tea. "She's _that_
kind of a woman, is she?" With the astonishingly quick shifting of
viewpoint of the young, she no longer felt the least anxiety that her
home, or even that she herself should make a good impression on this
evidently quite negligible person. Her anguish about the ceremony of
opening the door seemed years behind her. She examined with care all
the minutiae of the handsome, unindividualized costume of black velvet
worn by their visitor, but turned an absent ear to her talk, which
brought out various facts relating to a numerous family of young
children. "I have six living," said Mrs. Fiske, not meeting Mrs.
Marshall's eyes as she spoke, and stirring her tea slowly, "I lost
four at birth."
Sylvia was indeed slightly interested to learn through another turn of
the conversation that the caller, who looked to her unsympathetic eyes
any age at all, had been married at eighteen, and that that was only
thirteen years ago. Sylvia thought she certainly looked older than
thirty-one, advanced though that age was.
The call passed with no noteworthy incidents beyond a growing wonder
in Sylvia's mind that the brilliant and dashing old Colonel, after
his other matrimonial experiences, should have picked out so dull and
colorless a wife.
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