1Olivia was right in her belief that Anson was ashamed of his behavior on the night of the ball. It was not that he made an apology or even mentioned the affair. He simply never spoke of it again. For weeks after the scene he did not mention the name of O’Hara, perhaps because the name brought up inevitably the memory of his sudden, insulting speech; but his sense of shame prevented him from harassing her on the subject. What he never knew was that Olivia, while hating him for the insult aimed at her father, was also pleased in a perverse, feminine way because he had displayed for a moment a sudden fit of genuine anger. For a moment he had come very near to being a husband who might interest his wife.

2But in the end he only sank back again into a sea of indifference so profound that even Aunt Cassie’s campaign of insinuations and veiled proposals could not stir him into action. The old woman managed to see him alone once or twice, saying to him, “Anson, your father is growing old and can’t manage everything much longer. You must begin to take a stand yourself. The family can’t rest on the shoulders of a woman. Besides, Olivia is an outsider, really. She’s never understood our world.” And then, shaking her head sadly, she would murmur, “There’ll be trouble, Anson, when your father dies, if you don’t show some backbone. You’ll have trouble with Sybil; she’s very queer and pig-headed in her quiet way, just as Olivia was in the matter of sending her to school in Paris.”

3And after a pause, “I am the last person in the world to interfere; it’s only for your own good and Olivia’s and all the family’s.”

4And Anson, to be rid of her, would make promises, facing her with averted eyes in some corner of the garden or the old house where she had skilfully run him to earth beyond the possibility of escape. And he would leave her, troubled and disturbed because the world and this family which had been saddled unwillingly upon him, would permit him no peace to go on with his writing. He really hated Aunt Cassie because she had never given him any peace, never since the days when she had kept him in the velvet trousers and Fauntleroy curls which spurred the jeers of the plain, red-haired little Sabine. She had never ceased to reproach him for “not being a man and standing up for his rights.” It seemed to him that Aunt Cassie was always hovering near, like a dark persistent fury, always harassing him; and yet he knew, more by instinct than by any process of reasoning, that she was his ally against the others, even his own wife and father and children. He and Aunt Cassie prayed to the same gods.

5So he did nothing, and Olivia, keeping her word, spoke of O’Hara to Sybil one day as they sat alone at breakfast.

6The girl had been riding with him that very morning and she sat in her riding-clothes, her face flushed by the early morning exercise, telling her mother of the beauties of the country back of Durham, of the new beagle puppies, and of the death of “Hardhead” Smith, who was the last farmer of old New England blood in the county. His half-witted son, she said, was being taken away to an asylum. O’Hara, she said, was buying his little stony patch of ground.

7When she had finished, her mother said, “And O’Hara? You like him, don’t you?”

8Sybil had a way of looking piercingly at a person, as if her violet eyes tried to bore quite through all pretense and unveil the truth. She had a power of honesty and simplicity that was completely disarming, and she used it now, smiling at her mother, candidly.

9“Yes, I like him very much.... But ... but ...” She laughed softly. “Are you worrying about my marrying him, my falling in love—because you needn’t. I am fond of him because he’s the one person around here who likes the things I like. He loves riding in the early morning when the dew is still on the grass and he likes racing with me across the lower meadow by the gravel-pit, and well—he’s an interesting man. When he talks, he makes sense. But don’t worry; I shan’t marry him.”

10“I was interested,” said Olivia, “because you do see him more than any one about here.”

11Again Sybil laughed. “But he’s old, Mama. He’s more than thirty-five. He’s middle-aged. I know what sort of man I want to marry. I know exactly. He’s going to be my own age.”

12“One can’t always tell. It’s not so easy as that.”

13“I’m sure I can tell.” Her face took on an expression of gravity. “I’ve devoted a good deal of thought to it and I’ve watched a great many others.”

14Olivia wanted to smile, but she knew she dared not if she were to keep her hold upon confidences so charming and naïve.

15“And I’m sure that I’ll know the man when I see him, right away, at once. It’ll be like a spark, like my friendship with O’Hara, only deeper than that.”

16“Did you ever talk to Thérèse about love?” asked Olivia.

17“No; you can’t talk to her about such things. She wouldn’t understand. With Thérèse everything is scientific, biological. When Thérèse marries, I think it will be some man she has picked out as the proper father, scientifically, for her children.”

18“That’s not a bad idea.”

19“She might just have children by him without marrying him, the way she breeds frogs. I think that’s horrible.”

20Again Olivia was seized with an irresistible impulse to laugh, and controlled herself heroically. She kept thinking of how silly, how ignorant, she had been at Sybil’s age, silly and ignorant despite the unclean sort of sophistication she had picked up in the corridors of Continental hotels. She kept thinking how much better a chance Sybil had for happiness.... Sybil, sitting there gravely, defending her warm ideas of romance against the scientific onslaughts of the swarthy, passionate Thérèse.

21“It will be some one like O’Hara,” continued Sybil. “Some one who is very much alive—only not middle-aged like O’Hara.”

22(So Sybil thought of O’Hara as middle-aged, and he was four years younger than Olivia, who felt and looked so young. The girl kept talking of O’Hara as if his life were over; but that perhaps was only because she herself was so young.)

23Olivia sighed now, despite herself. “You mustn’t expect too much from the world, Sybil. Nothing is perfect, not even marriage. One always has to make compromises.”

24“Oh, I know that; I’ve thought a great deal about it. All the same, I’m sure I’ll know the man when I see him.” She leaned forward and said earnestly, “Couldn’t you tell when you were a girl?”

25“Yes,” said Olivia softly. “I could tell.”

26And then, inevitably, Sybil asked what Olivia kept praying she would not ask. She could hear the girl asking it before the words were spoken. She knew exactly what she would say.

27“Didn’t you know at once when you met Father?”

28And in spite of every effort, the faint echo of a sigh escaped Olivia. “Yes, I knew.”

29She saw Sybil give her one of those quick, piercing looks of inquiry and then bow her head abruptly, as if pretending to study the pattern on her plate.

30When she spoke again, she changed the subject abruptly, so that Olivia knew she suspected the truth, a thing which she had guarded with a fierce secrecy for so long.

31“Why don’t you take up riding again, Mother?” she asked “I’d love to have you go with me. We would go with O’Hara in the mornings, and then Aunt Cassie couldn’t have anything to say about my getting involved with him.” She looked up. “You’d like him. You couldn’t help it.”

32She saw that Sybil was trying to help her in some way, to divert her and drive away the unhappiness.

33“I like him already,” said Olivia, “very much.”

34Then she rose, saying, “I promised Sabine to motor into Boston with her to-day. We’re leaving in twenty minutes.”

35She went quickly away because she knew it was perilous to sit there any longer talking of such things while Sybil watched her, eager with the freshness of youth which has all life before it.

36Out of all their talk two things remained distinct in her mind: one that Sybil thought of O’Hara as middle-aged—almost an old man, for whom there was no longer any chance of romance; the other the immense possibility for tragedy that lay before a girl who was so certain that love would be a glorious romantic affair, so certain of the ideal man whom she would find one day. What was she to do with Sybil? Where was she to find that man? And when she found him, what difficulties would she have to face with John Pentland and Anson and Aunt Cassie and the host of cousins and connections who would be marshaled to defeat her?

37For she saw clearly enough that this youth for whom Sybil was waiting would never be their idea of a proper match. It would be a man with qualities which O’Hara possessed, and even Higgins, the groom. She saw perfectly why Sybil had a fondness for these two outsiders; she had come to see it more and more clearly of late. It was because they possessed a curious, indefinable solidity that the others at Pentlands all lacked, and a certain fire and vitality. Neither blood, nor circumstance, nor tradition, nor wealth, had made life for them an atrophied, empty affair, in which there was no need for effort, for struggle, for combat. They had not been lost in a haze of transcendental maunderings. O’Hara, with his career and his energy, and Higgins, with his rabbitlike love-affairs and his nearness to all that was earthy, still carried about them a sense of the great zest in life. They reached down somehow into the roots of things where there was still savor and fertility.

38And as she walked along the hallway, she found herself laughing aloud over the titles of the only three books which the Pentland family had ever produced—“The Pentland Family and the Massachusetts Bay Colony” and Mr. Struthers’ two books, “Cornices of Old Boston Houses” and “Walks and Talks in New England Churchyards.” She thought suddenly of what Sabine had once said acidly of New England—that it was a place where thoughts were likely to grow “higher and fewer.”

39But she was frightened, too, because in the life of enchantment which surrounded her, the virtues of O’Hara and Higgins seemed to her the only things in the world worth possessing. She wanted desperately to be alive, as she had never been, and she knew that this, too, was what Sybil sought in all her groping, half-blind romantic youth. It was something which the girl sensed and had never clearly understood, something which she knew existed and was awaiting her.