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As the "season" heightened, the beautiful paneled walls of Mrs. Marshall-Smith's salon were frequently the background for chance gatherings of extremely appropriate callers. They seemed a visible emanation of the room, so entirely did they represent what that sort of a room was meant to contain.
But he was following out some thought of his own, and now rose, went to Mrs. Marshall-Smith's fine, small desk, snapped on an electric light, and began to write. When he finished, he handed a bit of paper to Sylvia. "Do you suppose your sister would be willing to let me make up for the objectionable Charlie Winthrop's deficiences?" he asked with a deprecatory air as though he feared a refusal.
Marshall-Smith's conversational range hardly extending at all outside of aesthetics of one kind or another, communication between these two house-mates of years' standing was for the most part reduced to a primitive simplicity for which a sign-language would have sufficed. Arnold's phrase for the situation was, "I let Madrina alone, and she don't bother me."
Marshall-Smith's face was averted and she did not turn it back as she said, "Just run along into the shop and leave your glass, Sylvia here is the money." After Sylvia took her seat again in the carriage, the coachman turned the horse's head back up the Main Street. "Aren't you going to the campus?" asked Sylvia in surprise. "No, we are going to the hotel," said Aunt Victoria.
"You make your old friend out as a very weak character," she said. Mrs. Marshall-Smith's tolerant, clear view of the infirmities of humanity was grieved by this fling of youthful severity. "Oh, my dear! my dear! A young, beautiful, enormendously rich, tremendously enamored girl? That's a combination! I don't think we need consider Felix exactly weak for not having resisted!"
Whereas Aunt Victoria Sylvia's earnest and thoughtful efforts at home-dressmaking had fitted her, if for nothing else, for a full appreciation of Mrs. Marshall-Smith's costume. She had struggled with cloth enough to bow her head in respect and awe before the masterly tailoring of the rich, smooth broadcloth dress.
Marshall-Smith's very reasonable presentation of her case; the long tradition as to the justifiability of such ignorance on a bride's part; the impossibility that any woman should ever know all of any man's character before marriage; the strong presumption that marriage with a woman he adored would cure habits contracted only through the inevitable aimlessness of too much wealth; the fact that, once married, a woman like Judith would accept, and for the most part deal competently with, facts which would frighten her in her raw girlish state of ignorance and crudeness.
She remained silent, looking fixedly out of the great, plate-glass window, across the glorious sweep of blue mountain-slope and green valley commanded by Mrs. Marshall-Smith's bedroom. She did not resemble the romantic conception of a girl crossed in love. She looked very quiet, no paler than usual, quite self-possessed.
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