class="pnext">"Aren't you going to prescribe for me now you have diagnosed my case?" Sylvia came to the rescue.

"I did prescribe, but you wouldn't swallow Mr. Jack Amidon, sugar-coated pill though he is. How about your tawny-maned, giant, ex-football-hero M.D.? He isn't so good looking as Jack but--"

"I think he is much nicer looking," Barb interposed surprisingly, then blushed and subsided.

"Oho!" laughed Suzanne. "Better keep your eye on our Barbie if you want to keep Doctor Philip Lorrimer on your waiting list, Sylvia. Such unprecedented enthusiasm! And she has beheld him but once at that. Oh, the witchery of that Commencement moon! I inadvertently nearly promised to marry Roger Minot myself in its specious glamour. I'll wager our demure Barbie flirted with your six-foot medicine man when you rashly left him on her hands on the outskirts of Paradise. 'Fess up, Barb. Didn't you flirt a teeny weeny little flirt in the moonshine?"

"No, I didn't," denied Barbara, flushed and indignant. "But I did like Doctor Lorrimer. He talked sense, and I was awfully interested in his work in the free clinic."

"Sense! Shop! By moonlight! Ye gods!" mocked Suzanne. "Never mind, Barbie. Your tactics were admirable. Listen to 'em. Keep on listening to 'em. It's what the sex likes. It gets 'em every time."

"But I don't want to get 'em," protested Barbara earnestly.

Whereupon Suzanne giggled and tossed her victim a silver sheathed bonbon by way of reconciliation. Then she returned to her charge upon Sylvia, who had sat silent during the last sally, meditatively playing with the spray of scarlet creeper in her lap.

"Sorry, Sylvia, belovedest. But I can't seem to think of a single suitable job for you except matrimony. You are eminently fitted for that."

Sylvia looked up with an expression half mirthful, half dissenting.

"Thanks. But at this juncture I don't happen to want to get married one bit more than you do, which to judge from your protestations and your treatment of poor Roger isn't much."

"Right you are. No such 'cribb'd, cabin'd and confined' business as matrimony for this child. What was the advice old Bacon cites as to when a man should marry? 'A young man not yet, an elder man, not at all.' Read woman for man and you have my sentiments in a nutshell."

"Oh, Suzanne!" Thus the refrain from the big chair. But Sylvia only laughed, knowing what Barbara seemed never to be able to learn, that Suzanne rarely meant more than a half or at best a quarter of what she said and thoroughly delighted in being iconoclastic, especially if the idols made considerable noise smashing, as she would have put it herself.

"Look at your neighbor, Mrs. Doctor Tom." Suzanne warmed her to her subject. "She used to write for all the best magazines and travel and live the broadest, freest, splendidest kind of life. How does she put in her time now? Eternally making rompers for Marjory, trying to keep Thomas Junior's face clean and his vocabulary expurgated, seeing that the dinner is warm and the cook's temper cool when Doctor Tom is late to meals, and so on and so on to the end of the chapter. Only there isn't any end to the chapter. It goes on forever like Tennyson's stupid brook. Bah! Excuse me!" And Suzanne's gesture betokened insuperable scorn for the ways of the wifely.

"But Mrs. Daly looks as if she enjoyed doing all those things, and I think it is lovely to have babies." There was a little wistful note in Barb's voice as she made the statement.

"H-mp! Maybe so. But I say it is a shame for anybody who could write the way she could to give it up. Don't you, Sylvia?"

"O dear!" groaned Sylvia. "Yes and no. Why do I always have to see both sides of things? Lois is happy. At least I think she is. You can't always tell about Lois, she is so cool and serene and deep. Anyway, the babies are lovely. But I can't help agreeing with you a little, Suzanne. It does seem a pity."

"Of course it is a pity. And there is your Felicia. She is another case in point. She gave up her work and a fortune to marry a man who lived just long enough to leave her with a big heartache to carry round inside her and two children to provide immediate bread and butter for. You can say what you like. I say it was too much of a price."

"O, but, Suzanne, Marianna and Donald are such dears!" pleaded Barb.

"Of course they are dears. They are adorable. But you can't deny they have kept her back. She is just beginning to be a real sculptor after all these years. And now she is beginning appears this Kinnard person to spoil it all."

Sylvia looked up a trifle startled.

"What do you mean, Suzanne? Mr. Kinnard isn't spoiling anything. He is helping. Felicia hasn't a bit of faith in herself. She never would have thought of entering into that mural relief competition if he hadn't made her. And I know her designs are going to be splendid. Mr. Kinnard says they are, and he knows."

Suzanne shrugged.

"I fear the Greeks bearing gifts. No man ever gave a woman something for nothing since time began. You'll see."

"What shall I see?"

"You might have seen the way he looked at your Felicia yesterday afternoon. You needn't stare. She is the loveliest thing imaginable; and, anyway, widows always marry again. They can't seem to help it. It is in the system."

"Oh, he looks at every woman. How can he help it with eyes like that? He is much more likely to be wooing Hope. He has been sketching her all summer and she makes lovely shy dryad eyes at him while he works. I don't see how he can resist her myself, she is so deliciously pretty."

"'A violet by a mossy stone.' Mr. Kinnard isn't looking for violets. You'll see, as I said before."

And in spite of her denial, Sylvia couldn't help wondering if there were any truth in Suzanne's implications. She had accepted Stephen Kinnard quite simply as Felicia had explained him, an old friend and fellow artist of Paris days. He had been in Greendale nearly all summer doing some sketches of Southern gardens for a magazine, and it had seemed perfectly natural to Sylvia that he should come often up the hill to see Mrs. Emory. They were both artists and had much in common beside their old friendship. That any factors deeper than those which appeared on the surface might be keeping Stephen Kinnard in Felicia's proximity had not until the moment occurred to Sylvia. For a moment it flashed across her mind how sadly Arden Hall would fare without Felicia who with the dear "wonder babies" had come to help Sylvia keep Christmas nearly six years ago and had remained in the old house ever since to its young owner's infinite content and well being.

"I never thought of Felicia's marrying again," she said after a moment of silence.

"Well, Stephen Kinnard has thought of it, if you haven't," pronounced Suzanne. "By the way, he said a rather nice thing about you yesterday. He said you had a genius for happiness."

Sylvia smiled a little as her gaze strayed past the white pillars, past the giant magnolia-tree lifting its shining leaves to the sun, past the pink and