Sylvia Arden Decides

"I know what the trouble with Sylvia is," announced Suzanne, elevating herself on one elbow and leaning forward out of the hammock just enough to select and appropriate a plump bonbon from the box on the wicker stand near by.

"Well," encouraged Sylvia, "what is the trouble with me?"

At the moment as she stood leaning against the massive white pillar with a smile on her lips and in her dark eyes, the sunshine glinting warm, red-gold lights in her bronze hair, it seemed as if it would be hard indeed to find any trouble with her so completely was she a picture of radiant, joyous, care-free youth.

Suzanne demolished her bonbon, then proceeded to expatiate on her original proposition.

"The trouble with you," she averred oracularly from her cushions, "is that you are addicted to the vice of contentment."

"Well, why shouldn't she be?" demanded Barbara from the depths of the huge arm-chair which nearly swallowed her diminutive figure. "I'd like to know who has a better right? Hasn't Sylvia this minute got everything anybody in the world could want? If I had been born to live on a hill top, like Sylvia, I'd never leave it."

Suzanne sat up, brandishing a reproachful forefinger at the speaker.

"Barbie Day! I am shocked at you. What would your Aunt Josephine say? Sylvia, she must be packed off at once. She mustn't be allowed to stay even for the party. The flesh pots have gone to her head. Another day at Arden Hall will ruin her for the Cause." And, with a prophetic shake of her head, Suzanne helped herself to a "Turkish Delight" and relaxed among her cushions, the leaf green color of which, contrasting with the pale pink of her gown, made her look rather like a rose, set in its calyx. Suzanne was extraordinarily pretty, much prettier, in fact, than was at all necessary for a young person of distinct literary bent and a pronounced--audibly pronounced--distaste for matrimony. Thus Nature, willfully prodigal, lavishes her gifts.

"Speak for yourself," retorted Barbara with unusual spirit. "If the flesh pots are ruining me they shall continue on their course of destruction without let or hindrance until Wednesday next. I was born poor, I have lived poor and I shall probably die poor, but I am not above participating in the unearned increment when I get a heavenly chance like this blessed week and if anybody says 'Votes for Women' to me in the next five days he or she is likely to be surprised. I am going to turn Lotus Eater for just this once. Don't disturb me." And by way of demonstration Barb tucked one small foot up under her, burrowed even deeper in the heart of the big chair and closed her eyes with a sigh of complete satisfaction.

In the meanwhile Sylvia had absentmindedly plucked a scarlet spray from the vine which was swaying in the September breeze just above her head and her eyes were thoughtful. Unwittingly, the others had stirred mental currents which lay always fairly near the surface with her, suggested problems which had been asserting themselves of late rather continuously. The generous-hearted little schoolgirl Sylvia who had wanted to gather all the lonely people in the world into her Christmas family, the puzzled Sylvia who even five years ago had been tormented by the baffling question why she had so much and others so little was still present in the Sylvia of almost two and twenty who considered herself quite grown up and sophisticated and possessed a college diploma.

"I don't know that I am so viciously contented as you seem to think, Suzanne," she said, "and I haven't the slightest intention of staying on my hill top, as you mean it, Barb. But I can't just come down off it and go tilting at windmills at random. I've got to know what my job is, and I don't at all, at present--can't even guess at it. All the rest of you girls had your futures neatly outlined and sub-topiced. Nearly every one in the class knew, when she graduated last June, just what she wanted to do or had to do next. Every one was going to teach or travel, or 'slum' or study, or come out or get married. But poor me!" Sylvia shrugged humorously, though her eyes were still thoughtful. "I haven't any startling gifts or urgent duties. I haven't the necessity of earning bread and butter, nor any special cause to follow. It is really hopeless to be so--" She groped for a word then settled on "unattached."

"There is more than one male who would be willing to remedy that defect, I'm thinking," chuckled Suzanne wickedly. "How about the person who disburses these delectable bonbons? Won't he do for a cause?"

"I am afraid not, the person being only Jack."

"Only Jack, whom the mammas all smile upon and the daughters don their fetchingest gowns and their artfullest graces for--quite the most eligible young man in the market. Sylvia, you are spoiled if Jack Amidon isn't good enough for you!"

"I didn't say he wasn't good enough for me." Sylvia came over to the table to provide herself with one of Jack's bonbons before seating herself on the India stool beside the hammock facing out over the lawn. "Jack is a dear, but I've known him nearly all my life, seems to me, and even to oblige you it would be hard to get up any romantic thrills over him."

"Too bad!" murmured Suzanne, regretfully. "He is so good looking. You two would look lovely prancing down the aisle together a la Lohengrin."

"Suzanne!" Barb opened her eyes to expostulate. "You are so dreadfully flippant. I don't believe anything is sacred to you."

Suzanne laughed. "Maybe not," she admitted. Then she sat up abruptly to add, "I forgot my Future. I have that shrined and canonized and burn incense to it every night. It is the only thing in the world or out of it I take seriously. I-am-going-to-write-plays." She thumped a plump green cushion vigorously, allotting a single thump to each staccato syllable. "I may not succeed this year or next year or in five years, but some day I shall arrive with both feet. You two shall come and sit in my first-nighter box and it will be some play!" She vaunted slangily, imparting a last emphatic punch upon the acquiescent cushion before she relinquished it.

"We'll be there," promised Sylvia. "I only wish I had convictions like that about my Future. Mine is just a nebular hypothesis at present. How about you, Barbie? Are you as certain about your Cause as Suzanne is about her Career?"

Barb uncurled herself to testify. "Not a bit," she sighed. "You see, my Cause is a sort of inherited mantle, and I am never sure whether it fits or not, though I never have the slightest doubt as to the propriety of my attempting to wear it even if I have to take tucks in it." Barbara's eyes crinkled around the corners in a way they had when she was very much in earnest. "You know it has been understood all along that I was to be Aunt Jo's secretary and general right-hand man as soon as I graduated. That was what she educated me for. Of course I believe in suffrage and all that. When I hear Aunt Jo talk I just get thrills all up and down my spinal column and feel as strong as Samson making ready to topple over the pillars, as if I could do anything and everything to give women a chance. But when I get away from Aunt Jo I cool off disgracefully. That is what makes me think sometimes it isn't the real fire I have but a sort of surface heat generated by Aunt Jo's extraordinary personal magnetism and fearful and wonderful vocabulary. It worries me dreadfully sometimes."

Barb's small, brown, child-like face puckered in perplexity and her blue eyes blinked as if they beheld too much light.

"It needn't," commented Suzanne sagely. "I know you. By the time you have been flinging out the banner six weeks you will be white hot for the Cause, especially if you can somehow manage to martyrize yourself into the bargain. You would have made a perfect early Christian. I can see you smiling with glad Pollyannaism into the faces of the abashed lions."

"Oh, Suzanne!"

Barbara had spent many minutes all told during the past four years of her college life saying, "Oh, Suzanne!" in precisely that shocked, protesting, helpless tone. The two were the best of friends, but in code of conduct and mode of thought they were the meeting extremes.

"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.