The tea-table was drawn up near its blaze, and Mrs. Carfax leant back comfortably in the corner of the sofa, sipping her tea and eating hot cakes appreciatively. “So you’re going to Rome?” she continued. “We hoped as you didn’t go away last year you had become reconciled to an English winter.” “I didn’t mean to go,” confessed Anne. “I was very happy here last year. But somehow this autumn I have begun to long for more sunshine. I know we’ve had a lovely summer, and I ought to be content, but the rain of the last fortnight has decided me.” She glanced with a little shiver towards the drenched garden. The rain had been too persistent to make much sweeping of leaves practicable, and the grass was strewn with them, yellow, battered and rotting. “Tell me about Sylvia!” she inquired. “I heard from her the other day, but I dare say you have later news. She seems very happy.” “Oh, she writes in excellent spirits, as of course she would, now she’s got her own way.” Mrs. Carfax’s expression was one of rather irritable displeasure, and Anne’s inward reflections turned on that deplorable yet possibly comprehensible antagonism which so frequently exists between children and parents; the tie of blood so binding, yet so provocative of mutual adverse criticism, involuntary irritation and impatience. “Do you like the boarding-house?” she asked. “Oh yes. Very nice. Her father and I took her there last week, you know. I couldn’t be easy till I’d seen what sort of place she was in. And men are no good at that sort of thing.” She helped herself to another tea-cake. “Oh yes,” she repeated, “it’s a very comfortable house; on the Embankment, I think you call it. At any rate, it’s quite close to the school where she takes her lessons. Sylvia shares a sitting-room with Susie Villiers, one of her school-fellows who is studying at the Slade, is it? I always forget the names of these places. It’s a house built on purpose for students, I understand. _Most_ comfortable. Hot and cold water on every floor, and bathrooms, and a beautiful dining-room. To my mind it’s all _too_ luxurious. Everything is done nowadays, it seems to me, to tempt young people from their homes.” Mrs. Carfax gave an exasperated sigh. “But Sylvia has a great gift, dear Mrs. Carfax,” pleaded Anne. “It isn’t as though she leaves home to do nothing.” “That’s what her father says now. He never used to. He always upheld me in maintaining that the place of the eldest daughter is at home. I don’t know what you could have said to change him so, Miss Page, but ever since he talked to you about Sylvia, his cry is that it’s sinful not to use the gifts with which God has endowed us. Men are so inconsistent; and if they’re clergymen they always seem able to quote some text to annoy you. I don’t mean to be profane, but sometimes I have found the Bible most trying.” Mrs. Carfax sighed again. “She has a lovely voice. You will be proud of her one day,” declared Miss Page, with her disarming smile.