Whereupon Sylvia took several days more to worry and wonder. She was not satisfied at all, and finally summoned her courage and wrote to the Bishop again. It was not merely a question of honor; if that were true, she would have to say that Beauregard Dabney was a scoundrel and she did not believe that. Might it not possibly be _knowledge_ that was lacking? She begged her uncle to do her the favor of his life by writing to van Tuiver; and she intimated further that if he would not do it, she would have to put the matter before her father. So there was another wait, and then came a letter from the Bishop, saying that he was writing as requested. Then, after a third wait, a letter with van Tuiver’s reply. He had taken the inquiry very magnanimously; he could understand, he said, how Sylvia had been upset by the sight of her friend’s illness. As to her own case, she might rest assured that there could be no such possibility. And so at last Sylvia’s fears were allayed, and she was free to be unhappy about other matters. § 26 You must not imagine that Sylvia was spending these days in moping; all her thinking had to be done in the odd moments of a strenuous career. Day and night she had to meet new people, and new people were always an irresistible stimulus to her curiosity. Not all of them were hall-boys and shop-clerks, falling instant victims to her charms; on the contrary, they were Knickerbocker “society”—people not infrequently as wealthy as her future husband, and having an equally great notion of their own importance. The tidings that Douglas van Tuiver had picked up a country girl had not thrilled them with sympathetic emotions. The details of the newspaper romance inspired them only with contempt. There had to be many a flash of Sylvia’s rapier-wit, and many a flash of Sylvia’s red-brown eyes, before these patrician plutocrats had been brought to acknowledge her an equal. A few of these acquaintances were kindly people, whom she could imagine making into friends, if only there had been time. But she wondered how anybody ever found time for friendship in this restless and expensive and highly ornamental life. Such a whirl of dinner-parties and supper-parties, dances and luncheons and teas! Such august and imposing splendor, such dignified and even sombre dissipation! The Major had provided abundant credit for this last splurge; and van Tuiver’s aunt was also on hand, conspiring with her nephew to smother Sylvia under loads of gifts. The girl wondered sometimes, was it that van Tuiver had suspicions of her wavering, and sought to bind her by forcing these luxuries upon her? Or would she be expected always to live this kind of Arabian Nights’ existence?