At last the company broke up, and Sylvia thanked her hostess for a most enjoyable evening. She stepped into the motor with Celeste, and sat with compressed lips, answering in monosyllables her “little sister’s” flood of excited questions--“Oh, Sylvia, didn’t you feel perfectly _terrible?_ Oh, sister, I felt _thrills_ running up and down my back! Sister, what _did_ you say to him? Sister, do you know old Mr. Perkins kept leaning over me and asking what was happening; and how could I shout into his deaf ear that everybody was stopping to hear what you were saying to Frank Shirley?” At the end of the ride, there was Aunt Varina waiting up as usual--to renew her own youth in the story of the evening, what this person had worn and what that person had said. But Sylvia left her sister to tell the story, and fled to her room and locked the door, and flung herself upon the bed and gave way to a torrent of weeping. Half an hour later Celeste went up, and finding that the door between her room and Sylvia’s was unlocked, opened it softly, and stood listening. Finally she stole to her sister’s side and put her arm about her. “Never mind, sister dear,” she whispered, solemnly, “I know how it is! We women all have to suffer!” End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Sylvia’s Marriage, by Upton Sinclair