If all this had happened a few years sooner, he undoubtedly would have taken Sylvia with him on many of these journeys into remote corners of the State, but Sylvia had her class-work to attend to, and the Professor shared to the fullest extent the academic prejudice against parents who broke in upon the course of their children's regular instruction by lawless and casual junketings. Instead, it was Judith who frequently accompanied him, Judith who was now undergoing that home-preparation for the University through which Sylvia had passed, and who, since her father was her principal instructor, could carry on her studies wherever he happened to be; as well as have the stimulating experience of coming in contact with a wide variety of people and conditions. It is possible that Professor Marshall's sociable nature not only shrank from the solitude which his wife would have endured with cheerfulness, but that he also wished to take advantage of this opportunity to come in closer touch with his second daughter, for whose self-contained and occasionally insensitive nature he had never felt the instinctive understanding he had for Sylvia's moods. It is certain that the result was a better feeling between the two than had existed before. During the long hours of jolting over branch railroads back to remote settlements, or waiting at cheerless junctions for delayed trains, or gaily eating impossible meals at extraordinary country hotels, the ruddy, vigorous father, now growing both gray and stout, and the tall, slender, darkly handsome girl of fifteen, were cultivating more things than history and mathematics and English literature. The most genuine feeling of comradeship sprang up between the two dissimilar natures, a feeling so strong and so warm that Sylvia, in addition to her other emotional complications, felt occasionally a faint pricking of jealousy at seeing her primacy with her father usurped.