Sylvia's father kept his promise about teaching her English, and she was granted the great pleasure of being admitted to his room every evening when he returned from work. This room until now had always been a Bluebeard's chamber, not merely for Sylvia, but for every one else in the house. To be sure Sylvia had sometimes, when supper was growing cold, peeped in to warn her father of fleeting time, but it had always been impressed upon her that in no circumstances was she to enter the room; though she had never seen in these quick glimpses anything more exciting than her father sitting in his shirt-sleeves and reading in a tumble-down arm-chair, there had always been the sense of a secret. Now that she was made free of this apartment she perceived nothing behind the door but a bookcase fairly full of books, nothing indeed anywhere that seemed to merit concealment, unless it were some pictures of undressed ladies looking at themselves in a glass. Once she had an opportunity of opening one of the books and she was astonished, when her father came in and caught her, that he said nothing, for she felt sure that her mother would have been very angry if she had seen her reading such a book. She had blushed when her father found her; when he had said nothing and even laughed in a queer unpleasant sort of a way, she had blushed still more deeply. Yet whenever she had a chance she read these books afterward and henceforth regarded her father with an affectionate contempt which was often expressed too frankly to please her mother, who finally became so much irritated by it that she sent her away to Bruxelles to stay with Elène, her eldest married sister. Sylvia did not enjoy this visit very much, because her brother-in-law was always making remarks about her personal appearance, comparing it most unfavorably with his wife's. It seemed that Elène had recently won a prize for beauty at the Exposition, and though Sylvia would have been suitably proud of this family achievement in ordinary circumstances, this continual harping upon it to her own disadvantage made her wish that Elène had been ignobly defeated. "Strange her face should be so round and yours such a perfect oval," Elène's husband would say. "And her lips are so thin and her eyes so much lighter than yours. She's short, too, for her age. I don't think she'll ever be as tall as you. But of course every one can't be beautiful." "Of course they can't," Sylvia snapped. "If they could, Elène might not have won the prize so easily." "She's not a great beauty, but she has a tongue. And she's smart," her brother-in-law concluded.