As for Sylvie, curiously enough, she was at war with herself, though she wore such a calm, light-hearted exterior. When she rejected Fred Lawrence, she was quite sure she despised the present man, and his narrow, futile purposes of life. Truly, to have been the wife of such a man would have proved irksome to the last degree. But his misfortunes had brought out the fine gold, the solemn strain of strength and endurance, that had come from his father's blood. I think even Sylvie had been a little mortified first, that he should have come back to Yerbury, and taken such a very inferior position. She wanted him to do something noteworthy with his pen and his high cultivation. It seemed so much choice material quite thrown away. Designing patterns was surely no high test of genius. Women with a purely technical art education had done it. But out of it had come this other opportunity that he had grasped with the pure instinct of genius. Employment for pen and pencil both, for the embodiment of the exquisite outward forms of beauty, and the rare, delicate, inward graces of imagination, for the true standards of taste and art in which he had been informing himself all these years; in the spirit of dilettanteism, it was true, but now when the intellectual impetus was added, and the positive need of daily bread, these complicated motives worked together as a strong stimulant. Perhaps, too, he had a not unworthy desire to show Sylvie Barry that the man who had loved her was not utterly unworthy or incapable. They had drifted together again in the ordinary purposes of life, which, after all, occur much more frequently than any grand or overwhelming shock. She took up the friendly, half-sisterly way, pleased with the instinctive deference he paid her. He understood that it would be quite useless to aspire to any regard of hers: that was all done with in the past. She could afford to evince an interest in his plans, since Irene cared not, and to his mother they were so much Greek, a subtle flavor that she admitted was the proper thing, but could not understand,--did not care to trouble herself, in fact. So these two young people, working in a common bond of sympathy, insensibly strengthened the regard that had grown with them from childhood. Fred gained sufficient courage to discuss some plans with Sylvie: she brought out her easel, as I have said, and accepted from him friendly criticisms. The difference between their work was soon manifest,--he had an earnest purpose, with breadth and scope: she had none. How had they so queerly changed places? she asked herself. Why were not her talents made of some avail, instead of this puerile pottering to please one's self?