“I was interested,” said Olivia, “because you do see him more than anyone about here.”
Again Sybil laughed. “But he’s old, Mama. He’s more than thirty-five. He’s middle-aged. I know what sort of man I want to marry. I know exactly. He’s going to be my own age.”
“One can’t always tell. It’s not so easy as that.”
“I’m sure I can tell.” Her face took on an expression of gravity. “I’ve devoted a good deal of thought to it and I’ve watched a great many others.”
Olivia wanted to smile, but she knew she dared not if she were to keep her hold upon confidences so charming and naive.
“And I’m sure that I’ll know the man when I see him, right away, at once. It’ll be like a spark, like my friendship with O’Hara, only deeper than that.”
“Did you ever talk to Thérèse about love?” asked Olivia.
“No; you can’t talk to her about such things. She wouldn’t understand. With Thérèse everything is scientific, biological. When Thérèse marries, I think it will be some man she has picked out as the proper father, scientifically, for her children.”
“That’s not a bad idea.”
“She might just have children by him without marrying him, the way she breeds frogs. I think that’s horrible.”
Again Olivia was seized with an irresistible impulse to laugh, and controlled herself heroically. She kept thinking of how silly, how ignorant, she had been at Sybil’s age, silly and ignorant despite the unclean sort of sophistication she had picked up in the corridors of Continental hotels. She kept thinking how much better a chance Sybil had for happiness. … Sybil, sitting there gravely, defending her warm ideas of romance against the scientific onslaughts of the swarthy, passionate Thérèse.
“It will be someone like O’Hara,” continued Sybil. “Someone who is very much alive—only not middle-aged like O’Hara.”
(So Sybil thought of O’Hara as middle-aged, and he was four years younger than Olivia, who felt and looked so young. The girl kept talking of O’Hara as if his life were over; but that perhaps was only because she herself was so young.)
Olivia sighed now, despite herself. “You mustn’t expect too much from the world, Sybil. Nothing is perfect, not even marriage. One always has to make compromises.”
“Oh, I know that; I’ve thought a great deal about it. All the same, I’m sure I’ll know the man when I see him.” She leaned forward and said earnestly, “Couldn’t you tell when you were a girl?”
“Yes,” said Olivia softly. “I could tell.”
And then, inevitably, Sybil asked what Olivia kept praying she would not ask. She could hear the girl asking it before the words were spoken. She knew exactly what she would say.
“Didn’t you know at once when you met Father?”
And in spite of every effort, the faint echo of a sigh escaped Olivia. “Yes, I knew.”
She saw Sybil give her one of those quick, piercing looks of inquiry and then bow her head abruptly, as if pretending to study the pattern on her plate.
When she spoke again, she changed the subject abruptly, so that Olivia knew she suspected the truth, a thing which she had guarded with a fierce secrecy for so long.
“Why don’t you take up riding again, Mother?” she asked. “I’d love to have you go with me. We would go with O’Hara in the mornings, and then Aunt Cassie couldn’t have anything to say about my getting involved with him.” She looked up. “You’d like him. You couldn’t help it.”
She saw that Sybil was trying to help her in some way, to divert her and drive away the unhappiness.
“I like him already,” said Olivia, “very much.”
Then she rose, saying, “I promised Sabine to motor into Boston with her today. We’re leaving in twenty minutes.”
She went quickly away because she knew it was perilous to sit there any longer talking of such things while Sybil watched her, eager with the freshness of youth which has all life before it.
Out of all their talk two things remained distinct in her mind: one that Sybil thought of O’Hara as middle-aged—almost an old man, for whom there was no longer any chance of romance; the other the immense possibility for tragedy that lay before a girl who was so certain that love would be a glorious romantic affair, so certain of the ideal man whom she would find one day. What was she to do with Sybil? Where was she to find that man? And when she found him, what difficulties would she have to face with John Pentland and Anson and Aunt Cassie and the host of cousins and connections who would be marshaled to defeat her?
For she saw clearly enough that this youth for whom Sybil was waiting would never be their idea of a proper match. It would be a man with qualities which O’Hara possessed, and even Higgins, the groom. She saw perfectly why Sybil had a fondness for these two outsiders; she had come to see it more and more clearly of late. It was because they possessed a curious, indefinable solidity that the others at Pentlands all lacked, and a certain fire and vitality. Neither blood, nor circumstance, nor tradition, nor wealth, had made life for them an atrophied, empty affair, in which there was no need for effort, for struggle, for combat. They had not been lost in a haze of transcendental maunderings. O’Hara, with his career and his energy, and Higgins, with his rabbitlike love-affairs and his nearness to all that was earthy, still carried about them a sense of the great zest in life. They reached down somehow into the roots of things where there was still savor and
