Having heard these strange stories, Sylvia was anxious to visit me, and I was, of course, glad to invite her. I purchased a fancy brand of tea, and some implements for the serving of it, and she came, and went into raptures over my three rooms and bath, no one of which would have made more than a closet in her own apartments. I suspected that this was her Southern _noblesse oblige_, but I knew also that in my living room there were some rows of books, which would have meant more to Sylvia van Tuiver just then than the contents of several clothes-closets.
I was pleased to discover that my efforts had not been wasted. She had been thinking, and she had even found time, in the midst of her distractions, to read part of a book. In the course of our talks I had mentioned Veblen, and she had been reading snatches of his work on the Leisure Class, and I was surprised, and not a little amused, to observe her reaction to it.
When I talked about wages and hours of labour, I was dealing with things that were remote from her, and difficult to make real; but Veblen's theme, the idle rich, and the arts and graces whereby they demonstrate their power, was the stuff of which her life was made. The subtleties of social ostentation, the minute distinctions between the newly-rich and the anciently-rich, the solemn certainties of the latter and the quivering anxieties of the former--all those were things which Sylvia knew as a bird knows the way of the wind. To see the details of them analysed in learned, scientific fashion, explained with great mouthfuls of words which one had to look up in the dictionary--that was surely a new discovery in the book-world! "Conspicuous leisure!" "Vicarious consumption of goods!" "Oh, de-ah me, how que-ah!" exclaimed Sylvia.
And what a flood of anecdotes it let loose! A flood that bore us straight back to Castleman Hall, and to all the scenes of her young ladyhood! If only Lady Dee could have revised this book of Veblen's, how many points she could have given to him! No details had been too minute for the technique of Sylvia's great-aunt--the difference between the swish of the right kind of silk petticoats and the wrong kind; and yet her technique had been broad enough to take in a landscape. "Every girl should have a background," had been one of her maxims, and Sylvia had to have a special phaeton to drive, a special horse to ride, special roses which no one else was allowed to wear.