From the dining-room below her rose the sound of voices, or rather of one voice--her father's. She wondered why it sounded so angry, and then, mixed with some unintelligible phrases--"turned out on the street, in trouble--in a foreign land--Good God!" she caught Pauline's name. Oh yes, that must be the trouble. Mother was telling Father about Pauline--whatever it was she had done--and he was as mad about it as Aunt Victoria had been. If Aunt Victoria's voice had sounded like that, she didn't wonder that Arnold had hidden under the bed. If she could have moved, she, too, would have run away, although the idea that she ought to do so did not occur to her. There had been no secrets in that house. The talk had always been for all to hear who would.
But when she tried again to slip her hand away from Buddy's the little boy pulled at it hard, and half opening his eyes, said sleepily, "Sylvie stay with Buddy--Sylvie stay--" Sylvia yielded weakly, said: "Yes--sh! sh! Sister'll stay. Go to sleep, Buddy."
From below came the angry voice, quite loud now, so that she caught every queer-sounding word--"righteous indignation indeed! What else did _she_ do, I'd like to know, when she wanted money. The only difference was that she was cold-blooded enough to extract a legal status from the old reprobate she accosted."
Sylvia heard her mother's voice saying coldly, "You ought to be ashamed to use such a word!" and her father retort, "It's the _only_ word that expresses it! You know as well as I do that she cared no more for Ephraim Smith than for the first man she might have solicited on the street--nor so much! God! It makes me sick to look at her and think of the price she paid for her present damn Olympian serenity."
Sylvia heard her mother begin to clear off the table. There was a rattle of dishes through which her voice rose impatiently. "Oh, Elliott, why be so melodramatic always, and spoil so much good language! She did only what every girl brought up as she was, would have done. And, anyhow, are you so very sure that in your heart you're not so awfully hard on her because you're envious of that very prosperity?"
He admitted, with acrimony, the justice of this thrust. "Very likely. Very likely!--everything base and mean in me, that you keep down, springs to life in me at her touch. I dare say I do envy her--I'm quite capable of that--am I not her brother, with the same--"