Sylvia broke into a peal of laughter which rang like a silver chime through the vine-shaded, airy spaces of the pergola.  Old Mr. Sommerville, nosing about in his usual five-o’clock quest, heard her and came across the stretch of sunny lawn to investigate.  “Oh, here’s tea!” he remarked on seeing Arnold, lounging, white-flanneled, over his cup.  He spoke earnestly, as was his custom when eating was in question, and Sylvia served him earnestly and carefully, with an instant harmonious response to his mood, putting in exactly the right amount of rum and sugar to suit his taste, and turning the slim-legged “curate’s assistant” so that his favorite sandwiches were nearest him.

“You spoil the old gentlemen, Sylvia,” commented Arnold, evidently caring very little whether she did or not.

“She spoils everybody,” returned Mr. Sommerville, tasting his tea complacently; “‘c’est son metier.’ She has an uncanny instinct for suiting everybody’s taste.”

Sylvia smiled brightly at him, exactly the brilliant smile which suited her brilliant, frank face and clear, wide-open eyes.  Under her smile she was saying to herself, “If that’s so, I wonder—­not that I care at all—­but I really wonder why you don’t like me.”

Sylvia was encountering for the first time this summer a society guided by tradition and formula, but she was not without excellent preparation for almost any contact with her fellow-beings, a preparation which in some ways served her better than that more conscious preparation of young ladies bred up from childhood to sit behind tea-tables and say the right things to tea-drinkers.  Association with the crude, outspoken youth at the State University had been an education in human nature, especially masculine nature, for her acute mind.  Her unvarnished association with the other sex in classroom and campus had taught her, by means of certain rough knocks which more sheltered boarding-school girls never get, an accuracy of estimate as to the actual feeling of men towards the women they profess to admire unreservedly which (had he been able to conceive of it) old Mr. Sommerville would have thought nothing less than cynical.

But he did not conceive of it, and now sat, mellowed by the rightness of his tea, white-haired, smooth-shaven, pink-gilled, white-waistcoated, the picture of old age at its best, as he smiled gallantly at the extremely pretty girl behind the table.  Unlike Sylvia he knew exactly why he did not like her and he wasted no time in thinking about it.  “What were you laughing about, so delightfully, as I came in, eh?” he asked, after the irretrievable first moment of joy in gratified appetite had gone.