And yet it was in connection with this very quartet that she had her first shocked vision of how her home-life appeared to other people.  She once chanced, when she was about eight years old, to go with her father on a Saturday to his office at the University, where he had forgotten some papers necessary for his seminar.  There, sitting on the front steps of the Main Building, waiting for her father, she had encountered the wife of the professor of European History with her beautiful young-lady sister from New York and her two daughters, exquisite little girls in white serge, whose tailored, immaculate perfection made Sylvia’s heart heavy with a sense of the plebeian inelegance of her own Saturday-morning play-clothes.  Mrs. Hubert, obeying an impulse of curiosity, stopped to speak to the little Marshall girl, about whose queer upbringing there were so many stories current, and was struck with the decorative possibilities of the pretty child, apparent to her practised eye.  As she made the kindly intended, vague remarks customarily served out to unknown children, she was thinking:  “How can any woman with a vestige of a woman’s instinct dress that lovely child in ready-made, commonplace, dark-colored clothes?  She would repay any amount of care and “thought.”  So you take music-lessons too, besides your school?” she asked mechanically.  She explained to her sister, a stranger in La Chance:  “Music is one of the things I starve for, out here!  We never hear it unless we go clear to Chicago—­and such prices!  Here, there is simply no musical feeling!” She glanced again at Sylvia, who was now answering her questions, fluttered with pleasure at having the beautiful lady speak to her.  The beautiful lady had but an inattentive ear for Sylvia’s statement that, yes, lately Father had begun to give her lessons on the piano.  With the smoothly working imagination coming from a lifetime of devotion to the subject, Mrs. Hubert was stripping off Sylvia’s trite little blue coat and uninteresting dark hat, and was arraying her in scarlet serge with a green velvet collar—­“with those eyes and that coloring she could carry off striking ’color combinations—­and a big white felt hat with a soft pompon of silk on one side—­no, a long, stiff, scarlet quill would suit her style better.  Then, with white stockings and shoes and gloves—­or perhaps pearl-gray would be better.  Yes, with low-cut suede shoes, fastening with two big smoked-pearl buttons.”  She looked down with pitying eyes at Sylvia’s sturdy, heavy-soled shoes which could not conceal the slender, shapely feet within them—­“but, what on earth was the child saying?—­”

“—­every Sunday evening—­it’s beautiful, and now I’m getting so big I can help some.  I can turn over the pages for them in hard places, and when old Mr. Reinhardt has had too much to drink and his hands tremble, he lets me unfasten his violin-case and tighten up his bow and—­”

Mrs. Hubert cried out, “Your parents don’t let you have anything to do with that old, drunken Reinhardt!”