Aunt Victoria made her way up the gang-plank to the landing dock, achieving dignity even there.  Felix sprang after her, to hand her her chair, and Helene and Sylvia followed.  Mrs. Marshall-Smith sat down at once, opening her dark-purple parasol, the tense silk of which was changed by the hot Southern sun into an iridescent bubble.  “We will wait here till the steward gets our trunks out,” she announced.”  It will be amusing to watch the people.”  The four made an oasis of aristocracy in the seething, shouting, frowzy, gaudy, Southern crowd, running about with the scrambling, undignified haste of ants, sweating, gesticulating, their faces contorted with care over their poor belongings.  Sylvia was acutely conscious of her significance in the scene.  She was also fully aware that Felix missed none of the contrast she made with the other women.  She felt at once enhanced and protected by the ignobly dressed crowd about her.  Felix was right—­in America there could be no distinction, there was no background for it.

The scene about them was theatrically magnificent.  In the distance Vesuvius towered, cloud-veiled and threatening, the harbor shone and sparkled in the sun, the vivid, outreaching arms of Naples clasped the jewel-like water.  From it all Sylvia extracted the most perfect distillation of traveler’s joy.  She felt the well-to-do tourist’s care-free detachment from the fundamentals of life, the tourist’s sense that everything exists for the purpose of being a sight for him to see.  She knew, and knew with delight, the wanderer’s lightened, emancipated sense of being at a distance from obligations, that cheerful sense of an escape from the emprisoning solidarity of humanity which furnishes the zest of life for the tourist and the tramp, enabling the one light-heartedly to offend proprieties and the other casually to commit murder.  She was embarked upon a moral vacation.  She was out of the Bastile of right and wrong.  She had a vision of what freedom from entangling responsibilities is secured by traveling.  She understood her aunt’s classing it as among the positive goods of life.

A man in a shabby blue uniform, with a bundle of letters in his hand, walked past them towards the boat.

“Oh, the mail,” said Mrs. Marshall-Smith.  “There may be some for us.”  She beckoned the man to her, and said, “Marshall-Smith?  Marshall?  Morrison?”

The man sorted over his pile.  “Cable for Miss Marshall,” he said, presenting it to the younger lady with a bold, familiar look of admiration.  “Letter for F. Morrison:  two letters for Mrs. Marshall-Smith.”  Sylvia opened her envelope, spread out the folded sheet of paper, and read what was scrawled on it, with no realization of the meaning.  She knew only that the paper, Felix, her aunt, the crowd, vanished in thick blackness, through which, much later, with a great roaring in her ears, she read, as though by jagged flashes of lightning:  “Mother very ill.  Come home at once.  Judith.”