Part 1

Produced by Al Haines.

SYLVIA ARDEN DECIDES

BY

MARGARET REBECCA PIPER

AUTHOR OF SYLVIA'S EXPERIMENT: THE CHEERFUL BOOK, (Trade Mark)

SYLVIA OF THE HILL TOP: THE SECOND CHEERFUL BOOK, ETC. (Trade Mark)

FRONTISPIECE BY HASKELL COFFIN

GROSSET & DUNLAP PUBLISHERS NEW YORK

_Copyright, 1917_, BY THE PAGE COMPANY

_All rights reserved_

First Impression, September, 1917

*CONTENTS*

CHAPTER

I Of Futures and Other Important Matters II Reasons and Wraiths III Twenty-Two IV The Ways of a Maid V September Afternoon VI Of Missions, and Omissions VII October Developments VIII Fire and Frost IX The Moth and the Star X The City XI Margins XII "Such Stuff as Dreams" XIII Into Haven XIV "And Having Eyes" XV The City and Sylvia XVI As Might Have Been Expected XVII Barb Diagnoses XVIII The Cause and the Career XIX Oh, Suzanne! XX Sylvia and Life XXI A Chapter of Revelations XXII Unto the Forest XXIII Aftermath XXIV High Tide XXV Warp and Woof XXVI The End and the Beginning

*SYLVIA ARDEN DECIDES*

*CHAPTER I*

*OF FUTURES AND OTHER IMPORTANT MATTERS*

"I know what the trouble with Sylvia is," announced Suzanne, elevating herself on one elbow and leaning forward out of the hammock just enough to select and appropriate a plump bonbon from the box on the wicker stand near by.

"Well," encouraged Sylvia, "what _is_ the trouble with me?"

At the moment as she stood leaning against the massive white pillar with a smile on her lips and in her dark eyes, the sunshine glinting warm, red-gold lights in her bronze hair, it seemed as if it would be hard indeed to find any trouble with her so completely was she a picture of radiant, joyous, care-free youth.

Suzanne demolished her bonbon, then proceeded to expatiate on her original proposition.

"The trouble with you," she averred oracularly from her cushions, "is that you are addicted to the vice of contentment."

"Well, why shouldn't she be?" demanded Barbara from the depths of the huge arm-chair which nearly swallowed her diminutive figure. "I'd like to know who has a better right? Hasn't Sylvia this minute got everything anybody in the world could want? If I had been born to live on a hill top, like Sylvia, I'd never leave it."

Suzanne sat up, brandishing a reproachful forefinger at the speaker.

"Barbie Day! I am shocked at you. What would your Aunt Josephine say? Sylvia, she must be packed off at once. She mustn't be allowed to stay even for the party. The flesh pots have gone to her head. Another day at Arden Hall will ruin her for the Cause." And, with a prophetic shake of her head, Suzanne helped herself to a "Turkish Delight" and relaxed among her cushions, the leaf green color of which, contrasting with the pale pink of her gown, made her look rather like a rose, set in its calyx. Suzanne was extraordinarily pretty, much prettier, in fact, than was at all necessary for a young person of distinct literary bent and a pronounced--audibly pronounced--distaste for matrimony. Thus Nature, willfully prodigal, lavishes her gifts.

"Speak for yourself," retorted Barbara with unusual spirit. "If the flesh pots are ruining me they shall continue on their course of destruction without let or hindrance until Wednesday next. I was born poor, I have lived poor and I shall probably die poor, but I am not above participating in the unearned increment when I get a heavenly chance like this blessed week and if anybody says 'Votes for Women' to me in the next five days he or she is likely to be surprised. I am going to turn Lotus Eater for just this once. Don't disturb me." And by way of demonstration Barb tucked one small foot up under her, burrowed even deeper in the heart of the big chair and closed her eyes with a sigh of complete satisfaction.

In the meanwhile Sylvia had absentmindedly plucked a scarlet spray from the vine which was swaying in the September breeze just above her head and her eyes were thoughtful. Unwittingly, the others had stirred mental currents which lay always fairly near the surface with her, suggested problems which had been asserting themselves of late rather continuously. The generous-hearted little schoolgirl Sylvia who had wanted to gather all the lonely people in the world into her Christmas family, the puzzled Sylvia who even five years ago had been tormented by the baffling question why she had so much and others so little was still present in the Sylvia of almost two and twenty who considered herself quite grown up and sophisticated and possessed a college diploma.

"I don't know that I am so viciously contented as you seem to think, Suzanne," she said, "and I haven't the slightest intention of staying on my hill top, as you mean it, Barb. But I can't just come down off it and go tilting at windmills at random. I've got to know what my job is, and I don't at all, at present--can't even guess at it. All the rest of you girls had your futures neatly outlined and sub-topiced. Nearly every one in the class knew, when she graduated last June, just what she wanted to do or had to do next. Every one was going to teach or travel, or 'slum' or study, or come out or get married. But poor me!" Sylvia shrugged humorously, though her eyes were still thoughtful. "I haven't any startling gifts or urgent duties. I haven't the necessity of earning bread and butter, nor any special cause to follow. It is really hopeless to be so--" She groped for a word then settled on "unattached."

"There is more than one male who would be willing to remedy that defect, I'm thinking," chuckled Suzanne wickedly. "How about the person who disburses these delectable bonbons? Won't he do for a cause?"

"I am afraid not, the person being only Jack."

"Only Jack, whom the mammas all smile upon and the daughters don their fetchingest gowns and their artfullest graces for--quite the most eligible young man in the market. Sylvia, you are spoiled if Jack Amidon isn't good enough for you!"

"I didn't say he wasn't good enough for me." Sylvia came over to the table to provide herself with one of Jack's bonbons before seating herself on the India stool beside the hammock facing out over the lawn. "Jack is a dear, but I've known him nearly all my life, seems to me, and even to oblige you it would be hard to get up any romantic thrills over him."

"Too bad!" murmured Suzanne, regretfully. "He is so good looking. You two would look lovely prancing down the aisle together a la Lohengrin."

"Suzanne!" Barb opened her eyes to expostulate. "You are so dreadfully flippant. I don't believe anything is sacred to you."

Suzanne laughed. "Maybe not," she admitted. Then she sat up abruptly to add, "I forgot my Future. I have that shrined and canonized and burn incense to it every night. It is the only thing in the world or out of it I take seriously. I-am-going-to-write-plays." She thumped a plump green cushion vigorously, allotting a single thump to each staccato syllable. "I may not succeed this year or next year or in five years, but some day I shall arrive with both feet. You two shall come and sit in my first-nighter box and it will be _some_ play!" She vaunted slangily, imparting a last emphatic punch upon the acquiescent cushion before she relinquished it.

"We'll be there," promised Sylvia. "I only wish I had convictions like that about my Future. Mine is just a nebular hypothesis at present. How about you, Barbie? Are you as certain about your Cause as Suzanne is about her Career?"

Barb uncurled herself to testify. "Not a bit," she sighed. "You see, my Cause is a sort of inherited mantle, and I am never sure whether it fits or not, though I never have the slightest doubt as to the propriety of my attempting to wear it even if I have to take tucks in it." Barbara's eyes crinkled around the corners in a way they had when she was very much in earnest. "You know it has been understood all along that I was to be Aunt Jo's secretary and general right-hand man as soon as I graduated. That was what she educated me for. Of course I believe in suffrage and all that. When I hear Aunt Jo talk I just get thrills all up and down my spinal column and feel as strong as Samson making ready to topple over the pillars, as if I could do anything and everything to give women a chance. But when I get away from Aunt Jo I cool off disgracefully. That is what makes me think sometimes it isn't the real fire I have but a sort of surface heat generated by Aunt Jo's extraordinary personal magnetism and fearful and wonderful vocabulary. It worries me dreadfully sometimes."

Barb's small, brown, child-like face puckered in perplexity and her blue eyes blinked as if they beheld too much light.

"It needn't," commented Suzanne sagely. "I know you. By the time you have been flinging out the banner six weeks you will be white hot for the Cause, especially if you can somehow manage to martyrize yourself into the bargain. You would have made a perfect early Christian. I can see you smiling with glad Pollyannaism into the faces of the abashed lions."

"Oh, Suzanne!"

Barbara had spent many minutes all told during the past four years of her college life saying, "Oh, Suzanne!" in precisely that shocked, protesting, helpless tone. The two were the best of friends, but in code of conduct and mode of thought they were the meeting extremes.

"Aren't you going to prescribe for me now you have diagnosed my case?" Sylvia came to the rescue.

"I did prescribe, but you wouldn't swallow Mr. Jack Amidon, sugar-coated pill though he is. How about your tawny-maned, giant, ex-football-hero M.D.? He isn't so good looking as Jack but--"

"I think he is much nicer looking," Barb interposed surprisingly, then blushed and subsided.

"Oho!" laughed Suzanne. "Better keep your eye on our Barbie if you want to keep Doctor Philip Lorrimer on your waiting list, Sylvia. Such unprecedented enthusiasm! And she has beheld him but once at that. Oh, the witchery of that Commencement moon! I inadvertently nearly promised to marry Roger Minot myself in its specious glamour. I'll wager our demure Barbie flirted with your six-foot medicine man when you rashly left him on her hands on the outskirts of Paradise. 'Fess up, Barb. Didn't you flirt a teeny weeny little flirt in the moonshine?"

"No, I didn't," denied Barbara, flushed and indignant. "But I did like Doctor Lorrimer. He talked sense, and I was awfully interested in his work in the free clinic."

"Sense! Shop! By moonlight! Ye gods!" mocked Suzanne. "Never mind, Barbie. Your tactics were admirable. Listen to 'em. Keep on listening to 'em. It's what the sex likes. It gets 'em every time."

"But I don't want to get 'em," protested Barbara earnestly.

Whereupon Suzanne giggled and tossed her victim a silver sheathed bonbon by way of reconciliation. Then she returned to her charge upon Sylvia, who had sat silent during the last sally, meditatively playing with the spray of scarlet creeper in her lap.

"Sorry, Sylvia, belovedest. But I can't seem to think of a single suitable job for you except matrimony. You are eminently fitted for that."

Sylvia looked up with an expression half mirthful, half dissenting.

"Thanks. But at this juncture I don't happen to want to get married one bit more than you do, which to judge from your protestations and your treatment of poor Roger isn't much."

"Right you are. No such 'cribb'd, cabin'd and confined' business as matrimony for this child. What was the advice old Bacon cites as to when a man should marry? 'A young man not yet, an elder man, not at all.' Read woman for man and you have my sentiments in a nutshell."

"Oh, Suzanne!" Thus the refrain from the big chair. But Sylvia only laughed, knowing what Barbara seemed never to be able to learn, that Suzanne rarely meant more than a half or at best a quarter of what she said and thoroughly delighted in being iconoclastic, especially if the idols made considerable noise smashing, as she would have put it herself.

"Look at your neighbor, Mrs. Doctor Tom." Suzanne warmed her to her subject. "She used to write for all the best magazines and travel and live the broadest, freest, splendidest kind of life. How does she put in her time now? Eternally making rompers for Marjory, trying to keep Thomas Junior's face clean and his vocabulary expurgated, seeing that the dinner is warm and the cook's temper cool when Doctor Tom is late to meals, and so on and so on to the end of the chapter. Only there isn't any end to the chapter. It goes on forever like Tennyson's stupid brook. Bah! Excuse me!" And Suzanne's gesture betokened insuperable scorn for the ways of the wifely.

"But Mrs. Daly looks as if she enjoyed doing all those things, and I think it is lovely to have babies." There was a little wistful note in Barb's voice as she made the statement.

"H-mp! Maybe so. But I say it is a shame for anybody who could write the way she could to give it up. Don't you, Sylvia?"

"O dear!" groaned Sylvia. "Yes and no. Why do I always have to see both sides of things? Lois _is_ happy. At least I think she is. You can't always tell about Lois, she is so cool and serene and deep. Anyway, the babies are lovely. But I can't help agreeing with you a little, Suzanne. It does seem a pity."

"Of course it is a pity. And there is your Felicia. She is another case in point. She gave up her work and a fortune to marry a man who lived just long enough to leave her with a big heartache to carry round inside her and two children to provide immediate bread and butter for. You can say what you like. I say it was too much of a price."

"O, but, Suzanne, Marianna and Donald are such dears!" pleaded Barb.

"Of course they are dears. They are adorable. But you can't deny they have kept her back. She is just beginning to be a real sculptor after all these years. And now she is beginning appears this Kinnard person to spoil it all."

Sylvia looked up a trifle startled.

"What do you mean, Suzanne? Mr. Kinnard isn't spoiling anything. He is helping. Felicia hasn't a bit of faith in herself. She never would have thought of entering into that mural relief competition if he hadn't made her. And I know her designs are going to be splendid. Mr. Kinnard says they are, and he knows."

Suzanne shrugged.

"I fear the Greeks bearing gifts. No man ever gave a woman something for nothing since time began. You'll see."

"What shall I see?"

"You might have seen the way he looked at your Felicia yesterday afternoon. You needn't stare. She is the loveliest thing imaginable; and, anyway, widows always marry again. They can't seem to help it. It is in the system."

"Oh, he looks at every woman. How can he help it with eyes like that? He is much more likely to be wooing Hope. He has been sketching her all summer and she makes lovely shy dryad eyes at him while he works. I don't see how he can resist her myself, she is so deliciously pretty."

"'A violet by a mossy stone.' Mr. Kinnard isn't looking for violets. You'll see, as I said before."

And in spite of her denial, Sylvia couldn't help wondering if there were any truth in Suzanne's implications. She had accepted Stephen Kinnard quite simply as Felicia had explained him, an old friend and fellow artist of Paris days. He had been in Greendale nearly all summer doing some sketches of Southern gardens for a magazine, and it had seemed perfectly natural to Sylvia that he should come often up the hill to see Mrs. Emory. They were both artists and had much in common beside their old friendship. That any factors deeper than those which appeared on the surface might be keeping Stephen Kinnard in Felicia's proximity had not until the moment occurred to Sylvia. For a moment it flashed across her mind how sadly Arden Hall would fare without Felicia who with the dear "wonder babies" had come to help Sylvia keep Christmas nearly six years ago and had remained in the old house ever since to its young owner's infinite content and well being.

"I never thought of Felicia's marrying again," she said after a moment of silence.

"Well, Stephen Kinnard has thought of it, if you haven't," pronounced Suzanne. "By the way, he said a rather nice thing about you yesterday. He said you had a genius for happiness."

Sylvia smiled a little as her gaze strayed past the white pillars, past the giant magnolia-tree lifting its shining leaves to the sun, past the pink and white glory of cosmos and the dial beyond, dedicating itself discreetly to none but sunny hours; beyond still farther to the clear turquoise space of sky visible behind it all.

"Being happy isn't much of an art when you can't help being it," she said, her gaze and her thoughts coming back from their momentary journey.

"Oh, but he didn't mean just your being happy," put in Barb in her quick, serious way. "He meant your way of making other people happy. It's true. I noticed it often in college. But it is truer than ever here. Everybody in Arden Hall is happy. It is like Shakespeare's forest. It makes you feel different--not just only happy but better, being here."

"That is the house. It has been like that ever since I had my Christmas family here. Of course, it is realty mostly Felicia. She is the mainspring of it all. But we like to pretend there is something magic about the house itself. You don't know how I love every stick and brick of it. I have never had half enough of it. I have been in school so much, I've only snatched a few vacations on the wing, as it were, and even that only in the last few years since I captured Felicia. Ugh! Nobody knows how I hated those dreadful holidays in hotels after Aunt Nell died and I came to America. And nobody knows how I love this." Her expansive gesture made "this" include house and lawn and magnolia and pink and white bloom and sun dial and all the rest, perhaps even the turquoise stretch of sky. "I've never had my fill of homeness," she concluded.

"Funny!" mused Suzanne. "Now, I don't want to be at home at all. Norton is such a stuffy, snippy, gossipy, little town, and I loathe being officially the 'parson's daughter.' Sometimes it used to seem to me I'd rather throw myself in the river than go to another prayer meeting and hear Deacon Derby drone out minute instructions to the Lord as to how he should manage his business. And being home isn't so sweet and simple as it seems either. I adore my mother, but we don't see two things alike in the wide world. She likes the chairs stiff and straight against the walls, just in the same position year in, year out. I like 'em at casual experimental angles, different every day. That is typical of our two viewpoints. She likes things eternally straight and the same. I like 'em eternally on the bias and different. We can't either of us help it. We are made that way. And we're both more or less miserable, whether we give in or whether we don't. Mother and Dad are regular darlings, both of them, but I don't mean to stay at home with them a bit more than I can help. They don't need me. They are perfectly used to doing without me and are really much happier sans Suzanne. I just stir things up and they like to snuggle down in their nice comfortable ruts. I've got to live in New York. I'd smother in Norton, Pa."

"Roger doesn't seem to be smothering in Norton," Sylvia reminded her. "Jack stopped over to see him last week and he said Roger was stirring things up with a vengeance since he has been sitting among the city fathers."

"Oh, Roger!" Suzanne shrugged Roger away as entirely negligible. "Roger Minot would stir things up in a graveyard. He likes to live in a small town. I don't. The biggest city in the world isn't one bit too big for me. New York for mine. Better change your mind, Sylvia, and come on, too. There will be plenty of room in my garret. More room than anything else probably. Aunt Sarah's legacy has its limits, more's the pity. But come on and share my crust."

"Maybe I will, temporarily. I've promised Jeanette Latham to visit her next winter and I'll include you and Barb in my rounds if invited."

"Jeanette Latham? Mrs. Francis VanDycke Latham? _The_ Mrs. Latham who figures in 'Vanity Fair' and the Sunday supplement? The only Jack's sister? There will be some contrast between visiting her and visiting me. She inhabits a Duplex on the Drive, doesn't she? One of the utterly utter."

"That depends. Mr. Latham is awfully rich and old family, if that is what you mean, and Jeanette does like to be at the extreme of everything, but underneath all her dazzle and glitter she is really as simple and genuine as Jack is. I like her, and she is Jack's favorite sister."

"Which helps," murmured Suzanne. "See here, Sylvia, if you once get into that high society labyrinth you'll never get out."

"Oh, yes I shall--unless the Minotaur gets me. I just want a bit of Jeanette's kind of life to see what it is really like. In fact, I want to try all kinds."

Sylvia smiled as she spoke, but she meant her last assertion for all that. Hers was an eager, active, questing temperament. She was avid for life in its entirety, with a healthy zest for experience whose sword blades rather than poppy seeds appealed to her just now, as is natural with youth. The college world from which she had been recently emancipated, full and various and strenuous as it had often been, had never fully satisfied her free, quick, young spirit. She had always the memory of those early rich years in Paris with her aunt from which to draw comparison. She had once complained to Felicia that college was too much like the Lady of Shallott's tower whose occupants perceived life in a polished mirror instead of in direct contact. She was already frankly a little tired of "shadows," ready for the real thing, whatever that was.

"Maybe I am glad I don't have to do any one thing," she continued. "All through school you are so pushed and guarded and guided and instructed you don't have half a chance to be yourself. I'm thankful for a breathing space to find out who I really am."

"Why, Sylvia! How funny!" puzzled Barb. "Don't you know all about yourself?"

"No, do you?"

Barbara shook her head with a faint sigh.

"Maybe not. Or, if I do, I don't let myself look at the real Barb for fear--" She broke off and Suzanne intervened.

"Well, I know all there is to know about Suzanne Morrison. I have taken considerable pains to get acquainted, in fact. It is great to know precisely what you want and that you are going to get it sooner or later." Thus the sublime arrogance of the young twenties.

"I wish I did!" said Sylvia quickly.

"Which?"

"Both," parried Sylvia.

But Barb, who was watching her, was aware of something in her friend's face which she could not quite fathom. Was it possible there was anything in the world Sylvia Arden wanted and could not have? It was a startling thought to Barb, who was accustomed to considering Sylvia as the Princess of all the Heart's Desires.

Just then the Japanese gong from within sent out its silver-tongued invitation. With the alacrity of the healthily hungry and heart-free the three friends rose, the conclave ended, consigning to temporary oblivion Causes, Careers and all Concomitant Problems.

*CHAPTER II*

*REASONS AND WRAITHS*

Mrs. Emory laid down her sewing on the porch table and rose to greet Stephen Kinnard, a tall, lean man with a rather angular but interesting face, with hair slightly graying on the temples, and remarkably beautiful eyes, slate-gray shot with tiny topaz colored flecks, eyes which as Sylvia said "looked" at women. They looked now, which was scarcely strange considering how beautiful Felicia Emory was at thirty-three.