"Oh, I know," relented his mentor. "I haven't any right to preach till I find my own job."
"You! Girls don't need a job. Their job is to look pretty and get married."
"Heretic! That's not twentieth-century lingo. You are positively mediæval. I shall set Barb on you."
"Barb knows it's true just as well as I do for all her theories. She would marry the right man in a minute if he turned up and forget the suffrage stuff. She's by all odds the most domestic of the three of you."
Sylvia looked thoughtful. She remembered Barb's opinion about the "loveliness" of having babies and wondered. For all his inconsequence Jack had a somewhat startling habit at times of getting beneath the surface of things. She suspected he had hit upon a truth now but would not give him the satisfaction of acknowledging the fact. Therefore she said nothing, and her silence gave her companion the opening he had been waiting for. He had not brought Sylvia out in the moonlight to talk "twentieth-century lingo."
"You didn't wear my orchids," he observed irrelevantly, at least irrelevantly to everything except his ardent eyes. From the beginning his eyes had been talking a language older than that of feminism.
"I didn't wear anybody's flowers. I had too many."
"And I am not different from just anybody?" There was a caressing, proprietary note in his voice. "Sylvia, sweetheart, you _know_ I am."
Sylvia faced him and the issue then, aware that she could fend no longer.
"Of course you are different, Jack. I've known you so much longer than the rest, but--I am afraid you are not different in the way you want me to say it. Please, Jack, don't spoil what we have by asking too much." Impulsively she put out her hand and let it rest on his. "Can't we keep on being--just friends?" She pleaded after the immemorial fashion of woman.
"I'm afraid not. You see, I don't want to be just friends. I want a whole lot more as it happens. I know I'm not much good, but I could be with you at the helm. You could do anything with me. You always could. Oh, Sylvia, wouldn't you try it? Couldn't you?" He stooped and lifted her hand to his lips. "Sylvia, isn't there any hope?" he implored, all his boy's heart in his eyes.
Sylvia couldn't help being stirred deeply. When one is loved it is not so hard to believe one loves in return and the call of youth and life is strong. But for both their sakes she steadied herself knowing the time was not ripe for yielding, if, indeed, it ever would be. This was one of the things among others that she was at sea about. She was not yet sure she knew herself, as she had told her friends.