"It was, in fact, there that your father met her," stated Aunt
Victoria briefly.

"Oh yes, I remember," said Sylvia, quoting fluently from an often
heard tale. "I've heard them tell about it lots of times. She was
earning money to pay for her last year in college, and dropped a
history book out of her basket as she started to get back in the
wagon, and Father picked it up and said, 'Why, good Lord! who in
Lydford reads Gibbon?' And Mother said it was hers, and they talked a
while, and then he got in and rode off with her."

"Yes," said Aunt Victoria, "that was how it happened.... Pauline, get
out the massage cream and do my face, will you?"

She did not talk any more for a time, but when she began, it was again
of Lydford that she spoke, running along in a murmured stream of
reminiscences breathed faintly between motionless lips that Pauline's
reverent ministrations might not be disturbed. Through the veil of
these half-understood recollections, Sylvia saw highly inaccurate
pictures of great magnificent rooms filled with heavy old mahogany
furniture, of riotously colored rose-gardens, terraced and
box-edged, inhabited by beautiful ladies always, like Aunt Victoria,
"dressed-up," who took tea under brightly striped, pagoda-shaped
tents, waited upon by slant-eyed Japanese (it seemed Aunt Victoria had
nothing but Japanese servants). The whole picture shimmered in the
confused imagination of the listening little girl, till it blended
indistinguishably with the enchantment of her fairy-stories. It all
seemed a background natural enough for Aunt Victoria, but Sylvia could
not fit her father into it.