"Ah, he's changed greatly--he's transformed--he is not the same
creature," Aunt Victoria told her gravely, speaking according to her
seductive habit with Sylvia, as though to an equal. "The year when
we lost our money and he married, altered all the world for us."
She linked the two events together, and was rewarded by seeing the
reference slide over Sylvia's head.

"Did you lose _your_ money, too?" asked Sylvia, astounded. It had
never occurred to her that Aunt Victoria might have been affected by
that event in her father's life, with which she was quite familiar
through his careless references to what he seemed to regard as an
interesting but negligible incident.

"All but the slightest portion of it, my dear--when I was twenty years
old. Your father was twenty-five."

Sylvia looked about her at the cut-glass and silver utensils on
the lace-covered dressing-table, at Aunt Victoria's pale lilac
crêpe-de-chine négligée, at the neat, pretty young maid deft-handedly
rubbing the perfumed cream into the other woman's well-preserved face,
impassive as an idol's. "Why--why, I thought--" she began and stopped,
a native delicacy making her hesitate as Judith never did.

Aunt Victoria understood. "Mr. Smith had money," she explained
briefly. "I married when I was twenty-one."

"Oh," said Sylvia. It seemed an easy way out of difficulties. She
had never before chanced to hear Aunt Victoria mention her long-dead
husband.