Page:Early Autumn (1926).pdf/114

 "Did you ever talk to Thérèse about love?" asked Olivia.

"No; you can't talk to her about such things. She wouldn't understand. With Thérèse everything is scientific, biological. When Thérèse marries, I think it will be some man she has picked out as the proper father, scientifically, for her children."

"That's not a bad idea."

"She might just have children by him without marrying him, the way she breeds frogs. I think that's horrible."

Again Olivia was seized with an irresistible impulse to laugh, and controlled herself heroically. She kept thinking of how silly, how ignorant, she had been at Sybil's age, silly and ignorant despite the unclean sort of sophistication she had picked up in the corridors of Continental hotels. She kept thinking how much better a chance Sybil had for happiness. . . . Sybil, sitting there gravely, defending her warm ideas of romance against the scientific onslaughts of the swarthy, passionate Thérèse.

"It will be some one like O'Hara," continued Sybil. "Some one who is very much alive—only not middle-aged like O'Hara."

(So Sybil thought of O'Hara as middle-aged, and he was four years younger than Olivia, who felt and looked so young. The girl kept talking of O'Hara as if his life were over; but that perhaps was only because she herself was so young.)

Olivia sighed now, despite herself. "You mustn't expect too much from the world, Sybil. Nothing is perfect, not even marriage. One always has to make compromises."

"Oh, I know that; I've thought a great deal about it. All the same, I'm sure I'll know the man when I see him." She leaned forward and said earnestly, "Couldn't you tell when you were a girl?"

"Yes," said Olivia softly. "I could tell."

And then, inevitably, Sybil asked what Olivia kept pray-