children played, for the most part, with the children of their
neighbors, farmers, or small merchants, and continued this humble
connection after they went into the public schools, where their
parents sent them, instead of to "the" exclusive private school
of town. Consequently the plainest, simplest clothes made them
indistinguishable from their fellows. Sylvia and Judith also enjoyed
the unfair advantage of being quite unusually pretty little girls
(Judith being nothing less than a beauty), so that even on the few
occasions when they were invited to a children's party in the faculty
circle their burnished, abundant hair, bright eyes, and fresh, alert
faces made up for the plainness of their white dresses and thick
shoes.

It was, moreover, not only in externals like clothes that the
childhood of Sylvia and Judith and Lawrence differed from that of the
other faculty children. Their lives were untouched by the ominous
black cloud familiar to academic households, the fear for the future,
the fear which comes of living from hand to mouth, the dread of "being
obliged to hand in one's resignation," a truly academic periphasis
which is as dismally familiar to most faculty children as its blunt
Anglo-Saxon equivalent of "losing your job" is to children of plainer
workpeople. Once, it is true, this possibility had loomed up large
before the Marshalls, when a high-protection legislature objected
loudly to the professor's unreverent attitude towards the tariff. But
although the Marshall children knew all about this crisis, as they
knew all about everything that happened to the family, they had had
no experience of the anxious talks and heartsick consultations which
would have gone on in any other faculty household. Their father had
been angry, and their mother resolute--but there was nothing new in
that. There had been, on Professor Marshall's part, belligerent,