He repeated, at Sylvia's instigation, the incident of the hearse horses at Poughkeepsie, with new flourishes, and cheerfully proposed a cousinship to all of them.
"Or, perhaps," he said, when he had found seats for them and had been admonished to leave, "perhaps it would be more in keeping with my great age to become your uncle.

Then you would be cousins to each other and we should all be related." Speculations as to whether he would ever come kept the young women laughing as they discussed him.

They declared that the meeting on the train had been by ulterior design and they quite exhausted the fun of it upon Sylvia, who gained greatly in importance through the encounter with Harwood.

She was not the demure young person they had thought her; it was not every girl who could produce a personable young man on a railway journey.
Sylvia wondered much about Marian and dramatized to herself the girl's arrival at college.

It did not seem credible that Mrs.Bassett was preparing Marian for college because she, Sylvia Garrison, was enrolled there.