Selina: Her Hopeful Efforts and Her Livelier Failures
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Title: Selina: Her Hopeful Efforts and Her Livelier Failures
Author: George Madden Martin
Illustrator: H. D. Williams
Release date: July 15, 2014 [eBook #46292]
Most recently updated: October 24, 2024
Language: English
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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK SELINA: HER HOPEFUL EFFORTS AND HER LIVELIER FAILURES ***
SELINA
[Illustration: "She'd heard I was fond of reading."]
[Page 20.]
_Selina_
_HER HOPEFUL EFFORTS AND_
_HER LIVELIER FAILURES_
_By_
_GEORGE MADDEN MARTIN_
_Author of EMMY LOU_
_Illustrated by_
_H.D. WILLIAMS_
D APPLETON AND COMPANY
NEW YORK · · · · MCMXIV
COPYRIGHT, 1914. BY
D. APPLETON AND COMPANY
Printed in the United States of America
_TO_
_E. A. M._
_FLORENCE, ITALY_
_You have long urged me to an attempted portrayal of the American girl
of the '80's. I take it that you from your viewpoint coming from long
absence from your own country, look upon her and her moment as in some
sense significant._
_As I read this girl and the conditions surrounding her, born late,
Victorian, she came into being when those sincere and fine tenets
upon which the Victorian era founded itself, were become the letter
of the original vital idea, and the moment itself sentimental, trite
and prudish. Outcome and victim of the inefficiencies of an hour so
flabby and platitudinous, this young girl of these Victorian '80's
apparently not only repudiated her condition made up of absurdities,
futilities and inadequacies, but in her maturity has lapsed over into
the post-Victorian era as pioneer, she and her companions of that day,
who blazed the way for the army of women now following. Following
where, you ask? Ah, now, that is another question, and one I am not at
all qualified or prepared to answer._
_In the fact that she did repudiate her day and her condition lies
the significance which you see, as I take it. That I have read her at
the moment of my depicting, piteous rather than pertinent, helpless
more than heroic, and groping rather than grasping, I hope will not
disappoint you. So she appears to me; her gravest need, the lack of
which renders her piteous and helpless, being a sense of proportion;
a lack answerable to the false standards around her, or to her sex, or
both, who among her sex shall say?_
_And that this epic of her days is chronicle of but the small and the
petty happening, you will forgive, because this same day made up of the
small and seemingly petty, is one of the things, she will tell you now,
against which she revolted._
_Nor am I defending her, nor claiming that she needs defense. As I see
her and have tried to set her down. I offer her to you._
_G. M. M._
_August, 1914._
_Anchorage, Kentucky._
CONTENTS
PAGE
CHAPTER ONE 1
CHAPTER TWO 19
CHAPTER THREE 33
CHAPTER FOUR 47
CHAPTER FIVE 56
CHAPTER SIX 62
CHAPTER SEVEN 73
CHAPTER EIGHT 81
CHAPTER NINE 87
CHAPTER TEN 101
CHAPTER ELEVEN 111
CHAPTER TWELVE 120
CHAPTER THIRTEEN 136
CHAPTER FOURTEEN 143
CHAPTER FIFTEEN 154
CHAPTER SIXTEEN 162
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN 171
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN 178
CHAPTER NINETEEN 184
CHAPTER TWENTY 190
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE 200
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO 210
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE 219
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR 227
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE 235
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX 249
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN 257
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT 268
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE 275
CHAPTER THIRTY 286
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE 296
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO 311
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE 325
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR 334
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE 346
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX 352
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN 357
CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT 372
CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE 385
CHAPTER FORTY 396
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
PAGE
"She referred to the cook, faithful and efficient colored
plodder" 2
"Impeccable yard plots, whitened flaggings and steps" 6
"Each lady was sitting by her standing work-basket of cane" 10
"'His name was Aristides Welkin, and we called him Mr. Arry'" 21
"He held back the gate, too, for her to pass through" 30
"Mamma looked around the castor and spoke briskly" 57
"Before the mirror, trying on the dress from Cousin Anna" 70
"Mr. Tuttle Jones ... sat with her through a pianoforte
number" 78
"Selina hurried out and joined him" 84
"The two groups had ... gone sauntering out the
sycamore-bordered road" 94
"Rooted out his umbrella and tucked Amanthus, pretty thing,
onto his arm" 118
"A covered wooden bridge across the river ... seemed older
than anything else" 126
"Marcus was there when Selina arrived" 137
"She went to her father" 140
"Selina ... sat down to write her note" 144
"She ... stood looking at them grouped below" 159
"Miss 'Hontas came in ... and talked to her about many
things" 168
"Her veil trailed crookedly" 188
"Owner and driver of a hack ... whereby he made a living,
meeting trains" 192
"Endeavoring to fit a glass into his eye" 203
"Maud was going in for china painting" 220
"'Mr. Welling looked at me in that ... quizzing way of his'" 223
"They found Mrs. Harrison ... before the open fire" 230
"He... stumbled over a rug and slopped the cream" 240
"He below, lifting his hat" 254
"'You haven't spoken to Papa about it?'" 258
"Selina ... fell on her knees" 270
"They boarded the street car" 282
"Flowers take patience and faith, and tendance and waiting" 305
"She watched the flying scene from the car window" 321
"Culpepper ... leaned over the back of her chair and spoke
softly to her" 344
"'More uplift, more culture is the cry of the moment'" 362
"For a full minute he did not speak" 373
"And whistled real softly under Juliette's window" 382
"Everybody waved and Culpepper was left standing there" 408
SELINA
CHAPTER ONE
"There must be something wrong, Lavinia, with our way of managing,"
said Auntie.
"If you think you can do it better than I, Ann Eliza--" came from
Mamma, with dignity.
Selina, scant seventeen in years and sweet and loving and anxious,
felt that she could not bear it. To sit in consultation thus, with her
mother and her aunt because the family purse was at one of its stages
of being exhausted, was desperate business enough, but to look from
the face of her little mother to the countenance of her auntie under
these circumstances was anguish. Negative character has been turned
to positive by less, inertia forced into action, the defenceless made
defender. And while the endeavors, about to be related, of this young
person to add to the income of her family by her own efforts, may call
to mind one Baron Munchausen lifting himself by his boot-straps, let it
be borne in mind that the boot-straps may be the inconsequential thing,
and that where the emphasis is to be laid is upon the good faith put
into the lifting.
[Illustration: "She referred to the cook, faithful and efficient
colored plodder."]
"It seemed wise to reduce the grocery bill as far as we could," her
mother was saying deprecatingly, "but in doing so, I should have
considered that I was leaving myself nothing to pay Aunt Viney." She
referred to the cook, faithful and efficient colored plodder.
"Last month it was the iceman who was kept waiting because we paid
everything to the butcher," said Selina. "Why is it," a little
desperately, "there's never money enough to go around?"
Her mother disliked such a display of feeling. "If you mean that in
criticism of your father--" she began.
Auntie interrupted. "The Wistar men have seldom been money-makers. My
father in his time was the exception. I'm sure Robert has tried."
Selina feeling she could not bear what she saw in these faces of her
elders, looked about the room where she was sitting with them. In her
time, which was twenty-five years ago, in an inland American city in a
semi-southern state, bedrooms were sitting-rooms during the day.
What she saw was a ponderously ornate bedstead, ponderous walnut
wardrobe, washstand, bureau, fading wall-paper of a pronounced pattern,
framed family photographs, and carpet resolutely tacked the four ways
of the floor. She did not know the day would come when she would learn
that this room with its wool lambrequin above the open grate, its wool
table-cover, its wool footstools, was mid-Victorian. Still less did
this loving and anxious Selina know that these two dear ladies with
whom she sat, were mid-Victorian with their room, and she of the next
generation, a victim to their mild inefficiencies and their gentle
sentimentalities. In looking about the room, she as by instinct of the
hunted, was seeking a clue to escape from her anguish of spirit.
"It isn't as though your father were not giving me the same amount
of money for the house as usual," her mother was saying. Mrs. Wistar
always spoke a trifle precisely. "It is more that having dropped so
behind with the bills, and knowing that he is worried so to give me as
much as he does, I don't like to tell him so."
"The worry'd be no more now than when he does have to know," from
Auntie.
"I suppose not," allowed Mrs. Wistar dubiously.
Selina sighed, and her gaze not finding the relief it sought within
the room, went to the window and looked out between its discreet
draperies. Thus far indeed Selina had gazed on all of life through
discreet draperies. And if as she sat there in the cushioned chair
with her eyes so sweetly anxious, she was incontinently young to look
upon even for scant seventeen, in any real knowledge of life and of
what life had a right to demand from her, she was pitiably younger.
This story undertakes to be the tenderly smiling narrative of Selina's
inefficiencies, the epic of her small aspirings and her, it is to be
hoped, engaging failures.
If she, untrained, unarmed and unaware, is typical in any sense of
the thousands of American girls of her period, shall it be assumed
there are none like her to-day, piously guarded and yet piteously and
absurdly unready for life's demands?
And if the conditions which surrounded her, and the inefficiencies
which marked her, were in any degree usual in her day, may we not
the better understand her generation's dissatisfaction with these
conditions, as shown in those gropings toward something illy defined
no doubt but deeply desired, which now appear to have been the first
general expression of woman's discontent in this country?
Selina's gaze had wandered to the window to find but doubtful comfort
there. For in her mind's eye she saw the relative position her squat,
two-storied brick house with its square of grass and its iron fence
set in stone coping, bore to the other houses on the block in size,
appearance and importance. There were some few smaller and shabbier.
She gave neighborly greeting to the dwellers within these homes when
she met them, but without any knowledge as to why, and through no
volition of her own that she was aware of, her life did not touch
theirs.
[Illustration: "Impeccable yard plots, whitened flaggings and steps."]
Of the other houses along the block, some were three-storied, others
two-storied but double in width, the further characteristics of
these eminently prosperous dwellings being impeccable yard plots,
whitened flaggings and steps, burnished doorsills, burnished
doorbells, doorplates. The dwellers within these altogether creditable
establishments, Selina did know; their lives and hers did touch; they
too were variations in a common inefficiency; they too were products of
the same conditions as herself. Amanthus in the one house, enchanting
and engaging, or so Selina saw her; Juliette in another, eager and
diminutive, cheeks carmine, fiery with the faith of the ardent
follower; Maud in a third, luscious, capable, inquiet, overflowing
with protest, alert with innovation; Adele in a fourth, stickler and
debater, full of a conscience for the pro and con: these four were
Selina's own, these and their households, the friends, she would have
told you, of her youth.
She had gone through measles and through mumps with them; through day
school and dancing school with them; through the baby age, the overly
conscientious age, the giggling age, the conscious age, the arriving
age, when at birthdays and school-closings, she, Selina, and Amanthus,
and Maud, and Juliette and Adele, exchanged clothbound and gilt-topped
volumes, "Lucille," "Aurora Leigh," Tennyson.
But the gaze of Selina right now was out the window of her mother's
bedroom, and in her mind's eye she was seeing, not these adored friends
of her youth, but the macadamized street she lived upon, with its
brick sidewalks and its occasional old sycamore tree, and the homes
of herself and these friends along it. And her home was the squat and
shabby one, her yard the untended one, and she, Selina Auboussier
Wistar, the genteelly poor one of these friends of her youth.
Then her attention came back to matters within the room.
"I try to save Mr. Wistar everything of worry I can," her mother was
saying defensively. "I've been setting a chair over that hole in the
dining-room hearth rug for months."
"I'm never sure it isn't better to be frank," held Auntie.
Selina's concern returned to her own affairs. Selina Auboussier Wistar!
Why Auboussier? Because her father was Robert Auboussier Wistar. Why
the Auboussier in either case was to be dwelt upon so insistingly and
in full, was never very dazzlingly clear, except that Mamma decreed it.
The name had brought her father nothing other in his day than a silver
mug, so far as Selina knew, and it had not even brought her that. But
it did roll off the tongue as though it had claims. In the very nicest
sort of way perhaps this was the explanation.
The affairs of her elders in the room again intruded.
"I paid the bills for all those extras we had not counted on when
Selina graduated in June," Mamma was saying, and defensively again,
"and said nothing about them. It seemed best at the time. And once I
got behind in this way on the other bills I haven't seemed able to
catch up."
"I needn't have had the carriage and the flowers and the rest of it if
I'd known," claimed Selina passionately. "And I'm sure Auntie is right.
Everybody in a family ought to know everything."
"I cannot allow such a tone from you, Selina," returned her mother
decidedly. "And of whom is it you speak in this disparaging manner?
Surely not of your mother? And I will not think you mean your father?"
Her father? Tradition, which meant Selina's own little mother again,
told how Mr. Robert Auboussier Wistar at the beginning of things, which
was before Selina at all could remember, had made a bold dash and start
in life, proprietor of his own inherited iron foundry. It lent solidity
and importance to the past, and support to the present. A structural
iron railroad and foot-bridge across a turbulent creek at the city's
edge, marks the crest of this gentleman's industrial prosperity. It is
an ugly bridge where it might have achieved beauty, Selina is forced to
admit this now, but then when the family walks on Sunday afternoons and
on holidays led to it with something of the spirit which carries the
faithful to Mecca, she obediently thrilled with pride as regularly as
her mother pointed out the structure to her.
The glittering career of Papa and the foundry had been brief, and
Selina had it from her mother and her auntie that this is a sad world
for the honorable and trusting man in business.
[Illustration: "Each lady was sitting by her standing work-basket of
cane."]
Mr. Robert Wistar, dear and very real gentleman as he was, and as his
Selina saw and knew him, for many years now had had a floor space in a
building in an off business street, and bought and sold machinery, new
and old, on the varying and uncertain basis of commission. But at home
in the squat and ugly brick house owned in part by him and in part by
Auntie, who was his older sister, his household of womenkind upheld his
prestige and dominance as their male and their protector.
His household of women! Selina's eyes went from the little person of
her mother, ardent striver to keep up a fairly prosperous front, to the
heavy person of her auntie, darling soul, who did not seem quite to
grasp why a front must be kept up, but assured that it must, submitted.
Big, lovable, personable auntie, could the pity of it be that she was
always submitting? Each lady was sitting by her standing work-basket of
cane, with work however abandoned into her respective dear lap.
Mamma, little person, meant by Heaven to be pretty if she had not in
the stead to be so perturbed, just here seemed disposed and almost
unreasonably, to harbor feeling against Aunt Viney for wanting what was
coming to her. There had been similar feeling on her part toward the
iceman, and, preceding him, toward the butcher.
"If it were anybody but Viney herself, coming upstairs to me right in
my own room and asking for her money, I would feel I could not overlook
it," she was saying. "She should have known that as soon as it was
convenient for her to have it, I would give it to her."
"It is the second time the collector of dues on her funeral insurance
has come around," reminded Auntie, "and I dare say he made her feel she
had to ask for it."
"There's more to it than her merely coming upstairs to me about it,"
said Mamma. "Two dollars and a half to three dollars is all anyone
thought of paying a servant in my day." Her tone would imply that her
day and her authority were decades past and other people in this matter
of Aunt Viney, altogether and unworthily responsible. "Four dollars to
a servant is out of all reason."
And so indeed four dollars at that day and in that place would have
been but for the agreement fixing the wages of this old person at this
sum!
Selina's cheeks flamed red. "Aunt Viney is getting four dollars instead
of three, Mamma," she reminded her mother, "because you dismissed
the washwoman who was getting two dollars, and persuaded Aunt Viney
to undertake it for the extra one." Cooking, washing, ironing,
dining-room, front door, coal, kindling, fires and something of the
rest of it, were the part of Aunt Viney!
Honesty drove Selina to defend her--tentatively and timidly, since
not for worlds in her day would a daughter venture to hurt a parent's
tender feelings. "Four dollars isn't so terribly much more than a
pittance, is it, Mamma? For a week's work? That is," hastily and
apologetically, "if one were the receiver of it?"
Time was to be, and that time soon, when Selina would know more about
the place of four dollars in the scale of recompense.
Auntie at this point moved heavily and uneasily. One always felt
that nature meant Auntie for something more definite. Her ponderous
energy was inexhaustible. To see her expend it on irrelevant and
inconsequential things, was to gather that after some fashion of
reasoning all her own, she drew comfort from such activities even to
convincing herself such efforts were contributory to the general relief.
"I'm sure I wish there were more brasses I could do," sighed the
precious and comely soul.
And while Selina here felt again that anguish which seemed more than
she could bear, still she blessed the brasses in question, fire-irons,
coal-bucket, and fender which adorned their parlor.
And she blessed Cousin Anna Tomlinson who had given the brasses to
the Wistar household. Japanned coal vases with panel decorations in
subjects such as cat-tails, and mantel tiles with swallow flights
across them had recently come in, and Cousin Anna was of those who will
have the latest or nothing. Selina did not know what the energy of
Auntie would do on the occasions of these recurrent money crises, if
she could not put it into the polishing of the brasses.
"I am sure I'm always wishing there were more of them," she was
reiterating now.
And then it was that Selina drew breath, a long and quivering breath.
There had come to be but one thing for her to do and she was about to
give it voice.
Never before had she taken the initiative in her life. The exact
length for the lowering of her dress skirt for graduation, the chosen
fashion for the tying of her white sash on that day, the manner of the
arranging of her hair, her flowers, her fan, each detail was for these
two dear but hitherto decreeing ladies to debate and decide upon.
When their Selina went forth upon her little pleasures and affairs, one
saw her off from the front-door step, the other waved a farewell from
the window above. When she returned one removed her hat and passed a
readjusting hand over her shining fair hair, the other lifted and put
away her cloak.
The initiative was to be Selina's now.
"I told you, Mamma and Auntie dear, of meeting Mrs. William Williams
down street yesterday? And of her stopping me?"
She had. She brought all incidents to her absences home, and the two
relived them with her. They saw Mrs. William Williams now in this
recall, large, impressive, with her benevolently dealt-around interests
and inquiries, as from a being of credentialed and superior parts to a
world of lesser creatures. Though why this arrogance was permitted,
the world of lesser beings could hardly say, but since authority even
when self-arrogated, and authority's running mate, material prosperity,
are ever potent, the world of Mrs. Wistar and Auntie submitted. Mr.
William Williams, a successful dealer in leather and raw hides, had
married Mrs. Williams late in both their lives, and one William
Williams Jr. was the result.
Selina was continuing. "And I told you how she said she does not
approve of the new methods called kindergarten that are beginning to be
used in the schools, and wants William Williams Jr. taught at home, and
did I know of any young person among my friends fitted to do it?"
"William Jr.'s head is too big," said Auntie, decidedly, "it rolls
around on his neck. I've noticed him on the bench at Sunday-school."
Selina passed over the interruption. "I told her yesterday that I did
not know of anyone. To-day I do. I am going to offer to teach him
myself!" But her throat was dry, and her hands were cold as she said it.
Selina knew no women wage-earners except her teachers at the public
school, who stood apart unique personalities in a world entered into
and left behind at intervals, and a scattering of women clerks in the
stores of her Southern city. Yes, on the contrary, she did know one,
Miss Emma McRanney, a regular attendant at the same church as the
Wistars, stolid, settled, and middle-aged, a setter of type at the
State Institute for the Blind. Mamma and Auntie made a point of going
out their ways on Sundays to stop her and shake hands with her kindly.
But she was the exception. In the world of Selina, in the world of her
mother and her aunt, in that of the friends of her youth and their
mothers and sisters and aunts, the accolading stamp of position, of
gentility, of femininity, lay in the monetary dependence of womankind
on its men.
Nor had life, as Selina came up through it, the private school of her
baby days, the public schooling of later days, the friends of her
youth, nor Mother, nor Auntie, nor those gilt-topped volumes, nor
dancing school, nor Sunday-school, nor her tinkling music lessons,
nor traditions, nor precedent, nor standards, nor prides, nor
preoccupations, nor day dreams, prepared Selina for this step. And so
her throat was dry and her hands were cold as she forced herself to say
it.
"I am going to offer to teach him myself."
And then it was that the unexpected happened. The fight on the part
of Mamma and Auntie had been a long one and a gruelling one, as long
almost as Selina's life, and they by nature were clinging creatures.
With the very note of her young utterance, as at the Gideon shout of
the newer generation, their walls fell.
This mother of Selina, behold, all at once a little, tearful,
dependent, child-like person. "Oh, Selina, daughter, _do_ you think
you _could_? The terror of having people come to the door with bills
one can't pay!"
This handsome, solid, impressive auntie, a bewildered, rudderless,
drifting soul. "I might be able to do little things at home to save you
here, Selina. There is the canary's cage. Let me take care of that."
Thus the walls fell about Selina and revealed to her the inward
weakness of that stronghold of dominance and authority she, up to now,
had deemed well-nigh impregnable.
One instinct with the two, however, held true to its function.
"We will not mention the matter to your father, Selina," from her
mother, "unless it seems best. He very likely would worry."
"Robert would worry," from Auntie, decidedly. "It might seem as if it
were in criticism of him if we went to him about it beforehand."
No protests! No objections! They were relieved! They were willing!
Selina stood up, her voice to her ears coming from vast distances away.
"Four dollars is certainly little more than a pittance for Aunt Viney,
I am sure you must see, Mamma." There was pronouncement and finality in
the tone as if for the first time she sat in judgment on her parent.
"As I've made up my mind to see Mrs. Williams, I'll put on my hat and
go now."
But it was all of an hour before she came from her own room ready to go.
"Has she been crying?" Auntie asked Mrs. Wistar anxiously, as Selina
went downstairs. "I thought her face showed traces."
"Selina has not the control I would like to see her have," said little
Mrs. Wistar concisely. "In my day we were not encouraged to indulge
ourselves in tears."
"In what then?" from Auntie as with one suddenly disposed to be
captious.
"In self-repression and the meeting of our duties," said Mrs. Wistar.
"Ann Eliza," severely, "sometimes I almost think you aid and abet
Selina in her expressions of discontent."
Auntie looked non-committal. "Do you, Lavinia?"
CHAPTER TWO
On Selina's return in the late afternoon, she came up to her mother's
room, her step light and springy now, to tell the two about her visit.
She had made up her mind that if she had to do this thing, she would do
it with as good grace as possible. They on the contrary had had time to
grasp the idea of Selina as a teacher in its several significances.
"Don't think I'd let you do a thing I did not think was proper and
right, Selina," her mother hurried to say in greeting. "There's nothing
derogatory, I'm sure, in accepting remuneration. I made a set of
chemises for your Cousin Anna last year, you remember, and was glad to
have her pay me."
"Look at _me_," said Auntie, "and don't you make chemises or anything
else, unless it's an understood thing that somebody _is_ going to pay
you."
A wave of protective feeling rushed over Selina, new to her but warming
and whelming, and she had forgiven them.
"I think, Mamma, that Mrs. Williams meant me when she spoke yesterday.
She said she was glad to see I was sensible about it. Evidently there
are people thinking I ought to go to work. She did."
This was not so rosy as Selina meant it to be for the attentive two;
she must do better.
"I'm sure, too, Mamma, she meant to be complimentary. She said a
whole lot about my being a booky girl, that she'd heard I was fond of
reading, and some more of that sort of thing. And about how she laid a
great deal of stress herself on cultivation, and how she wanted William
Jr. to achieve a taste that way, too. And she said that habits and
associations in the person of a teacher--I remember her words--mean so
much."
"I hope she values 'em accordingly," said Auntie indignantly. "I don't
like any such tone from her to you. She was a McIntosh, we mustn't
forget that. I never thought much of the stock."
"I'm sure all that Selina has told us is most gratifying," Mrs. Wistar
hastened to claim. "It only emphasizes the fact that teaching is a
calling of accomplishments and refinements. I remember the teacher that
I myself recall best." When Mrs. Wistar lost herself in reminiscence,
she was more than apt to lose her point also. "His name was Aristides
Welkin, and we called him Mr. Arry. He took snuff and recited Dryden
and Milton to the class in parsing most beautifully. He was English and
sometimes I think now, looking back upon it, drank. My parents paid
well for the privilege of having my sister Juanita and myself under
him. It was a school of selection and fashion, in the basement under
the First Church."
[Illustration: "His name was Aristides Welkin, and we called him Mr.
Arry."]
Selina kept to her narrative. "She said that of course I was a
beginner. That she realized it would hardly pay me to come way out to
her house for just William, and she thinks she can get three other
pupils in the neighborhood who will come into the class. I'm to go on
with him while she tries."
"If you're valuable as all that sounds," insisted Auntie, holding to
her point tenaciously, "she certainly ought to pay you well."
Selina paused to steady her voice. So far in her world, and in the
world of Mamma and Auntie, money matters were mentioned only when they
had to be, and then with embarrassment and reluctance. Hot to her
finger-tips and wincing to the fiber, she had had to discuss dollars
and cents with Mrs. Williams. Or rather, this lady with her air of
large condescension and kindly patronage had discussed it for her.
Since Mamma and Auntie had brought her up to feel this shrinking from
these things, how could they be so eager now about this part of the
interview?
"Mrs. Williams said she had inquired at the private schools and the
kindergartens, found the charge for a pupil, and would of course fix
the price at that." The blood surged slowly over Selina's face.
"Yes?" from Mamma a little impatiently.
Auntie however had noted the surging signals of distress. "I said that
boy William's head was too large," she declared anticipatorily to
anything of any nature which might follow.
Selina, who abhorred doing an uncouth thing, gulped. It was the painful
coincidence of the thing. The identical sum fixed by Mrs. Williams and
custom for training youth to a knowledge of the rudiments, culture,
good habits and worthy associations, had been in the mouths of Mamma,
Auntie and herself, all too recently. On hearing it from Mrs. Williams,
Selina had winced, and now shrunk from mentioning it herself until she
had to.
"I start in to-morrow. Mrs. Williams said why procrastinate things. No,
I won't take off my hat, thank you, Auntie."
She was winking fast, her eyes swimming behind something suspiciously
like tears. She was swallowing, too, at thought of her own especial
little world, her world including Amanthus and Maudie, Juliette
and Adele, and their prosperous and easy surroundings. And having
reached this point, she sobbed. For what would be the effect of the
announcement of her teaching on her world? And what, too, would
Culpepper Buxton say? The stepson of Cousin Maria Buxton, down here
from up in his part of the state studying law, and her, yes, her very
good friend? What would be the attitude of Culpepper to her move?
She found voice. Moreover, she smiled bravely at Auntie. "No, don't
take my cloak, please. I'm going out to find the girls and tell them
and have it over with. The price, you say, Mamma?" Unexpectedly she
sobbed again. The coincidence was mortifying. "Four dollars."
"I quite begin to follow your meaning, Ann Eliza, when you say Mrs.
Williams was a McIntosh," said Mamma with dignity. "You are right; her
old grandfather, Manuel McIntosh, used to sit outside his doorstep on
the sidewalk in his shirt-sleeves."
"I've always had a big respect for cooking, myself," said Auntie with
unexpected relevancy. "I've never thought we put enough emphasis on it
as a calling. Feeding the body is a worthy thing. It comes first."
"Who said anything about cooking, Ann Eliza?" from Mamma sharply. "How
you wander from the point! If you're going out before dark, Selina,
you'd better go."
The two dear ladies at their respective windows, beside their
respective work-baskets, watching for Selina to go out, saw her run
right into her four friends at the gate. The inference was they were
coming by on some of their common affairs. There was the weekly dancing
club, the last volume from the circulating library always passed
around, the new pattern-book, what-not, constantly bringing them
together.
The group opened to Selina as she came through the gate, each
individual of it talking as it did so, and closed about her in its
midst. Selina was popular with her friends.
Maud Addison was the dashing one with the red-brown hair and the
splendidly red and white skin. Maud's father was a solidly prosperous
wholesale merchant and a Presbyterian elder, as Auntie was wont to say,
as if the two things were bracketed, and Mrs. Addison, her mother,
capable and authoritative, was a noted housekeeper. There were four
children younger than Maud.
"I must say," commented Mrs. Wistar from her window to her
sister-in-law at hers, "Maud's rushing the season for October. And
Indian summer hardly begun. That's the new sealskin jacket her father
and mother promised her at graduation in June. I'd like it better if it
did not fit in like a basque."
"If only Selina might have suitable clothes," grieved Auntie, "she
would wear clothes well with her nice carriage and her pretty skin, and
her color that comes and goes. She would justify pretty things. She
gets her features from you, Lavinia, and her hair and her skin from
Robert."
"Thank you, Ann Eliza. I must allow I was considered pretty in my day."
The dark and vivid little creature of the group, the little flitting,
flashing creature at this moment embracing Selina, was Juliette
Caldwell. Juliette's mother was pretty and young to have two daughters
younger than Juliette and a son in arms. Her father, young, too, was
given to bantering, banging on the piano and making money.
"That crimson at the throat of Juliette's coat, and the crimson feather
in her hat, become her," went on Mrs. Wistar.
Auntie agreed. "And Adele Carter is pretty after her own fashion, after
all, Selina always insists she is."
"If you like that colorless skin and those big reflective dark eyes,"
said Mrs. Wistar.
"Adele's mother and her grandmother peck at her too much," claimed
Auntie.
"They're worldly as a lot, the whole family. In their efforts to make
Adele into what she'll never successfully be, a fashionable daughter,
they're only making her awkward. See how she shows she's got elbows."
But of the group of young people down there at the gate Amanthus
Harrison was the lovely one. With her cascading, scintillant,
positively effulgent hair, amazing skin, laughing eyes, laughing
cheeks, laughing lips, she was a radiant creature.
"Amanthus laughs like my flowers in the backyard blow," said Auntie,
"she hasn't an idea why she laughs."
"She doesn't need to have," said Mrs. Wistar promptly and astutely.
"You ask any man and he'd tell you that an idea would spoil her."
"She's popular," reflected Auntie.
"That's what I'm saying," impatiently. "And her mother is pretty and
popular before her."
"And enjoys it," from Auntie. "I've often wondered she hasn't married
again. I wish Selina wouldn't think it so much the proper thing to be
bookish, Lavinia," a little anxiously, "and to strew magazines around
the house so. It isn't as if she actually reads them."
"Selina is quite as popular as she needs to be," said her mother
quickly. "She doesn't lack for masculine friends."
"You don't have to take that tone to me, Lavinia," said Auntie sharply.
"Nobody has to defend Selina from me."
Here the four friends of Selina down there at the gate embraced her
with a sudden rush and ardor.
"She has told them," said Mamma.
"Yes," from Auntie.
And then both were silent, reading alike in the impetuosity of this
ardor on the part of these young persons, commiseration, and more,
amaze; amaze that she, Selina, their Selina Auboussier Wistar, pretty
Selina Wistar, was to go out to be a teacher, the teacher of William
Williams Jr.!
A moment later as the group departed silently and as if stunned, and as
Selina turned to re-enter her gate, the two ladies at their windows saw
Culpepper Buxton appear.
"To be sure, it is Tuesday," from Mrs. Wistar, "and we did tell him we
should look for him regularly at dinner on Tuesday evenings. I'm sure
I hope there's enough to eat. Viney is still resentful over having to
give in to Selina's fad, and have dinner instead of supper at any such
hour as six, because the Carters do."
"They got it from England, I daresay," from Auntie. "Mr. Carter went
over there last year, you know."
"They got it from Chicago," said Mrs. Wistar tartly. "They visit
soap-and-lard friends over there. I hope the roast, warmed over, is big
enough to go around. I quite overlooked the fact Culpepper'd be here,"
vexedly.
"We promised Maria, his mother, you and I both did, Lavinia, when she
was down, that we'd look after Culpepper. It isn't every stepmother
that would see her dead husband's son through as Maria is doing."
"Maria has means," said Mrs. Wistar. "We'd most of us do wonderful
things if we had means. There, look down at them. From Selina's manner
and Culpepper's, I believe she has told him, too."
"He's fine looking," from Auntie admiringly. "He's a third as tall
again as she is, and Selina is tall enough for a girl herself. He's
built on the lines of his country doctor father. He's listening to her
in that same close way his father had, too, as though he heard through
his gaze. I must say Culpepper is a great favorite of mine. But he's
looking at her, rather shocked and pityingly, Lavinia. Is it a very
terrible thing we're letting her do?"
Now the dialogue down there at the gate, where this Culpepper towered
above the slight young person of Selina, was this:
From him: "Expecting me to dinner? This thing mustn't come to be a
nuisance."
"Yes. Why, of course. Auntie would never get over it if you didn't
come. It's a serious matter to her, this compact with Cousin Maria.
Culpepper?"
"Yes?"
His eyes were a bold blue, his lashes and heavy brows and his hair
black. He looked even blatantly ready for the fight with life.
"How--or when did it come to you that you'd have to go to work? Did it
just dawn on you sometime? Or did somebody, Cousin Maria for instance,
tell you?"
"I haven't gone yet; don't give me undue credit." Culpepper gave that
almost insolently contented laugh of his. "I'm making ready. I didn't
do so badly at college and now I'm making law school. There wasn't any
coming to know about it. I just knew. Every boy knows. He's getting
ready from the start."
"I went to-day and asked for a position to teach and got it. I start
to-morrow!"
"The devil you--Selina, it slipped out, forgive it. So that's why you
wanted to know? I see. Felt you had to?"
She nodded. If a lump requiring to be swallowed was perceptible, she
was more willing for Culpepper to suspect than most people. She knew
him better, and, too, he was the sort, for all his matter-of-factness,
that understands. Or she thought so then.
[Illustration: "He held back the gate, too, for her to pass through."]
He gave a slow ejaculation as they went in together, a sort of
prolonged h'm-m between his teeth. He held back the gate, too, for her
to pass through, with that manner of his, highly indifferent to the
act, the manner of one who opens gates for people not because it is the
accepted thing to do, but because it pleases him, in this case or that
case, to do it.
"Cousin Robert, now, Selina, what does he say to it?"
She was quick in her father's defence. "He doesn't know, Culpepper.
Mamma thought it best not to mention it to him just yet."
He shook his head with dire warning. "When you or some other nice
feminine lady marries me, Selina, don't think I'm going to submit to
any such female managing." He glanced at her a bit oddly as he spoke.
Culpepper was extremely fond of Selina. He had known her since she was
a child, and came up to his stepmother's farm for visits in the summers
with her aunt. He teased her and indulged her both by manner and by
act. He was not the sort to bother with people at all if he was not
fond of them.
Auntie had come down to meet them and here opened the front door. She
adored Culpepper.
"Well, ole Miss?" He kissed her, the only person anyone ever had
seen Culpepper kiss, not excepting his stepmother to whom he owed
everything. "Safe through another seven days in the wicked city! For
another week I've kept my hands from picking and stealing, and my
tongue from lying and slandering. Gimme a clean slate."
"You're mightily sure of yourself, being young," retorted Auntie.
"I'll write Maria you're behaving. Selina, your mother says come right
upstairs and get yourself ready for supper."
"Dinner, Auntie," from Selina quickly and reproachfully. Selina was
scant seventeen.
"Dinner," Auntie corrected herself obediently.
"Dinner," mocked Culpepper with an alarmed air, "how're we plain folk
ever going to live up to her, I put it to you, ole miss, If she goes on
insisting on these things?"
CHAPTER THREE
When Selina came down to breakfast the next morning Papa was gone but
Mamma and Auntie were lingering over their coffee and waffles, waiting
for her.
She explained her tardiness. "I'm late because I didn't know just
what to put on to teach in. I got out my cloth dress, but that seemed
reckless when it's my best, so I put on the old plaid and this linen
collar and cuffs."
"Which are tasty and yet severe," said Mamma approvingly, "and somehow
in keeping."
The implication proved unfortunate. Selina's profile as it flashed
about on Mamma flushed. Such a young, young profile. Such a young
Selina in the plaid dress and the linen collar and the cuffs. Such
a child quivering with abhorrence of the act of going to work, and
wincing with shame because of the abhorrence. In her pitiful state she
was inclined to take umbrage at anything. And what did her mother mean?
"Linen collar and cuffs are in keeping with what, Mamma?" she asked in
reply, even sharply.
Mamma hastened to conciliate and again was unfortunate. "In keeping
with the very worthy calling you are entering on. The pettifogic
calling as we spoke of it under Mr. Aristides Welkin. He had a proper
respect for his occupation as a teacher and saw to it that his pupils
had."
"If he meant pedagogic, Mamma, he probably said so. And can't you
understand if there's one thing _I wouldn't_ want it to be, it's a
calling? Mamma, _please_ don't let's discuss the teaching any more.
Yes, I've had all I want to eat. I _did_ eat my egg, and I don't _want_
any waffles."
"Selina, come here and kiss Auntie before you go," from that dear
person. "I learned my a-b, abs, and my parlez-vous's, before the day
of Mr. Welkin. In my time we all went to old Madame Noël de Jourde de
Vaux, wife of a guillotined French nobleman, as I've often told you. In
a little four-roomed cottage it was, not far from the market-house. I
tasted my first olive there and sipped orange-flower water and sugar.
She was a tiny old personage with twinkling eyes and manners that
had served her well at court. She called it her A B C school for the
babies."
Darling Auntie! Selina threw grateful, passionate arms around her and
kissed her. One could see Madame de Vaux and her babies in the cottage
near the market-house through a glamour, but one hated Mr. Aristides
Welkin in his calling. Why? Selina couldn't have said. Then in a rush
of self-reproach, she swept about and kissed Mamma.
"It's a quarter past eight and I said I'd be there at nine. I'll have
to hurry."
* * * * *
She walked the ten blocks out to the opener neighborhood of the
Williams'. The early morning of the Indian summer day was tinged with
blue mistiness and underfoot was the pleasant rustle and crackle of
leaves along the pavement. On the way she stopped in a drugstore that
dealt in school supplies. She had told Mrs. Williams to have a primer
and first reader for William and she must have one of each herself.
As the man brought them she recognized them as the same she had used
in _her_ day, the primer with a salmon-pink cover in paper, the first
reader in a blue cover in pasteboards.
She took them in their package and left. In her day? That meant at the
little private school where she went at first and where she learned
to read. What did happen in her day at that school? She had to teach
William, and it might help her to remember?
She had held to Auntie's hand who took her to school that first day,
she remembered that, and cried bitterly because she was frightened. And
then? What had happened then?
Why Amanthus had happened then, the most lovely little girl Selina
seemed ever to have seen, with bronze shoes on with tassels. And
because of Amanthus and the shoes, and more particularly perhaps, the
tassels, she had let go of Auntie's hand and consented to stay.
And then Maudie had happened, a taller little girl with plaits that
were almost red. And after her a little, little girl with black curls
in tiers, whose name turned out to be Juliette, and next a little girl
with straight hair and big eyes named Adele. And following these, some
little boys occurred named Bliss and Brent and Sam and Tommy.
And on this first day did lessons begin? Just as lessons were to begin
this morning with William? If only she could recall!
Miss Dellie Black taught that school, and as Mamma intimated about the
stiff collar and the cuffs, her alpaca apron and the gloves upon her
hands with their fingers neatly cut off across the knuckles, seemed to
be in keeping with her calling. She had a ruler and rapped with it, and
a pointer with which she pointed to a primer chart and a blackboard.
But what had she taught? And how had she taught it? Selina shut her
mental eyes as it were, as she went along, and concentrated all her
forces at recalling.
Absurd! This picture that came to her of that first day! Auntie had
gone, and the class came out and stood in a row before Miss Dellie
because she said stand so. And _she_ stood before the chart with the
pointer and with a tap of the wood on the page beneath a black mark,
said, _"This is A._"
Everybody was polite about it, but even so Miss Dellie tapped again
and harder as though they had disputed it, and said again and louder,
"_This is A._"
Everybody accepted it again, but Miss Dellie seemed to want proof of
this.
"Now say it after me, everybody, '_This is A._'"
Everybody said it after Miss Dellie.
"Now say it again without me," from Miss Dellie.
And after they had said it again without her, the little, little girl
with the black curls, the little girl whose name proved to be Juliette,
looked up into Miss Dellie's face, her own little face and her eyes
full of wondering interest.
"Why's it A?" she asked the lady.
"What? What's that?" from Miss Dellie Black sharply. "Don't you know
I'm talking, little girl? And you must listen!"
Half a dozen volunteers explained what she had said, Maudie with the
red plaits, Tommy, Sam and others.
"She says _why's_ it A?"
"She's a naughty little girl not to know her place in school," said
Miss Dellie? Black firmly, "and if she can't be quiet she can go to her
seat and stay there."
Absurd again! So Selina told herself as before. Much good a recall like
this could do her this morning! She'd try again.
But this time it wasn't a picture of school that came to her at all.
But of herself at home going to Papa full of pride in her achievements
_at school_, and carrying with her to his knee, her primer open at a
picture.
"What's this?" Papa had said, full of flattering concern. "A big, big
ox gazing down on a frog on a lily-pad? What? No? It isn't any ox?
Miss Lizzie gave it to you for your lesson to-morrow, and she said so?
Though it may be a frog? If it isn't an ox, then what is it, Selina?"
She had told him clear and sure, that funny little fair-haired girl.
"'Tain't an ox. Miss Dellie told us what it was when she held up the
picture. It's a fable!"
Absurd again! And ridiculous! How was any of all this going to help
her, the grown Selina, to teach William?
* * * * *
The Williams' house stood in a long, narrow corner lot. Its windows
were tall and narrow; its front door was narrow and high. A white maid,
whose manner as she surveyed you, at once seemed to disqualify you,
opened the door. Selina remembered her from the other day.
It was a very proper house within, very exact, very shining, very
precise. One's heart opened a little way for William doomed to live his
infant days amid it.
Yet it almost would seem Selina had misjudged Mrs. Williams. She
appeared now at the head of the stairs as Selina came in, Amazonian,
handsome, impressive, and called down to her quite as anybody might.
She was so pleasantly excited she forgot to be condescending and
reassuring.
"Come right up, Selina. I'm sure you're going to feel I've done my best
for you. I couldn't feel I quite _could_ let you come way out here for
just _William_."
She actually radiated enthusiasm as Selina reached the head of the
stairs. "I made up my mind some of the mothers in this neighborhood had
to be made to take advantage of this opportunity I was offering them.
Come with me to the sewing-room. I've turned that over to you for the
present. I've put the lap-board across chairs for two to sit at, and
the checker-board on a chair for another. William has his own desk.
I've got you four pupils."
Selina followed Mrs. Williams through the hall toward the sewing-room.
"Rupy Dodd and Willy Dodd are midway of the seven Dodd children. Their
mother will be over to see you as soon as she can. It was a mercy on my
part to insist she enter these two. Henry Revis is our doctor's son.
It'll take him off the street, as I pointed out to his father. His
mother also will be over to see you."
They went into the sewing-room, Mrs. Williams ahead, making the
introductions.
"Rupy and Willy and Henry and William, this is Miss Wistar, Miss Selina
Wistar, the young lady, the very lovely and kind young lady I think we
may say, who is coming every day to teach you. Rupy!"
And at this one of the two little boys seated at the lap-board,
partially desisted from his absorption with some crimson rose-hips and
looked up. The lap-board was strewn with stems and husks and some of
the rose-hip contents.
"Rupy," sharply, "are you quite sure they're _good_ to eat?"
"Aw, who's eatin' 'em?" said Rupy the sturdy, red-haired and freckled,
spewing out rose-hip fuzz along with disgust at woman's blindness and
interference in what she didn't understand. "I took 'em away f'om Willy
to bust 'em an' see what's in 'em. Mummer sent 'em over to the teacher."
"I'll bust some myse'f soon as he'll lemme," from Willy anxiously, not
quite so sturdy and with hair not quite so red and paler freckles.
"Rupy's the oldest," from Mrs. Williams as if it were apology and
accounted for the whole business. "Willy's his twin. William, you and
Henry come and speak to Miss Wistar."
* * * * *
Mrs. Williams had withdrawn. Selma's coat and hat were on the sofa in
the corner and she had taken the chair provided for her beside a small
table. Her color came and went, her hair shone with pale luster, her
manner was pretty and the collar and cuffs were becoming.
At desk, checker-board and lap-board her pupils sat before her and
gazed at her.
William was at the desk. He was very clean, very shining and very
gloomy. His head _was_ too large. It looked tired as from the carrying
of an overweight of suspicion. Patiently he eyed her and the whole
business about to be with distrust. In a curious way it warmed Selina's
heart, causing her to feel banded with William as against some outside
cunning force. It was as if she found a friend and ally here in William.
Rupy Dodd and Willy Dodd sat at the lap-board. As said before, they
had red hair and freckles wherever freckles supposedly might be. Rupy
having abandoned the rose-hips by request, looked alert and Willy, his
twin, looked at Rupy.
Henry at the checker-board was small and lean with a keen blue eye and
a keener air. Asked by Selina to tell her again what his name was he
gave it with briskness and every off-hand due, as Hennery. A minute
before she had heard this Henry sum her up to Rupy.
"Aw, she ain't a teacher, she's a girl."
And she had heard the contumely of Rupy's reply: "With molasses-candy
plaits round her head."
* * * * *
Selina in the chair before her class held a slate in her hand. She had
borrowed it from William and with a bit of chalk supplied her by Mrs.
Williams from the machine drawer, had made a certain symbol upon it.
This slate with the symbol in chalk upon it she now held up to the
class.
"This, William and Rupy and Willy and Henry," she said a little
tremulously, even while trying to make it sound firm, "_this is A._"
William looked tired with distrust of the whole doubtless tricky
business. He'd been fooled into this thing called life for a starter,
his manner seemed to say, and he'd be wary and watchful about the rest.
Let it be A, it was her business since she was claiming it was A, not
his.
Henry spoke disparagingly. "Pshaw, I know the whole durned business
from A to Izzard. It don't need any teacher to tell _me_ what's A."
Willy was peevish. But then, as everybody's manner of bearing with him
said, including his brother, what was he but a twin? "What's Izzard?"
from Willy, peevishly. "I know A. My Mummer, she taught us A. What you
meanin' by Izzard, Henry?"
But Rupy the flame-headed, spewing some more just-discovered rose-hip
fuzz out his mouth through a gap made by two missing incisors, here
spread himself across the lap-board and asked a question. Asked it as
one asked a question he long has wanted to know. Asked it in faith with
a demanding eye, as one who means to bite into more fruits in life than
mere rose-hips and reveal their hearts, or know the reason.
"_Why's it A?_"
And the girl-teacher, this Selina, looked back at him. Why was it A,
indeed? Rupy of this decade was asking as Juliette of the last decade
had done. And _Juliette_ had had no answer.
William spoke up out of what one gathered was the gloom of his own
experience, addressing himself to Rupy. "She'll tell you it's because
God says so. Eve'ybody tells you that."
Rupy flung himself back off the lap-board against his chair with the
air of one who had her. "Why's it A?" he repeated.
Henry, small, lean, knowing, never had remitted his shrewd gaze fixed
appraisingly upon her. Suddenly now he relaxed and his manner changed
from challenging to protective, from aggressive to benignant. "Aw, gwan
an' say it out. Don't you be afraid. You say what you wanter say about
why it's A."
For Henry had read her and discovered her. _She didn't know why it was
A!_
And Selina drawing enlightenment from Henry upon the wise path to
tread, said what she wanted to say, just as he bade her do.
"I don't know why it's A. The first day I ever went to school we asked
why it was A, but nobody told us."
"An' you don't know yet?" from William with the triumph of the certain
if gloomy prognostigator.
Rupy seemed to feel that he had started all this and was responsible.
His air, too, like Henry's, had changed from the demanding and the
challenging to the protective. She was a girl, and she didn't know!
What further proof needed that she was here to be taken care of?
"Well, anyhow this one's A. Go on. The next one's B. We all know 'em."
Willy came to as though the burden of the proof suddenly was put upon
him.
"B bit it, C cut it, D dealt it----"
"Aw, Willy," from Rupy disgustedly, "you go on like a girl when she
thinks she knows it."
William emerged into an outraged being. "Don't go on like a girl. You
gimme back them rose-hips. They was mine to give the teacher."
"Well," grumbled Rupy as with one willing to take part of it back, "if,
'tain't like a girl, it's like a twin, then."
* * * * *
They knew their letters, they knew their numbers, up to ten at least,
they all had primers and had them with them, and proved to her they
knew cat, and rat, and mat, and hen, and pen and men, on the page.
Selina didn't believe, however, that any of them could read. As well
make a start somewhere and find out. She turned to a page well on in
the primer, a page she had met before in her day. She held it up to
them. It showed a benevolent bovine gazing downward at a frog on a
lily-pad.
"Everybody turn to this page. It's a fable and we'll start there."
They were on to her at once with contumely and derision, Rupy the
freckled, Henry the lean, William the tired because as now of the very
inadequateness of most creatures.
"Fable?" from Rupy. "What for's it any fable? What's a fable?"
pityingly.
"Aw, 'tain't no fable, can't you see it ain't?" from Henry in disgust.
From William with gloomy patience. "It's an ox. And the thing it's
talking to is a frog."
Willy bobbed up. He was nothing but a twin, poor soul! But even so,
_he'd_ show her! "O-x, ox, f-r-o-g, frog, p-r-i-m, prim, e-r, er,
primer."
"Aw, Willy," from Rupy in tones of even greater disgust. "Whut's the
matter with you? This here's _her_ school. Let her talk. It ain't
your'n."
For she was a girl! And discovered to be pretty! And twice proven under
test not to know! She was here to be taken care of and protected! What
further proofs of this were needed?
* * * * *
Mrs. Williams came out to the hall as Selina was leaving at noon. "I
hope you feel you got along fairly well? That your first morning gave
you encouragement?"
Selina hesitated. Her linen collar was a bit awry and the crown of
flaxen plaits about her head had sagged. "It's--it's different from
what I thought. I don't think I knew what little boys were like.
It's--it's interesting, and I dare say I'll like it. Little girls, as I
remember us, tried to think the way we were told to think. It's as if
little boys feel that's a reason for thinking the other way."
"I dare say," from Mrs. Williams absently. She wasn't following what
Selina had to say. But then Selina wasn't at all certain she was
following herself.
"I feel you're quite justified in coming to us now," Mrs. Williams was
saying. "It's a great relief to me that I succeeded in convincing two
mothers at least of how greatly it was to their advantage to send their
children over. You understand, of course, Selina, that Rupert and Willy
and Henry mean four dollars for you, the same as my William?"
It was what Selina had been anxious to know but had not quite liked to
ask.
CHAPTER FOUR
When Selina returned from her first morning's teaching, she had much
to tell. She almost felt she was growing sordid and mercenary herself.
"When I got to Mrs. Williams', Mamma, I found three other pupils
waiting for me."
"It's an ugly brick front, that house of the Williams', so tall and
spare," said her mother, not just grasping what was significant in the
information.
"Three more pupils it means, Mamma and Auntie, making _four_ in all."
"I'm sure I'm glad she proved as good as her word," said Auntie. "I
suppose because she needed the others to make up the class for her
own child, she made those mothers feel it was entirely her interest
in their children's welfare bringing it about. People always go down
before that sort of zeal for their benefit. That's Amelia McIntosh,
exactly!"
Selina tried again. She herself was tremendously excited. If when she
arrived at the Williams' and found those four wide-eyed little boys
awaiting her, her heart misgave her as to what she was going to do with
them, she had no intention of telling it at home, and if damage seemed
likely to be done at her novice hands to the innocent William and his
equally innocent companions, she was not thinking of that part of it at
all! What she was trying to make plain was of a different nature.
"Don't you realize what it means, Mamma? Four pupils at four dollars a
pupil! Think of that, Auntie!"
They saw the point at last and dropping their sewing in their laps, sat
up animated and excited.
"Four pupils at four dollars a pupil?" said Auntie. "That's how much
for a week's teaching, Lavinia?" Auntie always succumbed before figures.
"Four and four's eight, and eight's sixteen," said Mamma, dazzled, "and
multiply this sixteen by four again for a month's total--four t'm's six
is twenty-four, four t'm's one is four and two to carry, is--! Selina,
you must have a round-necked, real party dress now!" happily.
"And two to carry is what, Lavinia?" from Auntie anxiously. "Sixty-four
dollars?" in answer to her sister-in-law's triumphant reply. "I can't
believe it! Selina, you must have a hat with a soft feather, too!"
Selina was dazzled, too, but endeavoring to hold herself steady.
Fifteen dollars was the most she had had for her own at any one time in
her life. She had held on to it hoardingly, letting a dozen things go
by that she really wanted, to lose her head in the end and spend it for
a thing she didn't want at all as it proved. She was going to keep her
head and her dignity this time over this sudden wealth opening to her.
"I shall pay Aunt Viney from now on; that's to be my part," she
said with finality. "Remember that, please, Mamma, in making your
calculations."
"But nothing more," from Auntie.
"Not one thing more, other than for yourself," from Mamma, "and I shall
mention the matter to your father, now," happily, "there's nothing in
it for him to feel worried over now."
Her father spoke to Selina that evening, stopping her on her way up the
stairs as he came down.
"Your mother has told me about this teaching, since I got home," he
said. "Stop a moment, Selina."
He lifted her face by a hand placed softly beneath her chin as they
stood there on the steps. The refined, rather delicate face with the
close brown beard she perforce thus looked up into, was sensitive as
her own.
The eyes seemed to be regarding her as from a new viewpoint. His own
little daughter, this young person with the all too heavy flaxen plaits
and the dress-skirt down to her instep!
"Your mother assures me you chose to do this teaching yourself, Selina?
Am I to decry it, or applaud it?"
She was horribly embarrassed, not being accustomed to discuss her
affairs in this way with him, communications of an intimate nature
between them always being through her mother. The thing was to end
the interview as quickly as possible and get away from the disturbing
proximity.
"It's settled, Papa, so don't decry it," she spoke stiffly and even
while doing so was ashamed of it.
He was regarding her a little wistfully. "Your mother tells me,
Selina, that you will need a winter dress?" Was he groping, perhaps
sorrowfully, trying to find some point through which to reach her? "See
to it that it comes from me, will you, and that it is a nice one?"
Again she was ashamed, this time of the relief with which she fled from
his kiss and the touch of his hand on her shoulder.
Apparently there is everything in an undertaking being a success, even
when it is teaching for your living, and you a woman. Selina told
Juliette, what her four pupils were to bring her, and she told the
others, they who had been so plainly shocked and full of distress for
her, and they came hurrying over, filled with excitement and admiration
now.
It was the afternoon following Selina's second day of teaching. She
was in her own room which overlooked the backyard and Auntie's beds
of salvias and dahlias still braving the first light frosts. Now
Selina felt that her room didn't lack distinction. She would have
preferred a set of cottage furniture like Maud's, of course, white with
decalcomania decorations on it in flowers and landscapes, instead of
the despised mahogany set that had belonged to the grandmother she was
named for. Selina belonged to her own day and hour.
"Cottage furniture is adorable and mahogany relegated to attics and
junk shops," she once had said discontentedly to her mother.
Still, with her books and her pictures, a panel in oils done by Cousin
Anna, of cat-tails, and the companion to it in pond-lilies, and a
Japanese parasol over her mantelpiece, her room did not lack for
distinction.
She was looking over the first-reader books she had ordered for her
pupils, and wondering what she was to do with them, when there was
a tap at her door and Amanthus came in. Lashing the laughter of her
cheeks and eyes, and Amanthus did not often stop being enchanted for
side matters, this loveliest of creatures came hurrying to her and
kissed her.
"I've been wanting to tell you, Selina, that Tommy and Bliss and the
other boys think you're wonderful and a dear about teaching." Tommy
Bacon and Bliss were the quite especial two with Amanthus just now,
there never being less than two in her case. "But I came in now because
Juliette has told me! Think of you earning all that!"
Juliette, who had come with Amanthus and had lingered to speak with
Mrs. Wistar and Auntie in the front room, came flashing in here.
"Isn't Amanthus' new dress enchanting, Selina? Who but Mrs. Harrison
would have thought of fawn color and rose? I heard ribbon bows as
trimming were coming in, and I must say I like them. We've been
discussing you, Selina. Maudie says you didn't want to teach, and
that every step we take toward the thing we don't want to do, as you
did, strengthens our characters. She is choosing something for me to
take up, that I won't care for, because she says I'm volatile and
changeable. Think of you really earning all that, Selina!" The crimson
staining Juliette's cheeks was glorious!
"I'm not sure Maudie is such a safe one for you to follow, Judy,"
considered Selina, the fair-skinned. "You're not as volatile, if I know
what volatile is, as she is."
Amanthus turned away from the bureau where she had been fluffing her
sunny yellow hair, and came and sat down before the open coal fire with
the two. "Mamma says Maudie is laughable if she wasn't so masterful,
taking you all after strange gods. I asked her what strange gods meant,
and she laughed and told me I'd never need to find out."
"You won't, Amanthus," said little Judy omnisciently, with a nod of her
small dark head, "the rest of us, I kind of feel," with big solemnity,
"will go far." Then she took a lighter tone. "It's Maudie who's always
proposing something to the rest of us, but when you come to think
about it, we always fall in. There she is now, calling to your mother,
Selina, as she comes up the stairs. She said she'd be over."
Handsome Maud, bringing energy and unrest with her, burst forth with
her plaint before even she had found a seat, Selina vacating one of the
three chairs for her, and taking a place on the bed.
"It's giving me such concern, what I ought to be making of myself,
Selina, now you've set the way, I didn't sleep last night for
considering it. I said so to Papa, and he said 'stuff' which wasn't
polite. And anyway, I know I'm right; everyone should center on some
talent, only I can't decide on which. Think of the proved value of
yours!"
And here Adele came in. She had gone by for one and the other, and then
followed them here. If Juliette was flashing, and Amanthus enchanting,
and Maudie with her red-brown hair and red and white skin, undeniably
handsome, Adele, seemingly, should have been lovely. Her eyes were
dark, and her cheeks softly oval. But somehow she lacked what Maud
called the vital fire. Or was it confidence she lacked? She herself
explained it by saying she never was allowed by her family to respect
the things she had the slightest bent for doing.
As Adele came in now, her dark eyes looked their worry. She took the
place indicated beside Selina on the bed. "You're working for what
you'll get, Selina, giving something for something? It's just come to
me, thinking it over. It must be a self-respecting feeling it gives. It
makes me begin to wonder if I've really any right to my allowance from
Papa."
"While Selina's busy with her teaching, maybe it would be a good
thing for the rest of us to get together and keep up our German,"
burst forth Maud. "Oh, I know, Adele, you mean a different thing,
something highly moral and uncomfortable, but meanwhile let's be doing
_something_. It's inaction that's galling."
"You said the other day," from little Juliette, indignantly, "we'd get
a chart and find out something about the stars and astronomy. I went
and bought me a book!"
Amanthus, flower-like and lovely creature, looked from one to the other
of them as they talked. The wonder on her face and the bother in her
violet eyes made her sweet and irresistible.
"You're so queer," protestingly, "you Maudie and Adele, and yes,
Juliette, too. You do get so worked up. I don't see what it is you're
always thinking you're about. Selina needed the money. I don't see
what more there is to it than that. It's certainly fine she is going
to make all she is by teaching. And, Selina, I mustn't forget, Mamma
told me to give you her love and consummations, no, I guess I mean
congratulations." Amanthus was given to these lapses in her English.
"Are the rest of you going to stay longer? I've got to go."
When Culpepper came around a night later and heard the astounding news
of Selma's good fortune, he pretended to a loss of his usually sober
head.
"Come go to the theater with me to-night, Selina, to celebrate? That
is if your mother agrees? No, certainly I can't afford it. I see the
question in your accusing eyes, but you needn't rub it in that I'm a
plodding dependent and you're the opulent earner."
At the close of her first week at teaching William the gloomy and Rupy
and Willy and Henry, Selina did not bring home her expected sixteen
dollars. "It probably is customary to pay monthly. I didn't like to
ask," she told Mamma and Auntie. "Settle with Aunt Viney for me until I
get it, Mamma; she pays the rent for her room by the week, I know, and
I'll give it to you in a lump sum at the end of the month."
And when that time came, she did, a pale, incredulous, crushed Selina,
and fell weeping against Mamma's neck with a hand outstretched to be
cherished by Auntie.
"She said four dollars a pupil. I supposed she meant a week the
same as we pay Aunt Viney. I thought that was little enough. She is
amazed I could have dreamed of such a thing. She says I ought to have
known, that my common-sense should have told me, that I could have
investigated for myself. She meant four dollars a month for a pupil.
Education comes cheaper than cooks. The money from all four of them---
here it is." Selina stretched forth the other hand passionately. "It
will not quite pay Aunt Viney."
"She was a McIntosh, as your Aunt says. I never did think it was much
of an alliance for a Williams," from Mamma scathingly.
"I said from the start that boy William's head was too large" from
Auntie as one justified.
CHAPTER FIVE
That evening at the dinner table, Mamma looked around the castor and
spoke briskly to Papa, tall and slight gentleman that he was, with
temples hollowing a bit.
"We made a foolish miscalculation in the amount Selina is to receive
for her teaching. We women are poor arithmeticians. With her lack of
experience it is gratifying that she will be commanding the customary
price as it is."
By this Selina understood that her father was to be spared as much
of her disappointment as possible. She really owed this gentleman
something on account in this teaching business, if she were given to
considering money received from him after any such fashion. He had
smilingly, at her mother's request, advanced the amount needed for
books and other material for her teaching, and a second sum for carfare
to the Williams' in bad weather. But these transactions were not on the
mind of Selina at all. Just as the economic end rather than Aunt Viney
was the thing considered by Mamma in the readjustment of the family
wash, so Papa, as a source of supply was taken for granted by Selina.
It would not have occurred to her, nor yet to Mamma or Auntie, or to
any of the mothers and aunts and daughters whom they knew, that the sum
of her earnings was offset by the amount advanced for her equipping. On
the other hand Selina was loving, and quite understood that it should
be the feelings of her father she must spare.
[Illustration: "Mamma looked around the castor and spoke briskly."]
"The experience will mean everything," she claimed briskly and promptly
to her mother's cue, "I ought to be glad to teach for nothing, I
daresay, to get it."
Auntie looked alarmed at any such view of the matter. "I knew of an
apprentice in my young days, our gardener's son, bound out for the
experience in a rope-walk, who carried thirty-seven boils at one time
from the mildewed cornmeal they fed him. I don't approve of anyone
working for anybody for nothing. We're sure to undervalue what we don't
pay the price for. It's a poor plan."
"How you wander," from Mamma.
"Not from my point," from Auntie stoutly. "I've made it."
After dinner Juliette and Maud who lived next door to each other, and
Amanthus and Adele who lived at the opposite ends of the block, came
in in a body. It was a way the group had of getting together at one
house when there was nothing else especial on hand. They trooped gaily
in, dropping their wraps in the hall and coming into the parlor. No
more were they and Selina seated about the open grate fire and Auntie's
burnished brasses, and prepared to talk volubly, than Culpepper walked
in. He found a chair and joined the group.
"Judy and I," Maud was saying to Selina who was pale though nobody
noticed this, "saw you starting out this morning to your teaching. We
think if you'd coil your plaits round your head, instead of looping
them, you'd look older."
"If four infant pupils bring in one swollen fortune," speculated
Culpepper blandly, "how many fortunes, through how many infant pupils,
is one Selina, now she's started, likely to amass?"
It was as well! The mistaken matter of such banter indeed was uppermost
in Selina's thoughts. The minds of these five friends had to be
disabused of their rosy misinformation about her earnings, and the
sooner the better. Selina, who in general had a gay little way in
talking to these friends, endeavored to take that way now.
"I've some interesting data about the market value of education with
some other things," she said briskly. "I'm thinking I'd get rich
sooner, Culpepper, if I abandoned pupils and decided to cook. I'll have
to ask you to divide by four"--did Selina choke a little here?--"that
Fortunatus salary I thought I was getting for teaching William and the
others."
"Selina! Divide by four? What do you mean? Oh, I do wish," plaintively,
"you all would ever say what it is you mean, plain out," from Amanthus.
"Selina!" from Adele, "Oh, I'm sorry!"
"Let me help you choose a better vocation if that's the case,"
indignantly from Maud. "Don't waste yourself on it."
"How did you make such a mistake, Selina? Or was it your mistake?" from
Juliette.
"Mrs. Williams said I ought to have known what she meant, I should have
investigated--" Selina thus was taking up the tale of it once more when
she stopped.
"Yes?" from Culpepper. "We're waiting?"
But with a brisk air of not hearing him, Selina changed the subject.
Her father whom she had forgotten was sitting in the back parlor with
her mother and her aunt, had lowered his paper and was listening, too.
By all the precedents and traditions of her up-bringing, it was hers to
change the subject.
Her audience all were acquainted with the personnel of her little class
of boys by now, for when Selina was interested in a thing she talked
about it. They were familiar, too, with Auntie's grievance about the
cranial peculiarity of William. The thing now was to turn the matter
off with what Maudie would call sprightly nonchalance.
"William's head certainly is growing smaller, you must know," said
Selina with gayety. "Isn't it some sort of reflection on me? As his
teacher? I would have thought it would be the other way."
Culpepper from across the circle was looking at her with those boldly
blue eyes of his, beneath half-raised lids. Papa's paper was lowered to
his knee in the next room. Something was wrong, this brave gayety was
assumed and they showed that they knew it was.
"Bluffed," said Culpepper still with that keen and appraising gaze upon
her, "she's going to quit."
Papa's paper floated unnoticed from his knee to the floor. Was he
listening for what was to come?
"I'm not," said Selina indignantly, stung by these attitudes as of
watchers noting her on trial, "I've just begun."
"Still, it seems to me, Mrs. Williams was right," from little Judy here
in the front room. "You ought to have investigated; you should have
known for yourself. Somehow girls and women never seem to know for
themselves. I wonder why?"
Mrs. Wistar's voice murmuring defensively came in from the next room.
"I hardly follow you, Mr. Wistar! I'm sure it was harder on me than on
Selina to have her so disappointed. No girl was ever more shielded than
she has been from all possible disappointments, and such things, up to
now, nor spared where it was possible to spare her!"
The murmuring voice in reply came from Auntie. "My father's mother with
her eight children followed her husband, she by wagon, he on horseback,
over the old wilderness road to settle here where this town is now. She
learned to use a gun and an axe as well as she used a spinning wheel,
because she had to. She bore him seven more children after they were
here. Nobody spared women or children then. Maybe it's been our mistake
to spare her too much, Lavinia."
CHAPTER SIX
There are Olympians in each group of us, and Mrs. Gwinne Tuttle not
only was of the Olympians in Selina's community, but was held by some
to be _the_ Olympian. Such is the magic of pre-eminence the name Tuttle
sounded chaste and euphonious to the ear.
Selina's aunt and this lady who had gone to school together and were
old friends, met down street. If the weakness of Mrs. Tuttle, who
was an august but kindly soul, lay in a palpable enjoyment in the
overdressing of her large person, her virtues lay in a well-intentioned
heart. Though the details of the meeting between these two ladies were
not all given to Selina, what happened at the underwear counter of the
drygoods store where they met, was this:
"Selina is teaching, Emmeline, teaching in a private way," Auntie
told Mrs. Tuttle. "It does not pay, but it is an opening wedge," an
explanation she made everybody.
"You mean to say, Ann Eliza Wistar, that Robert's child is old enough
for that! Her name, Selina, is for your mother, I remember. And a
mighty capable and resolute woman she is named for. That stock in our
mothers one generation removed from pioneer blood and bone, was fine
stock, Ann Eliza. How is Lavinia taking the child's doing it?"
"Well, she feels it's a pity, and so do I, and so, I think, does
Robert. Selina is pretty, Emmeline."
"H'm, I see. I remember now she is. I used to see her once a year at
least at the dancing school balls. You send her to me, Ann Eliza,
whenever an invitation comes to her from me this winter. No, better,
now I come to think about it, you tell her I want her at my house
to-morrow night. I'm having a musicale. I'll look out for her.
Somewhere before nine o'clock."
Selina reached home that day in excellent spirits anyway. She had
been teaching her class of four for two months now, and William had
been embarrassingly slow starting at reading in his first reader. He
seemed to feel he had enough of reading when he finished his primer.
This morning Mrs. Williams had come to her in the sewing-room, with
reassuring news.
"We find William has begun to read at last, Selina. Day before
yesterday he couldn't, and last night he seized his book, when we
urged him, and deliberately read his father a page about a baby robin,
without a mistake. We think it's wonderful how it's come about all at
once."
Selina thought so, too, but was none the less relieved for that. Not
that she was not conscientious, for with the best will in the world
she was applying the printed page to her four pupils and her pupils
to the page, the moment of flux unfortunately being unpredictable but
exceedingly reassuring when it came. Evidently there is more in the
phrase "born teacher" than she had been aware of, and she grew a bit
heady with the relief of this news.
And here when she reached home was the invitation from Mrs. Tuttle
awaiting her! Honors were crowding her! She and Mamma and Auntie talked
it over eagerly at the lunch table.
"There's no ease like that from going about to the best places," said
Mamma. "I can't be too glad this has come just when it has. It defines
Selina's position. I don't suppose," musingly, "Amelia Williams ever
was asked to the Tuttle home in her life. The McIntoshes never were
anybody. Not that I'd have you mention to her, Selina, that you're
going to this musicale."
"Emmeline's even more given to dress now than when she was a girl,"
said Auntie. "She had trimming in steel and jet all over the bosom of
her dress this morning, and big as she is, it looked too much."
Just here, as Aunt Viney brought in the plum preserves for dessert,
Culpepper walked in with a note from his mother, inclosed in his weekly
letter from home.
"It says 'Ann Eliza' on the outside, ole miss, so I'll have to reckon
it's for you."
Auntie took her note, then broke forth with the more immediate news
happily: "Selina's going to a grown-up party at one of my old friend's
to-morrow night."
Culpepper was bantering but practical. He got his pleasure out of these
dear ladies, too. "Tomorrow night? How's she going to get there?"
True! They all three had forgotten! "To be sure, Selina!" said her
mother, "it is your father's whist night."
"I can't see why she wants to go. I never see much in these things
myself," from Culpepper, "but if you do, Selina, I'll come around and
take you, wherever it is, and get you later and bring you home."
After he was gone Mamma and Auntie sang his praises. "It was both
nice and thoughtful in him to remember about your father and his
neighborhood whist club," said Mamma.
"I hope he's not inconveniencing himself to do it," from Auntie.
It would seem that all those honors right now crowding Selina were gone
to her head. Resenting quite so much solicitude for Culpepper under the
circumstances, she all but tossed that head.
"He wouldn't put himself out, let me assure you Mamma, and you, Auntie,
too, if he didn't want to."
During the afternoon Cousin Anna Tomlinson, who lived a block away,
came around, having heard the news through Aunt Viney, who had stopped
to chat with the servants on her way to the grocery.
"I always meant to give Selina gold beads," she said as she came in,
as if the enormity of the present crisis exonerated her from doing so
now. "What has she to wear, Lavinia? Why certainly she can't go in her
graduating dress. She's worn it on every occasion since she's had it.
It's been dabby for some time."
Cousin Anna was rich, the money belonging to her and not to Cousin
Willoughby Tomlinson, her husband. Her house impeccably swept and
garnished, year after year, was brought up to date though nobody
ever went there, Cousin Willoughby entertaining his friends at that
newly established thing, the club. And Cousin Anna, who had finery in
quantity though she never went anywhere, was fussily dressy, but in
last year's clothes. Just as she could not bear to use her house, so
time had to take the edge of value off her clothes before she wore
them. She had a straight and unswerving backbone; her coiffure as she
styled it, was elaborate; and she settled her watch chain and her rings
constantly.
"And she is every bit as old as I am," Mamma never failed to say.
Cousin Willoughby Tomlinson's mother had been a Wistar, and it was
commonly told among the older set, that he had tried for Emmeline
Knight, she that was now Mrs. Gwinne Tuttle, before he came round to
Cousin Anna.
This person gazed from Mamma to Auntie. "Certainly Selina can't be
allowed to go to a Tuttle entertainment dabby," she said sharply.
"You've never had a real dressmaker dress in your life, have you,
Selina? Emmeline Tuttle is a little too inclined to look on her
invitations as distributed favors. You're going to this musicale in a
Vincent dress of mine, if you can wear it, and judging by the eye, I
think you can. I'll go right home and send it round."
Madame Vincent was the last cry in the community among what Mamma and
Cousin Anna and Auntie called mantua-makers.
Oh, why should the spirit of mortal be proud? Juliette Caldwell,
little vivid, affectionate body, and Adele Carter, impersonation of
consideration for others, coming over as Cousin Anna left, Selina
snubbed them.
They were such slaving and believing followers of Maud! And she, Selina
herself? Well, she was a follower, too, but with reservations. Maud
recently had made sweeping assertions, saying that the group of them
as social entities were sadly limited, and she followed up the charge
by proposing they each commit a passage of poetry to heart each day,
saying she had read, and this really was at base of the whole matter,
that it would strengthen the mind, add to the vocabulary, and furnish
food for quotation and ready repartee. At the time they all had agreed
but Amanthus, who said she did not feel any need for vocabulary or
repartee, and in truth as they could see, she did not need them in the
least as assets in her business of life.
Juliette and Adele were come over now about this matter. They were full
of enthusiasm.
"We were to begin with our committed passages to-day, you remember,"
explained Juliette.
"We both have ours," added Adele.
"I'm really pleased with my way of selecting," from Juliette. "I opened
our volume of Scott and took the lines my eyes fell on:"
"Stern was her look and wild her air,
Back from her shoulders streamed her hair."
"I chose mine from a little volume of selections called 'Pearls of
Wisdom,'" said Adele:
"Man's love is of man's life a thing apart,
'Tis woman's whole existence."
Selina was at both impatient and intolerant. "I was fearfully angry
at Culpepper one day when he said that girls play at being educated
and boys are educated. Sometimes I think Maud is responsible for our
seeming to play at it. Don't you see, Judy dear, if there's anything
really in this idea of Maud's you must choose your quotation? You want
lines that are apt and quotable if you're going to do it at all? These
of yours are relevant to nothing."
"You can't say that of mine," from Adele, pacific enough in general,
but disposed to resent this manner toward Juliette, and from Selina of
all persons, usually so full of concern and appreciation.
This undreamed of Selina answered promptly. "I certainly can't applaud
your choice. Our sex should be the last to admit such an epigram
exists."
* * * * *
Cousin Anna did not send the dress around until the next morning, a
note to Mrs. Wistar which accompanied it, explaining the delay:
"Emmeline Tuttle is a little too pleased with being Emmeline Tuttle. I
am sending a dress this moment home from Vincent for Selina to wear."
On reaching home from the morning's teaching, Selina came hurrying
up to her mother's room to see it. Unboxed and laid on the bed, it
was an impressive affair, and the color rushed to her cheeks, and her
hands sought each other rapturously. Satin puffs in a high-light green
obtruded through slashes in a myrtle-green satin waist and sleeves.
From the throat arose something akin to a Medici collar, and the
skirt flowed away in plenitude. A beaded headdress for the hair of a
seemingly fish-net nature completed the whole.
There was no question Mrs. Wistar and Auntie were dubious. They looked
their worry.
"Is it Mary, Queen of Scots, in a steel engraving, it makes me think
of," from Auntie in an anxiously low voice to Mamma, "or is it Amy
Robsart in our pictorial volume of Scott's heroines?"
"Madame Vincent is always so ahead and so extreme in her styles,"
fretted Mamma, "and yet," still more fretted, "Anna may be depended on
never to forgive us if she isn't allowed to wear it."
[Illustration: "Before the mirror trying on the dress from Cousin
Anna."]
They looked at Selina with her eager color and prettily disordered hair
and shining eyes, already slipped out of her everyday dress of sober
plaids, dear loving child, and before the mirror, trying on the dress
from Cousin Anna.
"Mull and lace and a sash is the proper thing for her at her age, I
don't care if her dress is dabby. And it's a poor rule to be beholden
to anybody," held Auntie.
"We can't get her dress washed and ironed now," from Mrs. Wistar, "and
she took her sash down town to be cleaned and has not gotten it home.
We'll have to give in this time and let her wear this dress of Anna's."
"Come feel the satin of it, Mamma," exulted Selina, "put your cheek
against its sheen, Auntie. Or can one feel a sheen?" she laughed
happily. "Maud says let the love of dress get in your blood and it will
poison your life at its spring, and you even might come to marry for
what a man could give you! She meant it for Juliette who cried because
her mother wouldn't let her have high heels to make her taller. But
I'm not sure I see Maud's logic. When we marry, we take from the man
anyhow, don't we? Why shouldn't one care then, in the ratio of what one
takes? Don't look so shocked, Auntie, I'm only thinking it out."
"Sometimes, Selina," said Auntie, dismayed, "you talk like you weren't
the girl we brought you up to be! The dress fits well enough, that's
all I can say for it."
"It looks a little like a fancy costume," admitted Selina doubtfully,
"but anyhow it's wonderful and I love it. I think, Auntie dear,"
reassuringly, "it isn't that Maud and the rest of us are undependable.
It's that we want something, and we don't know what we want. When
we're with people who're grandly mental, we think it's that, or
religious, it's that, or when it's someone who's a social personage,
then it seems as if it's that. Does it sound weak-minded Auntie,
veering so?"
This evening of the musicale Culpepper came for Selina on the moment,
which he did not always do, and he and she in her gorgeousness, went
off gayly together, Mamma and Auntie seeing them to the door.
"She's really a child at heart, Lavinia," worried Auntie, after
they were gone, "a child, I sometimes fear, that has had so little
experience in life that it's pitiful. And yet this afternoon she spoke
shockingly. I wouldn't have her too helpless and inexperienced, but
neither would I have her lose her illusions. There's mighty little left
a woman when she parts with these."
"If I only felt more comfortable in my mind about that dress," from
Mrs. Wistar. "Sometimes I could wish I were a person of more courage
and finality; I didn't want to let her wear it."
"No, I wouldn't want her to feel we had failed her about it," agreed
Auntie. "I wouldn't want her ever to feel we'd failed her anywhere, but
sometimes I'm afraid she's going to."
CHAPTER SEVEN
The night was mild. When Culpepper and Selina reached the car-line on a
nearby street, the car with its two jogging little mules was in sight.
"There comes the car, and here comes the moon," said Culpepper. "Shall
we ride or walk?"
They walked.
Now Selina and her girl friends knew a sufficient number of boys,
always had known a plentiful number in fact, Tommy and Bliss and Brent
and the rest, as she termed them. Culpepper, however, was not of these:
he was older, he was from away and he was studying law; many reasons in
fact combined to make it gratifying to have it Culpepper.
He with three other law students had rooms including a common
sitting-room over a confectionery, where ordinarily young men away from
home in the city would have been in boarding houses. From information
dropped by Culpepper, they smoked pipes and played chess and read books
by writers known as Darwin and Spencer and Buckle. That they were bold
and buccaneeringly adventurous figures thus may be seen.
Added to all this, Culpepper did not care for girls, Selina being the
only one he went with, and further, he had been so used to a big family
connection and an overflowing house and habitual hubbub, Cousin Maria
Buxton, his stepmother, being related to everybody in her part of the
state, that his avowed dislike to gatherings and affairs was genuine.
"You men don't like to do a thing, and you say so and don't do it,"
wondered Selina; "Papa gave up night church long ago, and Mamma who
loves to go, had to accommodate herself to it."
Culpepper defended his sex. "We're honest. You're not, women as a
class, I mean. My stepmother is, but then she's independent."
"Independent?"
"Has her own means and manages her own affairs. It makes the rest of
you propitiatory," bluntly.
"Propitiatory? What does?"
"Taking money as it's doled to you, or doing without."
They had reached the Tuttle house now in its broad yard. Carriages were
arriving, delivering their occupants at the curb and driving away.
Culpepper steered Selina in at the gate, up the flagging, and with her
mounted the steps.
"I'm glad it's you and not me," was his cheering remark.
Selina herself was not feeling so glad about it all at once. Why had
she not wondered earlier if any persons she knew would be here?
As the door opened to admit guests just ahead of them and the light
fell on the lady entering and on her evening wrap bordered with
swansdown, that elegance of the hour, Selina became conscious of
Mamma's knitted throw on her head and Auntie's striped scarf about her
shoulders.
"You--you'll be for me on time?" she reminded Culpepper, "Mamma thought
half-past eleven at the latest?"
"Can you fancy I won't?" he returned, handing her in at the door, which
was a nice way of putting it and a good deal from him.
Evidently it is one thing to be within the gay world and another to be
of this world, and Selina in her striped scarf made her way hurriedly
up the stairs. And a dressing-room filled with ladies, who know each
other and who do not know you, presents parallels with Polar regions
for chill and solitudes. Glances fell on her but they passed her over,
or traveled elsewhere or beyond.
Moods have a protean way of changing from roseate hues to grayness.
Even the sustaining glory of Cousin Anna's dress seemed threatened,
for as the maid removed the striped scarf, it appeared according
to the cheval glass, that the radiance of spirit which earlier had
appropriated the gown to its wearer, had flickered and expired, leaving
the one Cousin Anna's, and the other, Selina Wistar, frightened and ill
at ease and unforgivably young.
She moved with the company out into the hall and down the stairs. The
walls were white and gold, paneled, and the stair covering was crimson;
there were niches on the landing and again down the further flight of
the stairs, from which looked busts of, so far as Selina knew, male
Tuttles in white marble. It was august and costly and subduing, and
though she had yet to live to be told it, Victorian and lamentable.
The parlors as seen through the arched entrances as she came
reluctantly down the steps, were spacious, with crimson carpets of a
piece with that in the halls, pier glasses, crimson curtains and gilt
cornices, marble mantels outvying the niched busts for whiteness, prism
chandeliers and gilt chairs in rows for the approaching musicale.
Mrs. Tuttle was stationed in the first parlor and by custom or
arrangement or understanding everything fell away from her as it were,
or so it seemed to Selina as she made her way in, the guests as they
were presented retreating into the background of the far parlor.
A young man of such distinguished and easy appearance as to suggest
new standards for judgment of Tommy and Bliss and Brent and the rest,
handed the guests on to the person of the hostess. He proved to be Mr.
Tuttle Jones, a nephew of the lady's deceased husband. Selina having in
time thus reached Mrs. Tuttle, raised her eyes.
In the full enjoyment of her large person's sartorial splendor stood
this lady, satin puffs in a high-light salmon, obtruding through
slashes in a crimson satin waist and sleeves, from the open throat of
which arose something akin to a Medici collar, the skirt flowing away
in plenitude and a beaded headdress of a seemingly fish-net texture,
completing the whole.
And in the pier glass just behind Mrs. Tuttle, and repeated again and
again and yet and yet again from a confronting pier glass at the far
end of the adjoining parlor, appeared a half dozen, a dozen, a hundred,
was it a thousand reflected Selinas in myrtle and high-light greens,
puffs, slashes, and netted headdress, vanishing into perspective? And
multitudes upon multitudes grouped about the back parlor, or so it
seemed to Selina, looking on.
So, it was the person of that young niece of Ann Eliza Wistar's that
Mrs. Tuttle was gazing on? This lady never was known not to speak her
mind.
"If Vincent made that dress for you, Selina, she's a fool."
The mirrors repeated the accusation, but they repeated the salmon and
crimson person of Mrs. Tuttle, too. She was not one to spare herself at
all.
"And when I allowed her to make its original, or its replica as the
case may be, for me, I was another."
Selina found speech small and arriving from far. "Cousin Anna Tomlinson
sent the dress around so that I could come."
[Illustration: "Mr. Tuttle Jones ... sat with her through a pianoforte
number."]
"Well, as for Anna Pope, by the grace of God, Tomlinson, there's never
been any doubt in anybody's mind, she's a fool. As for Vincent, it's
sheer perfidy! Go over there, in the next room, this one is cleared
for the piano and the performers. Find a chair, get a place, I'll send
someone to you, but for the land's sake, go and don't come back near
me."
Selina hurriedly sought a gilded chair in an unobtrusive position,
which as the evening went on proved to be an island solitude in an
immediate waste of vacant chairs. She had not even a program to bury
herself in. True, Mr. Tuttle Jones, the nephew, came and sat with her
through a pianoforte number, but at its close he left, to come again in
time with a second polite but perfunctory young man who also in time
departed.
Then it happened. Selina never will forget it, never. A vocal number
had reached that point where it reiteratingly bade 'Good-bye to hope,
good-bye, good-bye,' and she was bitterly agreeing, when a gloved hand
reached out and touched an empty gilt chair a few places beyond, while
the young lady owner of the hand and of the brown eyes above it, smiled
and in quiet gesture invited her to take it. What the kindly eyes had
been seeing, though Selina could not know this, was a young guest
awkwardly alone and betraying it in a color coming and going painfully
and a chin piteously inclined to quiver.
Selina went, seventeen is not so very far along the way, and the sob
so long threatening in the throat within the Vincent setting, arose
undisguisedly.
The owner of the smiling eyes, whose own shoulders emerged from a
charming and correct gown, by sharing her program afforded a momentary
sheltering for recovery.
At the close of the song came an intermission, during which servants
came about with ices.
Selina's companion chatted. "I should say we both were a little strange
here. I am 'Hontas Boswell, Pocahontas Boswell, from Eadston. My aunt
and I are down spending a few days at the hotel, and her old friend,
Mrs. Tuttle, was good enough to ask us here to-night. Shall you and I
agree to stay together?"
CHAPTER EIGHT
Selina and Miss Pocahontas had supper together at a little table in a
bay window with Mr. Tuttle Jones as a somewhat peripatetic third, since
his duties as aid to his aunt kept him constantly leaving them.
In the beautiful time Selina now found herself having with this new
friend, she told her about Mamma and Papa and Auntie, and even some
of the rest of it, about the friends of her youth, for instance, and
William Jr., whom she taught, and about Culpepper who brought her. For
after all, at seventeen, is not one's little world one's world, that is
to be talked about? And were not the warm brown eyes of Miss Boswell
amazingly tender and encouraging as she smiled back upon this ardent
young face?
Mr. Jones with a murmuring sigh of further apology came and sank into
his place once more with them at the bay-window table. He was a quick
and alert young man, with a nice smile and when he had time, a nice
manner. Was he perhaps dapper? His small moustache was immaculate, and
his tie and boutonnière irreproachable.
It would seem he was taking note of Selina as a possible entity for the
first time. "My aunt asked me to apologize to you about something I
don't seem to understand. She says she can't come herself----
"--without making herself ridiculous," said this hitherto seemingly
harmless young Miss Wistar with unlocked for and apparently astute
bitterness. Miss Boswell looked surprised. Mr. Jones looked at Selina.
He looked again. He might look away, as indeed he did, to concern
himself with the final course for their table, but Selina was an entity
now.
At half-past eleven she came downstairs amid the departing guests,
Mamma's throw upon her head, Auntie's scarf about her shoulders, still
in the comforting care of Miss Pocahontas Boswell and her aunt, Miss
Boswell. Miss Pocahontas was all kindness to the end. "And may we not
take you home? Our carriage is double?" she asked as they reached the
hall.
"Culpepper is to come for me," Selina explained. "He would not know
what to do."
"My niece tells me it is Maria Buxton's stepson, from up our way, you
speak of," said Miss Boswell, the aunt; "I remember him as a very
blunt, outspoken little son of a blunt father and outspoken stepmother.
If he is to come for you we had surely better leave you for him."
But come for her is what Culpepper failed to do. The various groups
departed, the crowd in the hallway thinned, a silver-chimed clock
somewhere struck the quarter, and the street-cars would stop at twelve.
The servants in the hall gathering up this and that, looked at Selina
interrogatively, then departed, too.
It was here that Mrs. Tuttle came out into the hall and found her. This
lady seemed engrossed in the closing of the house by the servants now,
and to have forgotten the matter of Cousin Anna's dress and Vincent's
perfidy.
"Culpepper who? Maria Buxton's boy?" This in answer to Selina's
explanation. "Ann Eliza didn't tell me he was living here? Is he
personable? A hostess always needs young men. Wait, Reuben," this to
the gray-haired negro man in livery moving around in the background,
"you know I always want to satisfy myself the window fastenings _are_
secure," Then to Selina, "You say he said he _would_ be here? What on
earth are we going to do about it, say _dear_ child?"
The lights were out now but for one or two, and everyone had
disappeared but Mrs. Tuttle and Selina and Reuben. Seeing a reflected
figure in a pier glass opposite her, and recognizing that disheveled
and distraught figure to be her own, certain words heard from Juliette
that afternoon, and which Selina had held to be inapt and wanting in
relevancy, beat themselves to measure on her brain:
"Wild was her look and stern her air,
Back from her shoulders streamed her hair"
[Illustration: "Selina hurried out and joined him."]
And when at length, incredible, unpardonable, unforgivable length,
Culpepper did come and Selina hurried out and joined him, what had he
to say?
"Of course you can't, I won't ask you to forgive me, Selina. There
was a boxing match on, but I would not go to that. Then I remembered
an expert chess game at--er--a place, a Hungarian player against home
talent, but I knew I would get drawn into the moves and--well. So I
went back to the rooms and the boys were all there, and we got to
jawing about this new thing by a man named George, called Single Tax,
and I got into the talk and forgot."
Selina stopped by Adele's house on her way to her teaching the next
morning. She was anxiously sweet and sorry, the natural Selina now.
"I was short about those quotations yesterday, Adele," she
acknowledged, "and I want to say to you, and I mean to say to Judy,
that I've every reason since I saw you both and was so rude, to think
they are, well, the one apt and the other true. Men it seems have so
many interests, they forget to come for us when they promise!" And she
told Adele all about it.
"But I made that Mr. Jones acknowledge me," she commented. "I don't
believe I could have stood all the rest if I couldn't feel I did
that. I'm beginning to believe that we only grow through a sort of
self-assertion, Adele. And I owe it to my self-respect, too, to say I
think Auntie's old friend, Mrs. Tuttle, was very rude."
She came home from her morning's work perturbed, and joined Mamma and
Auntie at the lunch table, a worried frown puckering her brow.
"It's the last straw. This time yesterday I was so elated on every
count. What's that saying of Papa's whist club when they're counting
up the score? Honors are easy, isn't it? Mrs. Williams and I were so
relieved when she found William could read. To-day she tells me she
believes he did it deliberately to stop their talk. He took a page
about a baby robin that he's heard the others read so often he knows it
by heart."
CHAPTER NINE
"Girls play at being educated and boys are educated," Culpepper had
said. Selina was to ask herself again if this was so.
She and her mother went at once to call on Miss Boswell and Miss
Pocahontas Boswell at their hotel. And so glowing was the further
description given by Selina to her four friends of the charms of Miss
Boswell the younger, that she had to go again to take them. Following
this the five were invited by Miss Pocahontas to spend an afternoon
with her, and she had what Maud called a little collation for them in
her hotel sitting-room.
Mamma and Auntie had the offer of Cousin Anna Tomlinson's carriage and
coachman for this same afternoon, and in order that the young people
might be free, they took Miss Boswell the elder for a drive to the
cemetery, they being of a mind, and the community with them, that no
more seemly spot for innocent recreation and enjoyment might be.
The afternoon and its collation were so delightful, and Miss 'Hontas
in a semi-formal afternoon gown was so winning, the guests went home
in a state of uplift, with the exception of Amanthus who seemed
non-committal. But, as Maud said, charming people are so often
resentful of other people being charming.
Selina spoke at home about this attitude from Amanthus. "She seemed
ungenerous over our admiration for Miss Pocahontas, Mamma. Right in
the middle of the afternoon she wanted to come home. Lovely as she is,
she's hard to stand when she acts this way."
"I've never encouraged you to find fault with your friends, Selina,"
reproved her mother. "No doubt Amanthus had her grounds."
"I haven't a doubt she had," from Auntie. "I've watched Amanthus
before. If a thing's true, Lavinia, why shouldn't Selina say it? She'll
get along the better for recognizing it. Refusing to admit a fact
doesn't make it less so."
"I've always found Amanthus sweetly feminine," said Mamma concisely.
"And there isn't a man won't agree with you," from Auntie. "She's
exactly to the pattern of what they look for in women. I found that out
before ever Amanthus was born."
"Ann Eliza, I'm astonished at your tone!"
"The tone goes with the rankle that's been in me a good many years,
Lavinia."
Selina and her group met with Maud this same evening to talk the
afternoon over as was their habit after an occasion. The Addisons were
prosperous and their parlors boasted velvet carpets, mirrors over the
mantels, lace curtains stiff with pattern and the seemly rest of what
handsome parlors at that day should boast.
Again Amanthus took exception to the enthusiasm over Miss Boswell.
Perhaps there was something in the name of the lady that was suggestive
of the especial line of attack. "I don't see anything so good-looking
about her," she declared. "She's too dark; she looks like an Indian
squab."
Amanthus was given to occasional lapses in her words, and while as a
rule the others were tolerant with her, this as concerning Miss Boswell
was too much.
"Meaning squaw, we are to presume?" said Maud--generous-spirited,
whole-souled Maud, scornful of such assets as mere red-brown hair and
splendid skin, the emphasis with her being laid on loftier attainments!
"I can't keep you from presuming," returned Amanthus with dignity,
_her_ daffodil yellow head held high, "I said squab."
"But it doesn't mean anything used so," pointed out conscientious Adele.
"Not a thing," corroborated little Juliette.
"You can't prove that it doesn't to me," returned Amanthus, which after
all was true. It also was characteristic of Amanthus. It was best to
change the subject. Perhaps it was unfortunate that it returned to Miss
Boswell.
"It seems to Mamma and to me," said Selina, "that I ought to do
something in the way of entertaining for Miss Pocahontas. It's more
of an occasion to have it in the evening, of course, but it can't be
dancing in our little house, nor music, because we can't depend on our
piano any longer."
"You wouldn't want the ordinary thing for her anyway," said Maud
promptly and decidedly. "Selina," one saw the sweep as it were of
Maudie's unbridled fancy as it mounted, one braced oneself against the
oncoming rush of her enthusiasm, "I have the idea!" Did she have it,
or was she merely pursuing it unaware of what it would be until she
overtook it? "Unless you actually want it, let me ask Mamma if I may
give it myself? I should love to. What I say," she had it now, and
brought it forth with the pride of ownership, "is a conversazione!"
"But I do want it," Selina hastened to declare, "though," dubiously, "I
hadn't thought of attempting anything like that."
Amanthus spoke here and almost crossly. "Mamma says the accustomed
thing is nearly always the proper thing. She told me to remember that.
I can't see why you're always hunting the unusual thing? I don't know
what a conversazione is."
"A conversazione," said Maud loftily, "is a meeting for conversation,
preferably on belle-lettres or kindred topics. It's not unlike the
French salons."
"I'll speak to Mamma," from Selina still more dubiously, "and if she
agrees I'll go and see Miss Pocahontas. If I do decide on it, will you
meet with me and help me plan it?"
"Meet here," said Maud, "and in the mean season I'll look up the
subject further."
When Selina went home with her proposal, Mrs. Wistar was more concerned
with the obligation than the nature of the entertaining. "Have what you
please, Selina, so it's reasonably simple in its cost and we can afford
it. I'm glad to have you do it for Miss Boswell."
Auntie demurred. "I like the idea of a party, too," she said, "but why
not just a party? What does Selina, or what do the others know about
a---- what is it you're proposing to have, Selina? A conversazione?
It sounds to me like borrowed finery in another guise such as we let
her wear to the musicale. Let's don't do it again, Lavinia. I don't
fancy mental furbelows that are not her own any more than dressmaker
furbelows. Let Selina give a plain party."
"Why should you want to discourage the child, Ann Eliza? If she and the
others want to have a conversational evening. I can see no reasonable
grounds for objection."
Accordingly the group met with Maud the next evening and Selina
reported. "Mamma approves, but Miss Pocahontas looked a little startled
when I said conversazione. Or maybe I imagined she did, for immediately
she smiled charmingly and said, 'How very lovely!' Maudie, do you
really think we'd better undertake it?"
Having originated an idea, Maud never was known to relinquish it. "Just
as you please," largely, "as I said before if you don't want it, let me
give it."
Selina surrendered. "You got our literary club at school into that
debate with the boys from the high school," she reminded Maud uneasily
however, "and what we thought at the time was applause from them, we
found out afterward was laughter."
They all moved uneasily at the recollection, all but Amanthus and she
had not been in it.
"It was the subject Maud insisted on, we can see that now," said
Juliette bitterly, "'Resolved that the works of Alexander Pope are
atheistical in their tendency.' We ought to have known they were
laughing at us when they accepted it."
"If we're here to help you, Selina," said Maud loftily, "we'd better
get about it. There's more than enough of our sex for the evening as it
is. I've been reading up and there's very little said about women as
guests at either salons or conversaziones. The important thing seems to
have been the men."
Amanthus showed more interest at this, but she seemed determined to be
trying. "I won't come if you have Tommy Bacon."
Juliette was responsible for this. At the Friday evening dancing club
she had burst forth to a group of them, impetuously, "What do you
suppose Tommy Bacon here has just said to me? That Maud and Selina and
Adele and I are the only girls he knows whose hand he can't hold when
he wants to."
In the pause which had followed Amanthus had grown very red. They
could not blame her now. Though Tommy measured suddenly against the
requirements of a conversazione did seem very young, still his absence
would leave them short.
Maud was rising to the demands of the moment again so visibly that her
companions as visibly looked uneasy. But her suggestion this time was
practical. On the previous Saturday afternoon she and Selina and Adele,
out for a walk in the Indian summer briskness had met Culpepper Buxton
and his three roommates out for a tramp also. The two groups had joined
forces and gone sauntering out the sycamore bordered road that led
up-climbing and down-rolling to the old monastery in its secluded and
wooded grounds where Louis Phillipe in his exile for a time had stayed.
It not only proved a pleasant occasion, the background of the French
king lending color and romance to the setting, but it added three
masculine acquaintances to the lists of the ladies--Mr. Cannon, easy
and talkative, Mr. Welling, provocative and in spectacles, Mr. Tate,
tall and studious. Older than their own set, decidedly these three
young men were acquisitions.
"You must ask these friends of Culpepper, Selina," proposed Maud. "And
do you believe if we coax Culpepper, he'll get Algernon Charles Biggs
to come? At a conversazione, after it is understood by Miss Boswell who
he is, he will seem to be a card?"
[Illustration: "The two groups had ... gone sauntering out the sycamore
bordered road."]
Algy Biggs was a near if collateral kinsman of a very real and great
poet on the other side of the English-speaking world, a thing he never
was allowed to forget, and which in company rendered him next to mute.
Yet he was amazingly big and athletic and good-looking, great in the
local militia, in the summer regattas on the river, as a stroke oar on
the barge picnic parties, carrying the baskets and luggage, building
the fires, fetching water.
"A regular Herculaneum, or whoever it was performed labors and cleaned
stables," Amanthus had said of him.
"He won't come if he knows what we want him for," affirmed Selina,
decidedly. "I'll try."
Adele here pointed out the flaw in the arrangements, it being her gift
from Heaven always to do that.
"But the ones you're naming are nearer our ages. There ought to be
somebody more suitable for Miss Boswell."
"Your Cousin Marcus, Selina." said Maud.
Selina felt ashamed of the haste with which she said no for surely it
is an unworthy thing to be overly sensitive about your kin, and nobody
is any better off as to family than the total average in desirability
of its members. Still there was no use running the family in on Miss
Boswell if she did not have to.
Aunt Juanita, married to Uncle Bruce, was Mamma's sister, and Cousin
Marcus was their son. Aunt Juanita wrote letters to the newspapers on
every sort of subject that engrossed her from Schopenhauer to Susan
B. Anthony, and made impassioned addresses to women wherever she ran
into them, at parties, picnics, church societies, anywhere, like as not
having forgotten to take down one curl-paper in dressing her iron-gray
hair. The subjects for the addresses varied.
A forerunner, a feminine John Baptist to her day and place and sex, as
Selina was one day to come to see her, then Aunt Juanita Bruce, tall,
angular, unmended and ungroomed, stood alone in her community, unique
in type but none the less absorbed and none the more abashed for that.
As for Uncle Bruce, Mamma called him in as he came by of mornings,
with his big bushy-haired head and untidy beard and his mummified
and scholarly little trotting body, and brushed him off and tidied
him up and retied his old black string cravat, and started him on
again. Whereat if he had a book, it being his way to proceed along the
streets with his nose and his spectacled eyes within the covers of some
abstruse volume, he was as like as not to proceed indefinitely at his
little dog-trot speed in whatsoever line started on, the levee and the
river, it was said, on more than one occasion bringing him up. Uncle
Bruce was a lawyer and Selina was told that he was an authority, but
there was small comfort to her young and innocent soul in that in the
face of his more salient characteristics.
Cousin Marcus, their son, did editorial paragraphs on the newspapers
and was clever, but then you never knew what he might be besides,
being all of Aunt Juanita and Uncle Bruce and himself together. If
he was asked to come at eight he would stroll round at ten, and if
one wanted to close the house at twelve, Marcus would produce his
cigarettes--he was the only person in town to use them and was looked
on askant therefore--and monologue with brilliancy till one. He was a
law unto himself and over-rode your laws. Now Selina yearned secretly
and passionately, and she feared almost unworthily, to be considered
correct and proper, and this, moreover, was an occasion for that
charmingly correct person, Miss Pocahontas Boswell. Auntie remembered
now, too, just who the Boswells were. She was sure that as a girl she
had spent a night at their even then old brick home at Eadston in
its setting of quaint garden. Selina was uneasy as it was, over this
conversazione business of Maud's, and if the truth be told, always
winced at her relatives, the Bruces.
"No," she said, and firmly for once in the face of Maud, "I don't think
I want Marcus."
"Then who---?" began Maud, and stopped. The same thought had occurred
at this point, was recurring to each of them, to four of them that is,
Amanthus not knowing the person in question this time.
A new assistant rector at Selina's church had achieved a notable
popularity, and of late these friends of hers, with the exception of
Amanthus, had been accompanying her to services whenever they could
be spared from their own. Perhaps they all blushed a bit now under
detection.
"Why not the Reverend Mr. Thomas Wingham if he'll come?" avowed Maud
stoutly despite the general abashment. "It's entirely for Miss Boswell
we're considering him?"
As yet Selina was the only one who had met the gentlemen, he having
called upon her household in the performance of his parochial duties.
Driven thus into a corner by Maud, there was no reason why he should
not be invited. "I'll ask Mamma," she conceded.
This person approved, and accordingly the invitation to him went the
next day in Mamma's lady-like and running hand, upon her visiting card.
It was hard to reconcile her being Aunt Juanita's sister, though to be
sure they did have different mothers.
To Meet
Miss Pocahontas Boswell
Conversation
Please Reply Friday Evening
The Reverend Mr. Wingham, young and good-looking gentleman that he was,
promptly replying that it would be his pleasure to meet Miss Boswell
on Friday evening, the affair assumed aspects entirely new, and in a
different sense, significant.
Mamma planned the details. The back parlor, so-called, in the Wistar
home, really was the dining-room.
"On the evening of your little affair, Selina," she explained, "thanks
to the screen which we'll set about the table beforehand, your aunt
and I, at the agreed-upon moment, will slip in with coffee, chocolate,
sandwiches, and plates of cake. There'll remain only the removing of
the screen by your father, to disclose us in our places, I behind the
chocolate pitcher, your aunt behind the coffee urn, and the adjournment
of your guests to the back parlor. I'm always thankful when an occasion
like this comes up, that the Wistar coffee urn isn't plate but silver."
After preparations for the affair thus were well under way, Juliette,
dependable if she was such a little creature, rounded up Maud and
Selina at the Wistars one afternoon. "It's conversazione, of course,
but what're we going to talk about?"
True! One saw Maud rising to the new demands of the situation. "If we'd
only thought about it sooner," she mourned. "On our walk with Culpepper
and his friends the other day, Mr. Welling that I was with, the square
one with spectacles, told me they were deep in a book round at their
rooms that they were having daily rows over, Adam Smith's 'Wealth of
Nations.' My uncle has it on his shelves. We might have gotten up on
that and showed them."
Amanthus happened in here and they explained the trouble.
"Why not talk in pairs and not trouble about a subject?" she asked
hopefully. "Wouldn't it be a conversazione just the same?"
They ignored this whereas they might have said patently tolerant things
to her. Amanthus was Amanthus and they must accept her as she was,
which meant be magnanimous with her rather than lofty or pitying.
"I'll go round to the school to-morrow," said Maud, "and ask permission
to look over the old minutes of our Sappho Literary Club. By looking up
our program, I'll happen on some subject of general interest that we're
all up on. As soon as you're home from your teaching, Selina, come over
and we'll decide."
"Don't count me in on this conversazione," said Amanthus, "I'll come
but I won't talk."
True, as she had said once before, lovely creature that she was,
sunny-haired, violet of eyes, coral-lipped, she had no need for
conversation, no, nor yet wit, nor repartee, in her business of life.
It almost would seem that Auntie agreed with Amanthus. "Selina's quite
pretty enough, Lavinia, to do without this foolishness," she insisted.
"It isn't on account of any brains she's got, or any she'll come to
have, for example, that Culpepper comes round here. Selina's pretty and
sweet and she looks up to him. So far as he and any other men she's
likely to meet go, what on earth more do they want in her? I'm an old
maid but I know."
CHAPTER TEN
It was the evening of the conversazione. Selina, dear child, as
Auntie called her, pretty and flushed and frankly excited, wore the
discredited graduation dress, furbished up once more by Mamma, and yet
once more pressed by Aunt Viney.
"Never, never again do we let her wear garments not her own," said
Mamma as Selina went down to welcome those first arrivals, the friends
of her youth.
"Thanks be, Lavinia, for that," said Auntie. "Maybe you'll come around
to my view of the mental furbelows next."
When Selina reached her friends below, she found Amanthus in yellow.
With a pretty mother who dressed well herself Amanthus always had
charming clothes. The corn-colored knotted sash and ribbons worn by her
to-night were the color of her abundant hair, and her fan of yellow
feathers seemed planned to open against her red lower lip while her
face dimpled and sparkled above it.
It was handsome Maud's self one saw, animated and sure and leading. You
hardly thought about, if you noted at all, her val-edged flounces and
her string of beads, though you did rejoice in her clear white and
red skin and her red-brown hair. Auntie said, you felt the courage and
vigor of Maud's Presbyterian forebears in her straightforwardness if
she did belie them in her impulsiveness.
Pretty Juliette's cheeks subdued her cherry ribbons, little gypsy
thing, and Adele's throat rose soft and white from her round-necked
blue cashmere. As for Miss Pocahontas Boswell who arrived here--but how
put into words that simplicity which is not simplicity at all, about
her amber draperies? Or how make plain the appreciation and interest in
her smiling eyes?
Mrs. William Williams, hearing of the occasion, had sent Selina a box
of hot-house flowers, half a dozen kinds at least laid on a bedding of
wet smilax, the endeavor in those days being for variety and assemblage
of colors. Combined with the smilax the whole made a mixed bowlful for
the table between the lace curtains of the two windows and, so Selina
felt, lent a riotous air of preparation and festivity to the parlors.
And now the remainder of the guests came, or seemed to come, at once.
Papa out in the hall, was shaking hands and exchanging little sallies
and seeing to the disposition of coats and hats, after which, having
sent, seen and brought the arrivals to the last one in, he went back to
his paper in the next room.
It was restoring to a hostess' anxious spirits now the actual moment
was come, to enumerate these arrivals in greeting them and in
presenting them to Miss Boswell. What can be more to the credit of a
hostess than an excess of the other sex?
Here were Bliss and Brent and Sam of their own set. But can it be that
familiarity in the long run does breed--well, an uncompromising eye?
For Bliss and Brent and Sam looked--it was the dismaying truth--they
looked young! They acted young, too, falling back the one against the
other at the parlor door, and reddening as they took the hand of the
guest as if they did not know what to do with it! And pretty Bliss,
rather spoiled on that account if the truth be told, with his ruddy
hair and his rosy checks, to have put on a pink neck-tie!
Culpepper and his friends arriving just here, made a gratifying and
convincing show: Mr. Cannon, alert and good-looking, enlivened by a
white vest; Mr. Tate, tall and decorous; Mr. Welling, square-set and in
spectacles. These with Culpepper were a force in themselves.
Bringing up the close came first the Reverend Mr. Wingham. Was it his
high vest or his high calling that gave the distinctive quality to his
good looks? And lastly came Algernon Charles Biggs, Culpepper evidently
on the lookout for him.
Algy was fearfully gloomy. As the company sat down he took his chair
with a furtive unwillingness, Culpepper seating himself near him almost
as if by intention.
With this exception, Selina felt, everything was quite _comme il faut_,
as Maude loved to say of an occasion, and even impressive and needless
to say, gratifying. Everybody sat around, the open grate the center,
so to speak, the firelight flickering on Auntie's especially burnished
fender and coal-bucket and fire-irons.
By the connivance of the four, Selina, Juliette, Maud and Adele, Mr.
Wingham was seated next Miss Boswell. He had shown brisk pleasure
on being presented to tall and dashing Maud and seemed willing to
linger and parry sallies with her; he had warmed, everybody warmed to
Juliette; while within the minute he was taking issue on some general
proposition with Adele. But these introductory passages over, they
passed him on to his place for the evening.
Bliss, pretty, pouty boy, on whom Amanthus had been smiling since she
dismissed Tommy, was sulky because she, from some perversity, was off
to herself in an unillumined spot as it were, between the bookcase and
the door. Yet she illumined it; she was a lovely creature.
"'Like sunshine in a shady spot,'" Selina and Adele who were near
together heard Miss Boswell say to Mr. Wingham, and his attention thus
directed to Amanthus, he heartily agreed.
Then Selina charmingly flushed beneath the crown of her fair hair,
could she but have known it, and prettily anxious, became aware that
Maud had coughed, was coughing again. It was the signal agreed upon.
There came a rushing as of the seas in her ears, a sinking in the pit
of her person. Had they allowed Maud to coerce them into something
ill-advised again? Was Auntie right? Were they about to make themselves
preposterous and ridiculous? And what had Culpepper said--Culpepper
there across the circle next to Algy? That girls played at having a
knowledge that men had? Was he laughing at them now with that same look
of lenient enjoyment in his bold blue eyes that he usually gave to
Auntie? Tears almost of anger were in her eyes.
Not at all! She had had these hideous moments preceding the actual
plunge before, precursors always to the later joys of triumph. As, for
example, when she used to lead in the debate at The Sappho, and at call
for her secretarial report at the junior missionary society, and again
at the moment of her figuring at her graduation. Surely she knew them
for what they were now!
Maud had given definite instructions beforehand. "Let your start seem
casual, Selina, the mere off-throw from passing reflections."
And, recalling this and drawing a restoring breath of confidence,
Selina spoke to the circle of her guests, endeavoring to convey ease
along with the proposition which was to furnish subject and substance
for the conversazione, in a voice which would not be quite steady.
"But is there not a denial of the truth that the moral is necessarily
part with the beautiful, in such phrases as 'art for art's sake,'
'beauty for the sake of beauty'? So Selina."
Maud, as per arrangement and program, came sweepingly to the retort
direct, which she had taken from a volume belonging to The Sappho's
library, called "Prepared Debates." As she had pointed out, there's
nothing like getting the requisite impetus at the start!
"The moral changes with the times, the place and the peoples. Art is as
fixed as the gulf between itself and the ethical obligation is wide."
Juliette, with cheeks afire, rushed gallantly in, also as prearranged
by Maud, she being scheduled to be off-hand, playful and staccato. She
was to fling the proposition on at this point to one of the guests,
having been instructed which one:
"If eyes were made for seeing,
Then beauty is its own excuse for being,"
said she gayly and insouciantly. "Isn't it so, er--Mr. Wingham?"
That very good-looking and well-set-up young clergyman across the
circle next to Miss Boswell, started ever so slightly at this call upon
him by name. He had been looking at Amanthus, lovely creature, who
needed neither vocabulary nor repartee either, in her business of life!
"It is," he agreed a little hastily; then gathering himself smilingly
together he said heartily, "It is eminently and conclusively its own
excuse and justification."
This coming from Mr. Wingham was a bit dismaying, as from the nature of
his cloth and calling, he had been counted on to take the moral issue
up at this point. It brought matters to an unprepared-for pause.
"The Puritan--" hurriedly began conscientious Adele, but with a glance
at Maud, stopped. The Puritan, as taken from "Prepared Debates," was
to follow in logical sequence after the support and exposition of the
moral by Mr. Wingham. Adele swallowed, and withdrew.
Whereupon support for the moral came from the other side of the circle,
from Culpepper nobly and by no sort of prearrangement either. One
could wish he would show more conviction and less jocularity about it,
however. The progenitors of this evening's business were of no mind
by now to be played with. Two of the friends of Culpepper, also, Mr.
Welling and Mr. Cannon, would bear looking after. Their markedly polite
attention almost would seem to cover ecstacy and enjoyment.
"In the ideals of that great old people, the Greeks," queried Culpepper
jocularly, "somehow I seem to recall that the symmetry of the human
body was the expression of the symmetry of the inner soul?"
Mr. Welling, he of the square person, resettled his spectacles. "As for
example, Aesop? Or shall we say Socrates?"
Mr. Cannon of the white vest burbled, then coughed to cover his
defection.
"The Puritan--" here ventured in Adele again, with an eye as to its
being proper business on Maud, who frowned darkly, whereupon Adele,
flushed but obedient again withdrew.
Tall Mr. Tate, the third of the friends of Culpepper, had looked across
each time at Adele's remark twice ventured and twice withdrawn. With
the exceptions of these glances in her direction, he like Mr. Wingham,
had been looking at Amanthus. Even so, something of what Maud called
scholastic earnestness sat upon Mr. Tate, and he was disposed, too,
to treat the evening with gratifying sincerity. There was that in the
subject twice introduced and twice withdrawn by the young lady in blue
as he afterward designated Adele, which evidently appealed to him to
the momentary eclipsing of Amanthus' charms.
"The Puritan--" he took the suggestion up the least bit sententiously
and with courteous acknowledgment toward the source of its origin,
"that great timely force for moral power which is moral beauty, was----"
Mr. Cannon indisputably naughty by this time, pulled down his white
vest and wickedly concluded the sentence--"'was at once known from
other men by his gait, his garb, his lank hair, the sour solemnity of
his face, the up-turned whites to his eyes'--how does the rest of the
paragraph go, Welling?" Which was not in the least what Mr. Tate nor
yet Adele had in mind to say.
But even so, was not this the mounting joy of wit? Of give and take? Of
stimulation? This the hitherto imagined delight of social intercourse?
So Selina. But a hostess must keep a hostess' wit and head! Everyone
must be won and led to speak! But wait, Miss Boswell, and smiling as
with one lending herself prettily to the moment, is talking:
"In speaking of beauty perhaps we're thinking a bit too much of the
quality in an object which in regarding it excites pleasing emotions?
Surely we're to believe that the terms of beauty apply to qualities
that arouse admiration and approval. I for one shall insist on there
being intellectual and moral beauty--and beauty of goodness and
utility. But if I understand just right, Mr. Biggs here is far better
qualified to define beauty than the rest of us. And with a great poet's
authority behind him, too!"
Big, handsome, gloomy Algy nearly fell over with his chair which at the
moment he was uneasily balancing on one leg as some perception of what
he was in dawned on him.
"I--Oh say now, any of 'em will tell you I've never read a word of him
in my life. Never could find the hitch--er--don't you know, between the
words and the sense. Quit it, will you, Culpepper, kicking me?"
"'A thing of beauty is a joy forever!'" gayly chanted dependable
little Juliette who true to the program was to throw herself and her
munitions into breaches as needed.
"'Handsome is as handsome does,'" suddenly observed Bliss, very young
and passing bitter, with an obviousness patent to those who understood
the evening's coolness between him and Amanthus, "'Beauty is only skin
deep.'" Could it be that Bliss had noted the glances of two of the
company, Mr. Wingham and Mr. Tate, fixed upon Amanthus even now?
"And yet," it was the first spontaneous contribution to the evening
from the Reverend Mr. Wingham, his gaze returning from that retired
corner where it had been drawn again and again, "the eternal youth of
the beautiful!" Certainly Amanthus did not need vocabulary or repartee
in the least!
Adele with new courage, and this time at a signal from Maud, began
again: "The Puritan through his great exponent----"
The doorbell rang. Kind conventions! _Comme il faut!_ Had Selina really
been congratulating herself in these gratifying terms?
It was Cousin Marcus Bruce; she recognized his voice as Papa let him
in.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
At least the guests were continuing to talk, though in the interruption
from the doorbell and the answering of it by Papa, Adele evidently
had lost out. For as the divided attention of Selina came back to
the circle about her, Miss Boswell for whom all these endeavors
and proprieties had been evoked, was doing her best to defend the
utilitarian beauty of woolen gloves and ear-muffs, propounded upon her
original proposition by spectacled Mr. Welling, backed by Mr. Cannon of
the white vest.
The while Selina heard Papa urging Marcus to give up his umbrella and
to take off his cape which she knew to be a waterproof cloth voluminous
affair to which he was much addicted. It gave one a sense of storm and
stress of weather and downpour without, whereas in reality it was a dry
and mild starlit night. It was merely of a piece with Marcus.
And here he came strolling in, casual as always. Marcus was tall,
lithe and thin. One lock of black hair fell anywhere, according to the
moment, over onto his long, thin-flanked face, to be brushed aside
continually by his long fingers, out of his deliberately roaming and
observing blue eyes, the remaining black locks throwing themselves
anyhow backward onto his old velvet coat collar. You never knew
what a Bruce might do, but you could be sure he would do something
extraordinary. Papa's overtures in the hall had only partly prevailed,
for Marcus coming strolling in, had retained his strapped and buckled
Arctic overshoes.
"Well, Selina? How are you little people?" This to Maud and Juliette,
Amanthus and Adele whom he had seen grow up along with Selina. The
meanwhile, Cousin Marcus was cheerfully and as a matter of course
shaking hands with--of all persons--Miss Boswell! "Everybody don't get
up, everybody don't change places, I went around to the hotel to find
you," this to Miss Boswell, "and your aunt telling me you were here, I
trusted Selina for grace and followed."
Marcus on terms of evident and easy friendliness with Miss Pocahontas?
Marcus, whom Selina had repudiated!
But in the meanwhile everybody had gotten up, and everybody was
changing places. In the readjustment Marcus was found to be in
possession of the chair next to Miss Boswell. His keen eyes patently
taking in much, roved delightedly, seeing among other things as it
proved, the well-set-up and good-looking Mr. Wingham hasten to carry a
chair for himself to that bit of obscurity lighted by the sunny hair,
the dimples, and the violet eyes of Amanthus. Saw him arrive with his
chair just in time to circumvent Mr. Tate who was doing likewise. Saw
Maud look incensed as Mr. Wingham contentedly sat himself down in this
haven where he would be, saw Selina and Juliette look indignant, Adele
incredulous. Else why should those keen eyes of Marcus thus roving,
grow delighted as with a comprehending sense of the situation? But they
roamed on, their owner accompanying their survey with comment:
"So, it's a conversazione, Selina, Cousin Robert tells me? In the name
of eloquence, Algernon Charles Biggs, how did you get in it?"
The worm turned. Big Algy reddened angrily. "Culpepper here got me in.
He swore it was a candy-pulling!"
Mr. Cannon snorted; Mr. Welling it was who this time coughed, and tall
Mr. Tate, who failing a place by Amanthus had come back and taken his
seat in the circle, looked sincerely annoyed.
"Apropos of Mr. Algernon," said Miss Boswell, still well-meaning,
seeing that Algy had been pointed to her as a card by her young
hostesses. She paused. Did the desperate look at her here by the
goaded Algy enlighten her as to something being wrong. "No, not Mr.
Algernon at all." She went on a little hurriedly. "Mr. Bruce," she
turned about to Marcus next to her. "Mr. Bruce here and I are old
friends," evidently she meant to be certain of her ground this time,
"thanks to his winters for his newspaper in our little city during the
legislatures. We've quarreled over such questions as these too often
for me not to know where he stands. So, self-avowed seeker after the
pleasing even to expedience, what are we to accept as the definition of
beauty?"
"Exactly," said Marcus cheerfully. "I would call it one thing, you or
Miss Maud or Algy here, another," he paused, to give Algy full time
to start and be quieted down by Culpepper, "while Mr. Welling and
Mr. Cannon stand ready to confute the lot of us. Still, we'll try it
around, Mr. Wingham," those eyes of Marcus had been roving as he spoke,
"give us an idea of what you hold it to be?"
"It--" said Mr. Wingham suddenly and a little tartly as he bandied the
impersonal and unenlightening pronoun thus thrust upon him, sparring
for time. He had been contentedly talking to Amanthus and as was
evident, had lost the trend of the discussion he had been asked here to
partake in. "It--er--I should claim, is, admitting of course, the term
to be indefinite--" the poor gentleman was floundering.
"It's so conceded to be," from Marcus encouragingly.
But everybody rushed to say something here to spare the guest, Maud and
Juliette as to beauty being beauty, Miss Pocahontas as to ethics and
utility being beauty, Bliss, put to it by Mr. Welling and Mr. Cannon,
as to beauty being vanity, and Adele with final arrival as to "the
Puritans' greatest exponent, Milton, being proof and utterance of the
beauty and poetry at the moral heart of Puritanism!" Which indeed she
owed to Maud and the "Prepared Debates." And in this general chorus,
Mr. Wingham and his impersonal pronoun was lost sight of, or at any
rate, sound of.
At half-past ten when the removal of the screen by Papa disclosed Mamma
with her precious bits of Honiton lace on her head and at her throat,
behind the chocolate pitcher, and Auntie in her black silk and long
gold chain behind the coffee urn, Mr. Wingham was found to be lost
again as well as Amanthus and this time in a more literal sense.
Selina had seen it when it happened, and so had Maud, Juliette and
Adele. One fancied Mr. Tate was aware of it, and so it now proved, was
Marcus.
"Wingham," his best and mellowest voice called as the company arose
to adjourn to the back parlor, "that cosy corner of sofa and lamp
under the stairs is very well for tête-à-tête, but how about bread and
butter?"
Nor did Amanthus and Mr. Wingham look too well pleased as they came in.
As Marcus who was on his good behavior, carried cups and passed
sandwiches, he leaned presently and spoke to Miss Boswell, just as
Selina arrived with cake:
"Your coupé has come, Pocahontas, may I go out and send it away and
you walk back to the hotel with me?" This from Marcus whom Selina had
deemed unworthy the occasion!
It happened, however, that Marcus took Amanthus to her home at the
corner first. Mr. Wingham went promptly after supper with somewhat the
air of one who has been unfairly treated. Bliss who still was in the
sulks went speedily too. Mr. Tate even while he struggled against the
coercion, was borne off bodily by Mr. Welling and Mr. Cannon whose
delight seemed to be in circumventing him. The two of them in leaving
made what Auntie would have called their devoirs, both for themselves
and him, though he struggled to make his own.
"Minerva over Venus ever, Miss Selina," from Mr. Cannon of the white
vest. "It's for that we're carrying Tate off. After his recovery from
this temporary dereliction, he'll be grateful to us."
"Ear-muffs and woolen gloves for the soul's sake, every time, Miss
Selina," from Mr. Welling of the spectacles, "and as a rule you would
have had Tate heart and soul with you. He's been adamant to dimples
before, so it must have been the hair or the eyes. We're hurrying him
off for his safe-keeping."
Culpepper and Algy already were gone, taking Maud and Adele to their
doors across the street. Juliette here by Selina's side in the hall
seeing the last of their guests off, was to spend the night with her.
Marcus happening out from the parlor along with Amanthus at this
moment, and discovering, so to speak, an empty hall, took in the
situation. If he had noted a little chill in manner toward Amanthus
since supper on the part of her four friends--and what was there ever
that Marcus did not note?--he recalled that chill now and evidently
coupled it with her uncavaliered situation. It is so men unfairly judge
of all women.
He went and found her cloak on the rack and brought it. Humming as he
did so, he broke forth lightly into words:
"Morality thou deadly bane,"
He put the soft and hooded wrap about her nicely, for him even
carefully and prettily,
"Thy tens of thousands hast thou slain."
He picked up his slouch hat and donned his disreputable old cape,
"Vain is his hope whose stay and trust is
In moral mercy, truth and justice!"
Having rooted out his umbrella and tucked Amanthus, pretty thing, onto
his arm, Marcus here paused within the doorway and said backward over
his shoulder mellowly to Selina and Juliette.
"Kindly explain for me to Miss Boswell that it will take me just three
minutes to go and return. She's talking in the parlor with your mother
and your aunt, Selina. Amanthus," still more mellowly, "shall I make
an utterance for you as you are leaving? Your single contribution to
the evening's parley? That, so far as I have been present to observe,
you have been a silently eloquent and irrefutable argument for the
affirmative? Don't ask Amanthus what irrefutable means, my cousin
Selina, nor brisk Juliette? That were unworthy of you, and unkind!"
[Illustration: "Rooted out his umbrella and tucked Amanthus, pretty
thing, onto his arm."]
Juliette turned indignantly upon Selina as Marcus and Amanthus left.
"It's we who're left in the ungenerous attitudes!" hotly. "How did we
get there?"
Later, after Marcus in his old hat and shabby cape had returned, and
again had departed, with Miss Boswell in his keeping, Selina cast
herself upon her mother and burst into tears.
"Are we as impossible, as ridiculous and absurd, as we are to judge we
are from what they all imply?" she sobbed hotly.
"More so, even, no doubt," from Juliette bitterly.
A caressing arm and hand came around Selina's shoulder as she wept on
her little mother's bosom, the hand of her father.
"But even so, delightful," said that gentleman comfortingly, "far more
delightful, if an onlooker may testify, than you'll ever quite know."
"We sent the borrowed dress home to Anna," said Auntie. "Let's pack the
mental furbelows up and send them over to Maud."
"We'll borrow them again," came from Selina in muffled tones of
bitterness. "We never learn."
"Or lend her ours, let's be quite honest," from little Juliette.
CHAPTER TWELVE
From the evening of the conversazione, Marcus aroused to a livelier
sense of his pretty cousin Selina, and she gained a new conception of
him. How had she failed to realize that it was not so much that he was
singular as significant? She said as much to her mother and Auntie.
"He's Juanita's son," said Mamma guardedly. "If she is my sister, I
have to allow that she's at times both eccentric and trying."
"He's Juanita's son but his own keeper," avowed Auntie. "If he's ever
thought in his life for anybody but himself, I've yet to hear of it."
But Selina felt that she as well as they were mistaken. Within the next
few weeks Marcus took her to the theater several times, and Oh, the
wonder not only of seeing Booth's _Hamlet_ and Modjeska's _Rosalind_
through the medium of his kindness and his comment and elucidation, but
of seeing how many persons in the audience strove to catch her cousin's
eye and invite his recognition! He did editorial paragraphs which were
clever for the leading daily paper, of course, but there was more to
it than that! Apparently if one can successfully back up some chosen
eccentricity, as of an old hat and shabby cape and the rest of it,
by exactly the adequate manner, he attains to being a personage! And
Selina for the better part of her seventeen years, had been thinking
Marcus merely had bad manners!
"You must do a bit of reading of a little different nature, pretty
cousin mine," he told her about this same time. "Aunt Lavinia and good
Miss Ann Eliza keep you a child."
And accordingly he brought her books of a flattering nature, among them
"The Story of Creation," differing from the narrative in the Pentateuch
in a way which would have startled Mamma and Auntie unspeakably. But
which she and Maud, adventurous soul that this person always was, set
themselves to read faithfully.
And lastly, about February, Marcus came round with a letter from Miss
Boswell who with her aunt was spending the remainder of the winter in
the South. Evidently the intimacy between Marcus and Miss Pocahontas
was close.
He read Selina one especial bit, which, or so it seemed to her who had
seen nothing at all of the world, opened a wide-spreading and dismaying
vista!
More and more [thus went the letter] I am convinced we ought to do
some of our wandering early. Our sense of true values ought to come
to us young. These glorious Florida nights of tropical softness and
moonlight only gain through their recall of other scenes as lovely
met in my wanderings when I was young with my invalid father and my
mother in search of the health he was not to find. I don't suppose we
ever really deplore the gain through experience, whatever the cost at
the time. My love to the little sequestered way-side bloom, Selina.
How sweet she was in her sheltered innocence and how touching. Do not
forget how we discussed the chances for her, you and I, for a bit more
of the world through you, her big cousin?
So? That was it? Miss Boswell with her tender eyes of comprehension was
behind this kindness from Marcus? Still one must be thankful even for
dictated favors once they are accepted.
Marcus read her bits again from a second letter full of the soft
glamour of tropical scene and beauty. After he had gone, Selina hunted
her old school geography and sought the map. A pale yellow lady-finger
a little over-run in the baking, Florida was on the page, but in the
mind of Selina as she sat there in the shabby parlor with the book
outspread on her lap, Florida the ever-blooming and the tropical, was
Ponce de Leon in gleaming apparel with banner and sword stepping ashore
upon sands flowing golden beneath the fancied fountain of his search,
Ponce de Leon the ever glorious and understandable to youth, symbol of
quest, of faith in the fabled, of adventuring forth!
Maud walked in here on Selina in the parlor in the dusk, the open
book still on her lap, the fire died to red embers, Auntie's brasses
in the faint glow the one note of brightness amid the gloom. Selina's
smile was a bit wan as she looked up and fluttered the pages of the
unwieldy folio. "Thirty-seven maps herein of the world and its blue
and pink and yellow grand divisions and kingdoms and countries, Maudie!
Marcus has just been here and he's left me wincing over what he calls
my limitations. I've been to Cincinnati, once, for two days, to the
exposition and the musical festival with you and Judy and your mother.
And I've been to Chicago for a week with Auntie and Cousin Anna to
visit some Wistar kin who live in a dreary house right on the street,
one of a row. Though Cousin Anna says it's a very good house and being
in a real city is expected to sit on the street in a row, that I merely
don't know any better. And that's the extent of my traveling!"
"Limitations is a very good word," decided Maudie promptly. "I'm
deploring our deficiencies right along! I've a new word myself. Mr.
Welling and I are reading German together. I gave up waiting for the
rest of you to keep your appointments and asked him. That's what I came
over to tell you. We started last night."
These friends of Culpepper were their friends now. As Maud put it,
since they discovered they were outgrowing Brent and Sam and the rest,
these newer acquisitions were a godsend!
Mr. Welling, by Christian name Henry, square-set by mind as by body
though a wag, had seemed to gravitate to mercurial Maud.
"Apparently to correct what he chooses to call my sweeping
mis-assertions," was Maud's way of explaining it.
Mr. Cannon, Preston by name, and perpetual joker, gravitated to Adele
for whom he had to diagram each joke, and assure her he didn't mean
it, while Mr. Tate, that scholastic young man, with earnest admiration
sought Amanthus who told him wonderingly she'd always supposed Pompey
was a buried city till he told her he was a general.
Something of the personal histories of these young men were known now
to the young ladies. The father of Mr. Welling was a judge in his end
of the state. Mr. Cannon's people lived in one of the mountain counties
and were what is called land-poor, and Mr. Tate had been raised by a
grandmother.
"And shows it," Maud said when she heard this. Mr. Tate had money left
him by his grandfather too, in a quiet respectable sense, and when his
grandmother died he would have a very considerable more.
"And his name's Lemuel," again from Maud at the time they were learning
these facts, "and it's perfectly patent after you know him, why the
others continually bait him."
But right now Maud had come over to talk to Selina about her German and
Mr. Welling.
"What's your new word, Maud?" Selina asked.
"_Wanderlust._ We came on it last night. It's apropos of what you were
saying about the thirty-seven maps in the atlas."
"I see."
In April the Boswells returned from the South and Miss Pocahontas
wrote asking Selina up to Eadston to visit her.
"It will mean a new spring dress," demurred Mamma, "and the price of
the ticket besides."
"But it will mean three days for her with Marcia and Pocahontas
Boswell," said Auntie. "She can go up from Friday to Monday and not
miss her teaching either. I must say, Lavinia, they're the kind of
people I want to have her visit."
"I suppose you're right. We'll have to manage the rest of it. Selina
get your pen and thank Miss Pocahontas for her invitation, and say you
accept with pleasure."
Miss Pocahontas herself was at the Eadston station on the following
Friday afternoon to meet Selina. The carriage and horses and colored
coachman in livery waiting for them outside were all old and handsome
and well preserved. The town as they drove through it was old, too, but
not so well preserved.
"As though our forefathers planned and builded for us better than we
deserve," Miss Pocahontas said in speaking of this. She seemed to
regret it and to make a point of it.
A covered wooden bridge across the river dividing the town seemed older
than anything else. Indeed Miss Pocahontas herself and Selina, as the
carriage rolled echoingly across this bridge, full of laughter and
pretty exchange of confidences, alone seemed young of all the staid and
sleepy place. For the square, brick house they came to presently, on a
street of big, square houses, its yard running down to this same river,
was old too, and its box hedges and its purple beeches were old with it.
[Illustration: "A covered wooden bridge across the river ... seemed
older than anything else."]
And within the house the big rooms, both above and below stairs, were
filled with old furniture, and mahogany at that, not sent to the
junk-shop or the attic either, but cared for and revered and openly
treasured. And as for other old things there were old portraits and old
brasses and old andirons, and soft-footed, pleasant-voiced old colored
servants, two at least among them in spectacles and with white hair.
There were old candle-sticks, old silver and old damask on the supper
table later. The pale-gray dress of Miss Boswell the elder, who was
tall and pleasing, trailed with a soft rustle, and the amber-toned
dress of the younger Miss Boswell was cut low.
Selina's mother had strained a point and along with the new spring
street dress, had made her a soft chaille, white sprinkled over with
pink rosebuds. Selina here at the Boswell table with it on, could not
be too thankful!
When the meal was about half over, Miss Marcia Boswell laughed softly:
"I saw your Cousin Maria Buxton last week, Selina. She was down here in
Eadston for the day to pay her taxes and took her dinner with us. She
reminded me that your aunt as a girl, once was here overnight with her
to a dance. She also made me admit what I've supposed all these years
was hidden in my maiden breast. Which is, that when she and I and your
Aunt Ann Eliza Wistar were sixteen--Ann Eliza spent a good deal of
her time up here with Maria in those days--we all three were in love
with the desperation of love at sixteen, with John Buxton, the father
of your Culpepper. He married at twenty according to his own bent
and not ours. Maria of course got him later after they were both free
again. Maria usually holds to her point pretty well, as I suggested to
her when she twitted me the other day. And even with two daughters of
her own by her first husband, if she has a downright weakness, and she
admits it herself, it's for her stepson by John Buxton, your Culpepper."
"Why," said Selina, quickly, "if Auntie's really foolish about any one
person in the world, it's Culpepper."
"Better and better," laughed Miss Marcia Boswell, altogether a
delightful personage. "I'll be ready when next they come twitting me."
The next day Miss Pocahontas and Selina in a pretty phaeton, drove
about the town with its old state buildings, and out the road along the
cliffs overlooking the river.
"Tell me about the teaching," Miss 'Hontas asked. "How does it go? Are
you satisfied that it's the right thing?"
Selina flushed, hesitated and opened her heart. "It's the only thing
I can do as far as I can see, if it paid better. My little boys seem
to be getting along pretty well. But it don't pay at all, especially
when I have to ride in bad weather. I can't talk much about it at
home, Mamma and Auntie don't understand, and take it out in disliking
the mothers of my little boys. And I don't seem to know how to find
anything better for next year."
She hesitated, her gaze up the canyon of the rushing river winding
between its cliffs of limestone softened with April verdure. She
had seen little of any scenery before! "You're so practical and so
definite, Miss 'Hontas, you and Miss Boswell, too. Auntie thinks it's
terrible to make personal remarks, and I beg your pardon, but I envy it
so."
"I'm not practical, I'm afraid, my dear, as you'll find. Look at
the town there below us, Selina, nestling in its hollow? I'm a bit
overenthusiastic instead. But perhaps what you see in Aunt Marcia and
myself is the result of depending on ourselves for a good many years.
My father died alone with me in Rome when I was fifteen, and my mother
had died shortly before. Aunt Marcia and I have our own means and look
after them."
The next day, on Sunday afternoon, Miss Pocahontas had callers: Mr.
Mason, a bluff young man who let it be understood his interests were
horses and in a milder degree the new stables he was building on his
stock-farm, and Mr. Huger who talked in a prosperous way of the tobacco
market and the present dullness in business. One could not associate
either of them in mind with Miss 'Hontas.
After these callers were gone, Miss 'Hontas went upstairs to her
sitting-room to write a note to a Miss Diana Talbot. Why she mentioned
this name, Selina did not quite see, but later on she was to understand.
She went up to this sitting-room, too, at Miss Pocahontas' suggestion,
and finding a seat on the broad white window-sill, not far from the
desk, looked out on the gravel paths and the box edgings and the beds
of jonquils and tulips in the garden sloping down to the river.
Presently Miss Pocahontas laid down her pen and rather tenderly studied
the slim figure in the rosebud chaille on the window-seat.
"And what now?" she asked with the smile in her eyes she seemed to keep
there for Selina, as this person turned.
"Mr. Huger was speaking of Marcus, Miss 'Hontas, after he heard he was
my cousin. He said what jolly good company men found him. I wouldn't
have thought Marcus was such a good mixer? Miss 'Hontas, do you suppose
another thing is true? From something Marcus said to me, I fancy he
writes verse."
Miss Pocahontas laughed outright: "And you have not grasped yet, or
will not, my little friend, that your cousin is a really and easily
clever person--even to cultivating Mr. Huger, who is prominent and
might be useful? Since you say he intimated it, why, yes, he writes
verse, writes bits of it even to me. The Austin Dobson its prophet
sort of thing my share is, light but clever and graceful, the ballade,
the triolet, the rondeau. I even have tried my hand at it under his
tutelage and encouragement myself," laughing.
Selina fingered a fold of her rosebud chaille and colored: "I don't
believe I know Austin Dobson and I'm sure I don't know about the
ballade, and the rest of what you mentioned."
When she heard more about these ballades and the rest and even was
shown some attempts at them by Miss 'Hontas, smiling at herself as she
did so, she was charmed. She had caught a new viewpoint, too! By play
at these clever things of life, play which one puts a value on as play,
life is made prettier! She and Maud and incidentally the others had
gone at everything exaggeratedly and too in earnest! By taking self too
seriously, you lay yourself open to ridicule! Ardent and dear Selina,
she was sure she had it right now!
And so pleased was she, that when on her return home the next day
the group gathered at her house in the evening to welcome her, she
complained to them about the commonplaceness of the average intercourse
and disclosed to them the more pleasing and different diversions of
persons like Miss Pocahontas and Marcus.
The response, however, was not all that she could have hoped for.
"Since when this furore about Marcus?" inquired Culpepper, but then he
always had refused ordinary grace to him, holding that he was a poseur.
"It was I always defending Marcus to you, up to now, Selina," said Maud
with a show of truth.
"She complains of the commonplaceness of intercourse when you are here,
Algy," said Mr. Cannon, "and when Tate, old man, is just through
telling Miss Amanthus that no man can say wherein lies the significance
of the fifth leg of the Assyrian bull."
"This poet person named Austin, and his masterpieces called Dobsons,
make a note of 'em, Culpepper," directed Mr. Welling. "Some of us must
try and qualify."
As the days went on, however, Marcus was not above being pleased by
this new attitude from Selina. He met her downtown wearing her new
spring hat, and the mail the next morning brought her a communication
from him, penciled, off-hand as it were, on the back of an envelope,
saying:
A broad-brimmed hat upon her head
To shade her cheeks' sweet roses,
A crown were fit, but she wore instead
A broad-brimmed hat upon her head.
I'll see her thus until I'm dead
And darkness on me closes,
A broad-brimmed hat upon her head,
To shade her cheeks' sweet roses.
Selina discovering more and more that Marcus was sought for, and
according to his fancy, went everywhere, felt even gratefully what
these lines meant coming from him.
Again, on the day later in May when her little class was to close for
the summer, she wore her new white piqué that she felt became her, to
mark the occasion. When the hour came for saying good-bye to William
Jr. and his three companions, they accompanied her to the Williams'
front gate, then because it was to be a protracted farewell until fall,
went with her to the corner.
As she was taking leave of them here with final conscientious
admonitions in her capacity of their teacher, Tommy Bacon's younger
brother, Tod, came along and stopped to ask her something about the
barge picnic up the river, on for Friday. It was here that Marcus,
out in that neighborhood in the quest of a book he had loaned, so he
explained, came upon the group, Selina looking very well indeed in that
new piqué which became her, being kissed in succession by four little
boys, and Tod waiting until this be done, to walk along home with her.
That same afternoon's mail brought her another communication from
Marcus, carelessly penciled in blue this time, which said:
The young she loves,
The innocent doves,
And her heart is quite tender, I ween,
And little boys
Are ceaseless joys
Up from six all the way to sixteen.
How she preaches,
As she teaches
With a glow in every feature,
And they,
Lack-a-day,
Fall in love with their teacher!
There was no denying that it was pleasing, and Selina determined, if
it was not lapsing too much into that overearnestness again, that she
would put this and the preceding one from Marcus away with certain
other treasures. There are kinds in straws to show the way the wind
blew, that some day surely will be pleasing to bring forth and show,
not alone to one's children but grandchildren. Maud did even more in
this sort of prudential provisioning; she saved _all_ illuminating
and perhaps valuable data, lists of her reading, theater programs,
dancing-cards with personal tributes in masculine writing upon them,
so that if in time need should come for biographical matter concerning
her, it would be there. And she frankly declared, too, that she had
every enthusiastic and honorable intention that such material should be
needed. But then one had learned not to pattern on Maud too closely!
At the close of Marcus' gratifying stanzas he had added a further line:
Had no idea until recently you were taking this thing of teaching and
earning your way in earnest. Come down to my place at 3:30 to-day and
see me.
By place, Marcus meant his office at the newspaper building. It was
three o'clock when the postman left the note. When Mamma heard about
it she demurred at first, saying it was no place for a young girl to
be going, but when Selina pointed out that she had only to go up a
stairway opening on the street to a door at its head, she gave way.
"Put on your spring suit and that jabot I made you to show at the
throat of your jacket when you went up to Eadston," she directed,
"and wear your best gloves and your good hat. No, the piqué won't do,
Selina; a business office calls for wool street clothes."
"And let us hope he'll be there when you get there," said Auntie. "It's
mighty little dependence I ever put on Marcus."
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Marcus was there when Selina arrived, actually and for once in the
place at the time he said he would be. A bare floor, a shabby desk,
three wooden-bottom chairs, and a framed cartoon of Marcus himself
hanging on the wall, was the whole of it.
He arose as Selina came in and an elderly lady seated in the second of
the three chairs looked at her with expectant interest.
"This is my Cousin Selina, Miss Diana Talbot."
Selina saw a plump, comely and cheerful person in comfortably sensible
dress, mantle and bonnet. It may be interpolated that what Miss Diana
Talbot saw was an ardent-faced, pretty girl in a plaid skirt and
plain jacket, a hat with roses, and a manner bright with interest and
interrogation.
The ladies shook hands.
"Miss Talbot has plans afoot to open a school in the autumn," said
Marcus, "and Miss Pocahontas Boswell has done you the compliment to
propose that she consider you as a teacher. Miss Talbot also on the
recommendation of the elder Miss Boswell and her niece, has come
from her part of the state to have me advise with her about her
advertisements and her prospectus."
[Illustration: "Marcus was there when Selina arrived."]
Miss Diana Talbot took up the narrative cheerily: "Miss Boswell and
Pocahontas and I were at the same small hotel in Florida this winter.
Pocahontas goes down with her aunt every year. I am returning South
later in the summer to open a winter school for girls whose health
requires they winter in the South, and whose parents are anxious their
schooling be continued. I will say the idea was suggested to me by an
acquaintance of the winter staying at the hotel with his family, a Mr.
Ealing from our part of the state. His two daughters are the nucleus
of my school, in fact my first enrollments. Pocahontas has suggested I
let her look after my French and music this first year as she has to
be South anyway. And she tells me that she has satisfied herself that
you can coach beginners in Latin and algebra, hear classes in the lower
branches and be of use to me in a secretarial way. I should say I have
taken the hotel where we were staying, for my school. The proprietor
died and it seemed opportune."
After further conversation and an appointment for a second meeting
with Selina, Miss Talbot left. Resuming his seat before his desk with
his long person outstretched in relaxation, Marcus smiled with lazy
satisfaction over at Selina, flushed prettily with excitement.
She was glad to have this word with him: "If it turned out by chance
that I could go, would it cost much to get me there, Marcus? To--to
Florida?" Her voice almost broke on the magic of the word.
"Ticket, sleeper, meals, trunk, something in your pocket to start you
on--a hundred or more dollars at least. I tell you though, Selina,"
Marcus actually roused himself and sat up emphatically, "you must make
it. The longer I look at it, the more I can see it is just what you
need. I haven't an idea but Pocahontas sees this in it for you, too,
in proposing it. A little contact with the larger world, a little
assertion and standing on your own two feet will do everything for you.
Aunt Lavinia and good Miss Ann Eliza, as I've said before, keep you a
baby, whereas naïveté can come to be downright irritating, and so can
lack of sophistication. Break away, Selina, and find yourself now."
There was that in this unfamiliar view of herself through Marcus'
estimate which hurt, and she went away silent.
Precedent and training had done all they might to make intercourse
between Selina and her father strained and unnatural. She could
remember when she was a bit of a thing, how on taking a pricked finger
to him for attention, she had been snatched away as from an act of
impiety, by womenkind, Mamma or Auntie, for womankind to attend it, and
somehow the episode seemed typical.
To open confidence with your father was as desperate a violation of
custom as to be immodest, and she had not forgotten the embarrassment
of going to him for money for her teaching venture of the winter, even
after her mother had opened the way. It came to her now that such a
relation between a daughter and father was a bit shocking.
[Illustration: "She went to her father."]
That night after her mother and her aunt were gone together to
Wednesday evening service, she went to her father who was reading his
paper as usual in the back parlor, and spoke quickly before her courage
could fail her.
"You--you have been giving me five dollars a month for my carfare and
change since I began teaching, Papa. And through Mamma you are paying
for my clothes. Isn't it a losing business for you? I've only been
giving Mamma the sixteen dollars I make a month, for Aunt Viney, and
that's over with for the summer now."
"Instead of keeping the sixteen dollars for your carfare and
incidentals and such?" smiled Papa, perhaps a little embarrassed, too,
at the trend of the conversation. "Won't you sit down, Selina?"
"But it seems so much more to Mamma and Auntie to have it come from me
this way."
"I bow to the processes in feminine logic more intricate than I can
follow," agreed Papa. "And what then, Selina?"
For a moment she almost abandoned the affair, then rallied: "Would you
be willing to advance more, Oh, a great deal more, all of--" Selina
nerved herself desperately, cold to her pretty finger-tips with the
effort of it, "--yes, a hundred dollars, if you thought good could come
to me of it?"
"Willing always, Selina; able is another thing. It is not easy for a
father to confess to his daughter that as a business proposition he is
a failure."
"Papa!"
"Yes, Selina."
The very necessity to get away from the horribly painful embarrassment
of this drove her on. "I have a chance to go away and teach, I can be
a help then by earning something worth while. Marcus thinks it wise,
Marcus says I ought to go, that I need to develop in self-reliance
and----"
"Marcus be--" began Papa and stopped.
The story came forth at this with a rush of detail. "And, Papa, to be a
whole, whole winter with Miss 'Hontas, under the same roof, doing the
same things! I love her so, Papa, I love her!"
There were further questionings from him and answers from Selina and
something in his sensitive face as he watched her while she talked,
drove her to seek justification.
"There is so much in the world, isn't there, Papa? And I haven't seen
anything of it yet? Not anything!"
By the time that Miss Diana Talbot was ready to return home several
days later, it was settled that Selina should go South in October and
teach for the winter in her school.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Mamma cried right along through the summer about it, and as the time
began to approach, Auntie stopped eating and grew pale. Culpepper had
gone home in June without knowing anything about the plan just then
afoot, and here at this point, late in August, an invitation came down
from Cousin Maria Buxton for Auntie and Selina to visit her.
"There's too much to do and to plan getting Selina ready," decided
Mamma, "and there'd be the extra expense of it to consider. I don't see
how it can be arranged, do you, Ann Eliza?"
"I'll write and say so," said Auntie.
"And I think, Selina," from her mother, "it would be only polite for
you to slip a note in your aunt's letter thanking your Cousin Maria for
asking you."
[Illustration: "Selina ... sat down to write her note."]
Selina got her pen and paper and sat down to write her note, then
paused and fell to dreaming. She saw Cousin Maria's farm, three
thousand acres she believed it was, orderly, productive and prosperous.
In her mind's eye it lay in zones, as it were, the outer boundary being
the old stone wall along the encircling limestone pike; the tilled
fields came next, of hemp, tobacco, corn and what not; the middle zone
between these tilled fields and the houseyard was the wide-spreading,
park-like woodland pastures; and heart of it all, reached through the
big stone-pillared iron gate, was the house in its houseyard, with
the garden behind. She loved this house of her Cousin Maria's, set
in lilac and syringa shrubberies, a one-storied white brick, wide and
ample and flanked by wings, with big gallery porches front and back,
and beneath a high basement containing kitchen, laundry, storerooms and
the farm offices. In recall Selina saw Cousin Maria now, too, comely
like Auntie, surveying her capably and appraisingly as she welcomed
her, had she and Auntie gone. And she saw Culpepper, too, as it were at
Cousin Maria's side as they welcomed her, regarding her quizzically.
Cousin Maria and the farm and Culpepper, seemed to stand visualized
thus in her mind, symbol for some suddenly defined thing. Was it the
best of the old things? The worth while of the established things?
Then she thought swiftly of the vista opening to her of the unknown,
with Miss Pocahontas and her outstretched hand awaiting, and her heart
leaped!
She began her letter and after thanking her Cousin Maria for the
invitation, went on to state her plans.
I want you to know, Cousin Maria, and Culpepper as well, that I'm
going away about the end of September to Florida to teach, with Miss
Diana Talbot who says she knows you, and with Miss Pocahontas Boswell.
It's not only to try to help myself and so make it easier for them
here at home, but because I want to go so badly I can't pretend this
feature of it doesn't come first. I say this because Culpepper would
see through me and say it for me if I didn't. Papa knows this part of
it and sympathizes, and I'm a little afraid Mamma and Auntie suspect
it and don't, as Mamma, for one, cries so about it most of the time,
it makes it hard, but I can't feel it possible for me to be unselfish
enough now to give it up.
Culpepper came down a week before it was necessary for his return to
the law school, to see about this thing of Selina going away as he put
it to Auntie bluntly. He walked in one evening big and sunburned and
bold and blatant with health and stored energy and conviction.
It was the first week in September and hot and he found the household,
Mamma, Auntie and Selina sitting out on the stone steps in the
starlight, Papa inside reading his paper, the aroma of his cigar
floating out.
"What does it all mean?" Culpepper without preamble demanded of the
older ladies--"this thing Selina wrote about of going away to teach?
Keep still, Selina, we know your side of it."
"And mine, I hope, Culpepper," came out through the open doorway from
Papa reading under the gas-jet in the hall. "Kindly accept the fact
that I am aiding and abetting her. She came to her father this time
first."
Mamma, coming in on this tearfully, was most emphatic: "I blame Marcus,
blame him entirely. He's Juanita's own child for stirring up trouble or
trying to, for other people. He defended himself to my face by saying
I had kept Selina so overyoung for her years she's almost ridiculous,
and that he's trying to help her to find what I've deprived her of, her
right to be a reasoning and thinking human creature." Mamma produced
her pocket handkerchief.
"Juanita herself came around with him," said Auntie aggrievedly.
"She'd better have stayed at home and mended her clothes. Her skirt was
without a braid and frayed, and two buttons were gone from the front
of her waist. Instead she told us that if we of the older generation
didn't face the demands of the present younger one, it simply means
they'll cut us out of their working plans and repudiate us. Don't ask
me what she meant. You've heard Juanita. And she said the time was at
hand and was ripe and she was warning us. What time she didn't specify.
That she hadn't been prophesying to her sex all these years not to know
the signs now they were here. She talked like an altogether determined
and fanatical person, and with no more sense to it than just what I
say, but then Juanita's talk is always more or less that way."
"Marcus, of course! I might have guessed he was in it," said Culpepper
with small patience. But then these two never had struck it off anyway,
neither ever willing to concede a thing to the other, Maud always said.
"It's a fool proposition, I beg your pardon, Cousin Robert, since you
say you're in it, but I'm with Cousin Lavinia and ole Miss here, every
time. If Selina's got to teach, she'd better teach for less here at
home where we all can look after her."
He spoke to Selina presently, suggesting they take a walk about the
block. He began to question her almost as soon as they were started,
the dry sycamore leaves on the pavement crackling under their feet.
This Selina by his side was scant eighteen now.
"It's true then, what you wrote in your letter? That it's you who want
to go? You're thinner than you were and you're pale. Stop here under
the gas post and let me look at you. What's it all about?"
He seemed almost to be making an issue of her wanting to go. She
colored in the dark with a feeling of vague uneasiness that she was
about to disappoint and hurt him by what she must say. And yet when she
once was started, she amazed herself by the actual passion with which
she spoke.
"It's like rosy beckoning fingers, Culpepper, and sweet odors I've
longed for, and food and drink I'm desperate for. It's not Florida
or Kalamazoo or Keokuk nor any other definite spot, Culpepper. I've
thought about it and I know. It's the unknown. It must sound to you
that I'm talking wildly and foolishly, but I won't allow it's either of
those and I won't allow I'm to blame."
He dropped her arm from his at this, and walked back to her gate beside
her with no further word.
"Good night," then he said. And yet he had asked her for her point of
view upon it! She had always thought Culpepper fair!
Later in September Cousin Maria Buxton came down for a week's visit
and shopping, and brought Selina a dress to add to her outfit for the
warm climate. Cousin Maria was solid and handsome, as said before; her
hair, still black, was parted and banded down to her ears about her
strong and healthily florid face and her black eyes surveyed the world
capably. The morning after her arrival she came into Mamma's room from
her own room adjoining, which really was Auntie's, with the garment in
question just taken from her trunk, hanging over her arm.
"It's a dress made last spring for one of Alice's girls. She's never
had it on. They have so many they outgrow them before they get around
to them."
Alice was one of Cousin Maria's two daughters by her first husband. She
had married a prominent stock-farmer in her part of the state and was
rich. The other had married a tobacco farmer and was rich likewise.
"Lavinia," pleaded Auntie, remindingly.
"I had said Selina never should wear finery again not her own,"
explained Mamma.
"Well, isn't it her own?" returned Cousin Maria emphatically, "and
haven't you and Ann Eliza been playing mothers to my Culpepper? Come
now, Lavinia, I shall be downright put out. Ann Eliza, you may as well
give in."
As for Selina herself, standing by, the good ladies, as was their
custom, never for a moment thought of allowing her a voice in the
discussion at all!
It was a dear dress that she, used to being obedient, here was bidden
to try on, just as Cousin Anna Tomlinson happening by, came upstairs.
There was not much to it, though in that perhaps lay its appeal. Scant
and slip-like, with a show of her pretty throat, and a show, too, of
her slim nice ankles, it consisted of hand needlework on a texture of
limp mull.
"Like our India muslins when we were young," Auntie was obliged to
allow to Cousin Maria with satisfaction.
"Made by the sisters here in the convent on Madeleine Street," said
Cousin Maria.
"I always meant to give Selina gold beads," said Cousin Anna.
"Why don't you give 'em then?" from Cousin Maria. "Selina, you look
dear. With ankle-strap slippers and your finger in your mouth the way
you had to be spanked out of, you'd seem about seven again. That's
right, look pleased."
It was Mrs. Gwinne Tuttle, however, of all unpremeditated persons!--who
gave Selina beads. She came trundling in just here to pay a visit to
Auntie and her lifelong friend, Cousin Maria, leaving her carriage at
the curb. Hearing voices upstairs, she came mounting up.
"As if Ann Eliza and Maria and I hadn't slept three in a bed in order
to stay together, many a Friday night in our young days," she reminded
Mamma. "I'd better add, we all were thinner then. Selina, that dress
is something more like what it should be than the ones Anna here and
Madame Vincent put on you and me. So you are going South, they tell me,
with Pocahontas and my old friend, Marcia Boswell? I wish Pocahontas
would make up her mind whom she's going to marry and do it. Huger with
all his tobacco money, wants her, I hear, Maria, and young Mason, the
jockey club's biggest man, is after her. Marcus Bruce is on her string,
too, they tell me. She's too charming a person to grow restless and
faddish, imagining she wants occupation and not a husband! That dress,
Selina, with its round neck, needs beads."
There came a murmur from Cousin Anna.
"Well, who's keeping you from giving gold ones, Anna?" inquired Mrs.
Tuttle. "I'm going to send Selina some beads on my own account. I owe
her on a score she and I know about. I was tried that night of the
musicale, Selina; two of my best soloists had failed me, and I can't
seem to stand a person being apologetic and deprecatory anyhow. Why
didn't you rise to it and tell me what you thought of me? My beads,
Anna, are going to be coral, the coral of Selina's cheeks right now.
The ingenue style of the dress and of Selina, call for coral."
"When a girl is young," said Cousin Maria, "I say have her look young."
"She does, Maria," returned Mrs. Tuttle. "Selina looks altogether
young. She's pretty, too, and it's not going to hurt her to know it.
It'll do her good instead, and give her spirit. I'm going down street
and choose my corals now."
After Mrs. Tuttle and Cousin Anna both were gone, Cousin Maria broke
forth: "I hope Diana Talbot isn't going to make a fiasco of her legacy
with this school venture."
"We haven't heard anything about a legacy," said Mamma. "We liked Miss
Diana very much when she called twice. She seemed very cheerful and
certain about the school, and has offered Selina thirty-five dollars a
month and her board and washing. She herself and the Episcopal minister
at the place, so she said, are to teach the advanced classes."
"Diana is as cheerfully volatile and heady as the rest of the Talbots,"
claimed Cousin Maria. "They are in the county next to ours and I've
known 'em always. Old Tom Talbot, the grandfather, built the first
brandy distillery in the state in order to distill brandy from beets.
Why, with corn everywhere and fortunes, too, to be made in sour-mash
whisky, only a Talbot could say. He failed, of course, and later set
out vineyards for claret on land that held fortunes in Burley tobacco.
He had traveled and read too much to be practical, old Tom Talbot had."
"Why, of course," chimed in Auntie, "I remember the stories of _him_.
He thought once he'd succeeded in making silk thread for weaving from
milk-weed."
"It's in the blood," said Cousin Maria. "Bulkley Talbot, Tom's son,
and Diana's father, had his craze planting yucca to make rope fiber
with all his wife's inherited acres crying to God and nature for hemp.
Diana's been kept down until now by her brothers who both married
level-headed women who have kept them steady in harness themselves. In
turn they've frowned down Diana until this last year when she came into
a legacy of some several thousand dollars from an aunt. Immediately
she disbanded the little school she had taught for half her life in
her home town, and last fall went South. She said our winters were
beginning to give her rheumatism and she was going down to sit on the
equator or some of its tributaries and think things over. They tell me
she has leased this hotel for two years, and I know she has had her
school furniture shipped. I don't mean to discourage you, Selina. Diana
is one of my old friends. In one sense you'll be as safe with her as
with your mother here, or with Ann Eliza or myself. And I must say,
too, I agree with Emmeline Tuttle that it looks freakish in Pocahontas
to drag her aunt down there this early in the season that she may go
to teaching when she doesn't have to. Young women didn't indulge in
restlessness in my day."
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
It seemed as though everyone wanted to do something for Selina as the
time drew near. Marcus stopped by one morning about a week before she
was to go. He had added a carelessly floating tie to his make-up of
cape and old hat, and his manner was even more easily negligent.
"Tell Uncle Robert not to do anything about a ticket for you, Selina.
The matter's as good as settled and I stopped to tell you I have a pass
for you."
This was news so astounding that Mamma on hearing it, lost her head.
"Then we will get that piece of white opera cloth, Ann Eliza, and make
her the evening cape she needs so badly. There'll be money enough for
it now."
Selina had not forgotten a certain extravagance she longed for. "And
those ankle-strap slippers, Mamma, may I have them?"
Maud brought her a letter portfolio, Juliette a little crêpe scarf,
Adele a case for photographs and Amanthus the dearest bangle for her
bracelet, if she'd owned a bracelet. Amanthus didn't always remember
things. The four came in a body with their gifts and stood about amid
the litter of preparation and packing, with embarrassment, almost with
wistfulness.
At last Maud broke forth. Judy and Adele flushed as she spoke and
Amanthus looked disturbed, but they evidently all stood with her in
what she said. "We've been talking about you, Selina. It's as if we
still need you and you no longer need us. And watching you, we can see
you're different in other ways. You've been giving in, just as you've
always given in more than any of us, letting your mother get you the
clothes she wants you to have rather than what you want, and pack your
trunk when we know how you want to pack it yourself. You're just the
same in this way _seemingly_, but in reality you're not the same at
all. You know now that you want your own way about the clothes, and
you know you want to pack your trunk. You've been slower coming to
it than any of the rest of us, except Amanthus, who hasn't any idea
what I'm talking about now, and probably never will have. Her mother
or her husband or somebody'll always pack her trunks and she'll thank
them beautifully and sweetly and mean it. But you _know_ now you want
to do it all for yourself, and it makes you different. And we've had
to decide you don't need _us_, because you've made all your plans and
arrived at your decisions without us?"
Selina looked from one to the other of them. Was it so? Did she not
need them as in the past? She did not know herself. Certainly it was
true that she passionately did want to pack her own trunk! How did they
guess? What could she say to them? She embraced them all in turn, and
kissed them tenderly.
Mr. Tate came round a full day too soon in his dates with roses for
her to take on the journey, and Mr. Cannon brought her all the latest
magazines. Mr. Welling came with a volume of what he explained were
Dobsons by that fellow Austin. Mr. Welling was a wag.
"I'm sorry none of us have been able to qualify, Miss Selina, and this
has to be the best I can do for you. There are rondeaux in it, I can
vouch for that for I've looked to see, and I'm suspicious there are
dittoes. But unfortunately there are not batteaux which would mean
more in a place like Florida. But then, of course, you'll have Miss
Tippecanoe," by which name he invariably spoke of Miss Pocahontas.
A dearth in news, or indeed in communication of any sort from Miss
Diana, began to prove worrying as the day before leaving arrived, and a
telegram was sent to Miss Pocahontas for reassurance.
By night her reply came:
Have wired Miss Talbot, and had answer. Expected on original date.
Miss Boswell and Miss 'Hontas were to leave Eadston in the late
afternoon. Selina was to start in the early evening and meet them at
one o'clock that night at the junction where she would board their
train.
This very day, Selina's trunk locked and her satchel ready, Aunt
Juanita stopped by with a message. It was a mercy she remembered to
deliver it.
"Marcus finds he is not going to get that pass; he asked me yesterday
to let you know. He put off his application until too late, but he says
he can arrange for a lower rate, and to tell Robert it will be about
half. And he does hope, Selina, you are going to be self-reliant and
not make too many demands on Pocahontas, who is a sacrifice to her aunt
and her aunt's asthma now."
Selina sat up straight and indignant. She really liked that. And from
Marcus who had insisted on her going!
Her mother began to worry as soon as Aunt Juanita left. "I'm sorry now
I took any of that money from you your father gave you this morning
for yourself, and paid the bill for your cape while I was down street,
Selina, but your father has been so bothered to get as much together,
we won't mention it to him. It isn't as if you wouldn't shortly be
earning money for yourself."
Cousin Anna came by here. "Willoughby wanted me to give you some money
for a present outright, Selina. But I said no--that fifty dollars is a
good deal for you to feel free to spend. I am putting that much in your
hands, however. I have it here with me now, for you to hold in case of
any emergency. Giving it to you with such an understanding we'll know
you have funds if need arises."
Everybody went to the train in the evening, Mamma, Auntie, Papa, the
girls, Culpepper, Mr. Cannon, Mr. Welling, Bliss, Algy even, and Tommy
Bacon. Papa had seen Marcus late in the afternoon who said he would
meet them at the station with the ticket as he was having a little
trouble getting it fixed up and that he wanted to see Selina off anyhow.
Five minutes before train time, with Selina's trunk waiting to be
checked and everybody agitated since it was known that Marcus was to
bring the ticket, there came, not this person at all, but a messenger
boy with an envelope, calling Wistar as he came through the gate, a
privilege which everybody enjoyed comfortably and at will in those days.
Well, it was here at any rate, the ticket, and Papa, his face dark with
suppressed rage, jerked out, not a ticket at all, but a scribbled line
from Marcus which Selina caught as her father flung it from him, and
read at a hurried glance while he in a quick undertone asked for her
purse to supplement his.
Cheaper rates out of the question. They tell me the regular tickets
are on sale at the station.
[Illustration: "She ... stood looking at them grouped below."]
While her father was gone to see about ticket and baggage, everybody
else boarded the train with Selina, only to be hustled off almost
immediately by the porter. Her kisses to Mamma and Auntie even were
curtailed. She hurried with them as far as the rear platform of her
coach, and stood looking at them grouped below, a somewhat bereft young
figure had she but known it, up there alone, pale and startled now the
actual moment of going was come. And she looked pretty, too, in her
new skirt and jacket of blue, with her traveling veil, also new, flung
back; quite too pretty and visibly inexperienced to be starting off
alone.
"That change at the junction by herself in the middle of the night, I
don't like it," insisted Mrs. Wistar down on the platform.
Auntie, when deeply moved, became cross. "What's the use bringing that
up now?" she demanded tartly. "You've known about it all along."
"The train's off and where's the ticket?" cried Maud.
"Oh, where?" from Juliette and Adele.
Selina's father running down the platform here and swinging up the step
to her with ticket and trunk check in his hand as the train began to
move, met Culpepper swinging up by the steps from the other side. There
was a look of determination on the older man's face. It was evident
that at this last moment he didn't like the idea of that change for her
at the junction either.
"You needn't," said Culpepper tersely, taking the ticket and check from
him. "My mind has been made up all the time, I am."
"On the contrary, I----"
"Cousin Robert!"
The eyes of the two met. "Exactly," said the younger, "now will you let
me go? Reassure ole Miss and her mother. She has to sign that ticket
somewhere, doesn't she?"
And Culpepper helped his Cousin Robert swing off the now briskly moving
train, and he and Selina saw him go back along the platform and join
the others.
* * * * *
At 1:45 Culpepper put Selina, ticket, satchel, umbrella, candy-box,
roses, magazine and lunch basket, into the actual hands of Miss
Pocahontas Boswell, up and at the steps of the sleeper to receive her.
"She's the only thing in the way of a Selina, such as it is, we've got,
you know," he remarked cheerfully.
"I know, and I'll see she is returned to you such as I take her, except
my own part in her which I propose holding," said Miss Pocahontas
smiling, too. "When do you get a train back?"
"Four in the morning," from Culpepper genially.
"He brought me here to the junction to you," Selina told Miss
Pocahontas in the dressing-room a bit later as that dear person
assisted her to get ready for her berth, "and took every sort of care
of me. But he was blunt. He wouldn't even talk."
"Why not?" from Miss 'Hontas, plaiting Selina's heavy flaxen hair.
"He didn't want me to want to come so much," said Selina, neither very
lucidly nor elegantly, she felt.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Thirty-six hours later, Miss Diana Talbot in a comfortably sensible
white dress, with a triangle of lace cap on her portly head, stood at
the top of the porch-steps of her leased hotel of white clap-boards,
the same set in a flanking of moss-draped live oaks with a nice blue
lake behind.
From the station omnibus at the foot of these steps, with their eyes
taking in this pleasing picture of establishment, descended Miss Marcia
Boswell, tall and quietly distinguished, Miss Pocahontas, charming and
smiling, and Selina in the jaunty new skirt and jacket of blue and the
back-flung veil, flushed and altogether lovely, her young eyes dewy
with something of joy and more of big and eager wonder.
Miss Diana's countenance as they came up the steps to her, however,
was by no means so comfortable in its aspect as her comely person. It
looked absorbed and
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