CHAPTER ELEVEN

CHAPTER ELEVENAt 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 deliberatelyroaming 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 Amanthusto 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—andwhat 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 isIn 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!""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 TWELVEFrom 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'sHamletand Modjeska'sRosalindthrough 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 successfullyback 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 andmy 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 mapsherein 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 andMiss 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 thesquare, 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."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 orthe 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 twentyaccording 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 MissPocahontas' 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 andcolored: "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 headTo shade her cheeks' sweet roses,A crown were fit, but she wore insteadA broad-brimmed hat upon her head.I'll see her thus until I'm deadAnd 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 herto 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 boysAre ceaseless joysUp from six all the way to sixteen.How she preaches,As she teachesWith 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 intothat 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 savedallilluminating 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 THIRTEENMarcus 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.""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 costmuch 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 goingto 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."She went to her father."That night after her mother and her aunt weregone 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 FOURTEENMamma 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.""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 CousinMaria'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," saidAuntie 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 theirfeet. 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 healthilyflorid 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 anddo 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 ofhim. 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 dollarsfrom 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 ELEVENAt 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 deliberatelyroaming 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 Amanthusto 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—andwhat 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 isIn 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!""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.

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 deliberatelyroaming 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 Amanthusto 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—andwhat 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 isIn 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!"

"Rooted out his umbrella and tucked Amanthus, pretty thing, onto his arm."

"Rooted out his umbrella and tucked Amanthus, pretty thing, onto his arm."

"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 TWELVEFrom 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'sHamletand Modjeska'sRosalindthrough 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 successfullyback 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 andmy 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 mapsherein 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 andMiss 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 thesquare, 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."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 orthe 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 twentyaccording 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 MissPocahontas' 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 andcolored: "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 headTo shade her cheeks' sweet roses,A crown were fit, but she wore insteadA broad-brimmed hat upon her head.I'll see her thus until I'm deadAnd 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 herto 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 boysAre ceaseless joysUp from six all the way to sixteen.How she preaches,As she teachesWith 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 intothat 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 savedallilluminating 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."

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'sHamletand Modjeska'sRosalindthrough 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 successfullyback 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 andmy 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 mapsherein 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 andMiss 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 thesquare, 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.

"A covered wooden bridge across the river ... seemed older than anything else."

"A covered wooden bridge across the river ... seemed older than anything else."

"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 orthe 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 twentyaccording 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 MissPocahontas' 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 andcolored: "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 headTo shade her cheeks' sweet roses,A crown were fit, but she wore insteadA broad-brimmed hat upon her head.I'll see her thus until I'm deadAnd 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 herto 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 boysAre 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 intothat 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 savedallilluminating 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 THIRTEENMarcus 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.""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 costmuch 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 goingto 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."She went to her father."That night after her mother and her aunt weregone 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.

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."

"Marcus was there when Selina arrived."

"Marcus was there when Selina arrived."

"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 costmuch 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 goingto 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.

"She went to her father."

"She went to her father."

"She went to her father."

That night after her mother and her aunt weregone 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 FOURTEENMamma 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.""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 CousinMaria'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," saidAuntie 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 theirfeet. 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 healthilyflorid 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 anddo 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 ofhim. 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 dollarsfrom 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."

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."

"Selina ... sat down to write her note."

"Selina ... sat down to write her note."

"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 CousinMaria'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," saidAuntie 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 theirfeet. 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 healthilyflorid 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 anddo 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 ofhim. 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 dollarsfrom 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."

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