CHAPTER THREEWhen Selina came down to breakfast the next morning Papa was gone but Mamma and Auntie were lingering over their coffee and waffles, waiting for her.She explained her tardiness. "I'm late because I didn't know just what to put on to teach in. I got out my cloth dress, but that seemed reckless when it's my best, so I put on the old plaid and this linen collar and cuffs.""Which are tasty and yet severe," said Mamma approvingly, "and somehow in keeping."The implication proved unfortunate. Selina's profile as it flashed about on Mamma flushed. Such a young, young profile. Such a young Selina in the plaid dress and the linen collar and the cuffs. Such a child quivering with abhorrence of the act of going to work, and wincing with shame because of the abhorrence. In her pitiful state she was inclined to take umbrage at anything. And what did her mother mean?"Linen collar and cuffs are in keeping with what, Mamma?" she asked in reply, even sharply.Mamma hastened to conciliate and again was unfortunate."In keeping with the very worthy calling you are entering on. The pettifogic calling as we spoke of it under Mr. Aristides Welkin. He had a proper respect for his occupation as a teacher and saw to it that his pupils had.""If he meant pedagogic, Mamma, he probably said so. And can't you understand if there's one thingI wouldn'twant it to be, it's a calling? Mamma,pleasedon't let's discuss the teaching any more. Yes, I've had all I want to eat. Idideat my egg, and I don'twantany waffles.""Selina, come here and kiss Auntie before you go," from that dear person. "I learned my a-b, abs, and my parlez-vous's, before the day of Mr. Welkin. In my time we all went to old Madame Noël de Jourde de Vaux, wife of a guillotined French nobleman, as I've often told you. In a little four-roomed cottage it was, not far from the market-house. I tasted my first olive there and sipped orange-flower water and sugar. She was a tiny old personage with twinkling eyes and manners that had served her well at court. She called it her A B C school for the babies."Darling Auntie! Selina threw grateful, passionate arms around her and kissed her. One could see Madame de Vaux and her babies in the cottage near the market-house through a glamour, but one hated Mr. Aristides Welkin in his calling. Why? Selina couldn't have said. Then in a rush of self-reproach, she swept about and kissed Mamma."It's a quarter past eight and I said I'd be there at nine. I'll have to hurry."She walked the ten blocks out to the opener neighborhood of the Williams'. The early morning of the Indian summer day was tinged with blue mistiness and underfoot was the pleasant rustle and crackle of leaves along the pavement. On the way she stopped in a drugstore that dealt in school supplies. She had told Mrs. Williams to have a primer and first reader for William and she must have one of each herself. As the man brought them she recognized them as the same she had used inherday, the primer with a salmon-pink cover in paper, the first reader in a blue cover in pasteboards.She took them in their package and left. In her day? That meant at the little private school where she went at first and where she learned to read. What did happen in her day at that school? She had to teach William, and it might help her to remember?She had held to Auntie's hand who took her to school that first day, she remembered that, and cried bitterly because she was frightened. And then? What had happened then?Why Amanthus had happened then, the most lovely little girl Selina seemed ever to have seen, with bronze shoes on with tassels. And because of Amanthus and the shoes, and more particularly perhaps,the tassels, she had let go of Auntie's hand and consented to stay.And then Maudie had happened, a taller little girl with plaits that were almost red. And after her a little, little girl with black curls in tiers, whose name turned out to be Juliette, and next a little girl with straight hair and big eyes named Adele. And following these, some little boys occurred named Bliss and Brent and Sam and Tommy.And on this first day did lessons begin? Just as lessons were to begin this morning with William? If only she could recall!Miss Dellie Black taught that school, and as Mamma intimated about the stiff collar and the cuffs, her alpaca apron and the gloves upon her hands with their fingers neatly cut off across the knuckles, seemed to be in keeping with her calling. She had a ruler and rapped with it, and a pointer with which she pointed to a primer chart and a blackboard.But what had she taught? And how had she taught it? Selina shut her mental eyes as it were, as she went along, and concentrated all her forces at recalling.Absurd! This picture that came to her of that first day! Auntie had gone, and the class came out and stood in a row before Miss Dellie because she said stand so. Andshestood before the chart with the pointer and with a tap of the wood on the page beneath a black mark, said,"This is A."Everybody was polite about it, but even so MissDellie tapped again and harder as though they had disputed it, and said again and louder, "This is A."Everybody accepted it again, but Miss Dellie seemed to want proof of this."Now say it after me, everybody, 'This is A.'"Everybody said it after Miss Dellie."Now say it again without me," from Miss Dellie.And after they had said it again without her, the little, little girl with the black curls, the little girl whose name proved to be Juliette, looked up into Miss Dellie's face, her own little face and her eyes full of wondering interest."Why's it A?" she asked the lady."What? What's that?" from Miss Dellie Black sharply. "Don't you know I'm talking, little girl? And you must listen!"Half a dozen volunteers explained what she had said, Maudie with the red plaits, Tommy, Sam and others."She sayswhy'sit A?""She's a naughty little girl not to know her place in school," said Miss Dellie? Black firmly, "and if she can't be quiet she can go to her seat and stay there."Absurd again! So Selina told herself as before. Much good a recall like this could do her this morning! She'd try again.But this time it wasn't a picture of school that came to her at all. But of herself at home going to Papa full of pride in her achievementsat school, and carryingwith her to his knee, her primer open at a picture."What's this?" Papa had said, full of flattering concern. "A big, big ox gazing down on a frog on a lily-pad? What? No? It isn't any ox? Miss Lizzie gave it to you for your lesson to-morrow, and she said so? Though it may be a frog? If it isn't an ox, then what is it, Selina?"She had told him clear and sure, that funny little fair-haired girl. "'Tain't an ox. Miss Dellie told us what it was when she held up the picture. It's a fable!"Absurd again! And ridiculous! How was any of all this going to help her, the grown Selina, to teach William?The Williams' house stood in a long, narrow corner lot. Its windows were tall and narrow; its front door was narrow and high. A white maid, whose manner as she surveyed you, at once seemed to disqualify you, opened the door. Selina remembered her from the other day.It was a very proper house within, very exact, very shining, very precise. One's heart opened a little way for William doomed to live his infant days amid it.Yet it almost would seem Selina had misjudged Mrs. Williams. She appeared now at the head of the stairs as Selina came in, Amazonian, handsome, impressive, and called down to her quite as anybodymight. She was so pleasantly excited she forgot to be condescending and reassuring."Come right up, Selina. I'm sure you're going to feel I've done my best for you. I couldn't feel I quitecouldlet you come way out here for justWilliam."She actually radiated enthusiasm as Selina reached the head of the stairs. "I made up my mind some of the mothers in this neighborhood had to be made to take advantage of this opportunity I was offering them. Come with me to the sewing-room. I've turned that over to you for the present. I've put the lap-board across chairs for two to sit at, and the checker-board on a chair for another. William has his own desk. I've got you four pupils."Selina followed Mrs. Williams through the hall toward the sewing-room."Rupy Dodd and Willy Dodd are midway of the seven Dodd children. Their mother will be over to see you as soon as she can. It was a mercy on my part to insist she enter these two. Henry Revis is our doctor's son. It'll take him off the street, as I pointed out to his father. His mother also will be over to see you."They went into the sewing-room, Mrs. Williams ahead, making the introductions."Rupy and Willy and Henry and William, this is Miss Wistar, Miss Selina Wistar, the young lady, the very lovely and kind young lady I think we may say, who is coming every day to teach you. Rupy!"And at this one of the two little boys seated at the lap-board, partially desisted from his absorption with some crimson rose-hips and looked up. The lap-board was strewn with stems and husks and some of the rose-hip contents."Rupy," sharply, "are you quite sure they'regoodto eat?""Aw, who's eatin' 'em?" said Rupy the sturdy, red-haired and freckled, spewing out rose-hip fuzz along with disgust at woman's blindness and interference in what she didn't understand. "I took 'em away f'om Willy to bust 'em an' see what's in 'em. Mummer sent 'em over to the teacher.""I'll bust some myse'f soon as he'll lemme," from Willy anxiously, not quite so sturdy and with hair not quite so red and paler freckles."Rupy's the oldest," from Mrs. Williams as if it were apology and accounted for the whole business. "Willy's his twin. William, you and Henry come and speak to Miss Wistar."Mrs. Williams had withdrawn. Selma's coat and hat were on the sofa in the corner and she had taken the chair provided for her beside a small table. Her color came and went, her hair shone with pale luster, her manner was pretty and the collar and cuffs were becoming.At desk, checker-board and lap-board her pupils sat before her and gazed at her.William was at the desk. He was very clean, veryshining and very gloomy. His headwastoo large. It looked tired as from the carrying of an overweight of suspicion. Patiently he eyed her and the whole business about to be with distrust. In a curious way it warmed Selina's heart, causing her to feel banded with William as against some outside cunning force. It was as if she found a friend and ally here in William.Rupy Dodd and Willy Dodd sat at the lap-board. As said before, they had red hair and freckles wherever freckles supposedly might be. Rupy having abandoned the rose-hips by request, looked alert and Willy, his twin, looked at Rupy.Henry at the checker-board was small and lean with a keen blue eye and a keener air. Asked by Selina to tell her again what his name was he gave it with briskness and every off-hand due, as Hennery. A minute before she had heard this Henry sum her up to Rupy."Aw, she ain't a teacher, she's a girl."And she had heard the contumely of Rupy's reply: "With molasses-candy plaits round her head."Selina in the chair before her class held a slate in her hand. She had borrowed it from William and with a bit of chalk supplied her by Mrs. Williams from the machine drawer, had made a certain symbol upon it. This slate with the symbol in chalk upon it she now held up to the class."This, William and Rupy and Willy and Henry,"she said a little tremulously, even while trying to make it sound firm, "this is A."William looked tired with distrust of the whole doubtless tricky business. He'd been fooled into this thing called life for a starter, his manner seemed to say, and he'd be wary and watchful about the rest. Let it be A, it was her business since she was claiming it was A, not his.Henry spoke disparagingly. "Pshaw, I know the whole durned business from A to Izzard. It don't need any teacher to tellmewhat's A."Willy was peevish. But then, as everybody's manner of bearing with him said, including his brother, what was he but a twin? "What's Izzard?" from Willy, peevishly. "I know A. My Mummer, she taught us A. What you meanin' by Izzard, Henry?"But Rupy the flame-headed, spewing some more just-discovered rose-hip fuzz out his mouth through a gap made by two missing incisors, here spread himself across the lap-board and asked a question. Asked it as one asked a question he long has wanted to know. Asked it in faith with a demanding eye, as one who means to bite into more fruits in life than mere rose-hips and reveal their hearts, or know the reason."Why's it A?"And the girl-teacher, this Selina, looked back at him. Why was it A, indeed? Rupy of this decade was asking as Juliette of the last decade had done. AndJuliettehad had no answer.William spoke up out of what one gathered wasthe gloom of his own experience, addressing himself to Rupy. "She'll tell you it's because God says so. Eve'ybody tells you that."Rupy flung himself back off the lap-board against his chair with the air of one who had her. "Why's it A?" he repeated.Henry, small, lean, knowing, never had remitted his shrewd gaze fixed appraisingly upon her. Suddenly now he relaxed and his manner changed from challenging to protective, from aggressive to benignant. "Aw, gwan an' say it out. Don't you be afraid. You say what you wanter say about why it's A."For Henry had read her and discovered her.She didn't know why it was A!And Selina drawing enlightenment from Henry upon the wise path to tread, said what she wanted to say, just as he bade her do."I don't know why it's A. The first day I ever went to school we asked why it was A, but nobody told us.""An' you don't know yet?" from William with the triumph of the certain if gloomy prognostigator.Rupy seemed to feel that he had started all this and was responsible. His air, too, like Henry's, had changed from the demanding and the challenging to the protective. She was a girl, and she didn't know! What further proof needed that she was here to be taken care of?"Well, anyhow this one's A. Go on. The next one's B. We all know 'em."Willy came to as though the burden of the proof suddenly was put upon him."B bit it, C cut it, D dealt it——""Aw, Willy," from Rupy disgustedly, "you go on like a girl when she thinks she knows it."William emerged into an outraged being. "Don't go on like a girl. You gimme back them rose-hips. They was mine to give the teacher.""Well," grumbled Rupy as with one willing to take part of it back, "if, 'tain't like a girl, it's like a twin, then."They knew their letters, they knew their numbers, up to ten at least, they all had primers and had them with them, and proved to her they knew cat, and rat, and mat, and hen, and pen and men, on the page.Selina didn't believe, however, that any of them could read. As well make a start somewhere and find out. She turned to a page well on in the primer, a page she had met before in her day. She held it up to them. It showed a benevolent bovine gazing downward at a frog on a lily-pad."Everybody turn to this page. It's a fable and we'll start there."They were on to her at once with contumely and derision, Rupy the freckled, Henry the lean, William the tired because as now of the very inadequateness of most creatures."Fable?" from Rupy. "What for's it any fable? What's a fable?" pityingly."Aw, 'tain't no fable, can't you see it ain't?" from Henry in disgust.From William with gloomy patience. "It's an ox. And the thing it's talking to is a frog."Willy bobbed up. He was nothing but a twin, poor soul! But even so,he'dshow her! "O-x, ox, f-r-o-g, frog, p-r-i-m, prim, e-r, er, primer.""Aw, Willy," from Rupy in tones of even greater disgust. "Whut's the matter with you? This here'sherschool. Let her talk. It ain't your'n."For she was a girl! And discovered to be pretty! And twice proven under test not to know! She was here to be taken care of and protected! What further proofs of this were needed?Mrs. Williams came out to the hall as Selina was leaving at noon. "I hope you feel you got along fairly well? That your first morning gave you encouragement?"Selina hesitated. Her linen collar was a bit awry and the crown of flaxen plaits about her head had sagged. "It's—it's different from what I thought. I don't think I knew what little boys were like. It's—it's interesting, and I dare say I'll like it. Little girls, as I remember us, tried to think the way we were told to think. It's as if little boys feel that's a reason for thinking the other way.""I dare say," from Mrs. Williams absently. She wasn't following what Selina had to say. But thenSelina wasn't at all certain she was following herself."I feel you're quite justified in coming to us now," Mrs. Williams was saying. "It's a great relief to me that I succeeded in convincing two mothers at least of how greatly it was to their advantage to send their children over. You understand, of course, Selina, that Rupert and Willy and Henry mean four dollars for you, the same as my William?"It was what Selina had been anxious to know but had not quite liked to ask.CHAPTER FOURWhen Selina returned from her first morning's teaching, she had much to tell. She almost felt she was growing sordid and mercenary herself. "When I got to Mrs. Williams', Mamma, I found three other pupils waiting for me.""It's an ugly brick front, that house of the Williams', so tall and spare," said her mother, not just grasping what was significant in the information."Three more pupils it means, Mamma and Auntie, makingfourin all.""I'm sure I'm glad she proved as good as her word," said Auntie. "I suppose because she needed the others to make up the class for her own child, she made those mothers feel it was entirely her interest in their children's welfare bringing it about. People always go down before that sort of zeal for their benefit. That's Amelia McIntosh, exactly!"Selina tried again. She herself was tremendously excited. If when she arrived at the Williams' and found those four wide-eyed little boys awaiting her, her heart misgave her as to what she was going to do with them, she had no intention of telling it at home, and if damage seemed likely to be done ather novice hands to the innocent William and his equally innocent companions, she was not thinking of that part of it at all! What she was trying to make plain was of a different nature."Don't you realize what it means, Mamma? Four pupils at four dollars a pupil! Think of that, Auntie!"They saw the point at last and dropping their sewing in their laps, sat up animated and excited."Four pupils at four dollars a pupil?" said Auntie. "That's how much for a week's teaching, Lavinia?" Auntie always succumbed before figures."Four and four's eight, and eight's sixteen," said Mamma, dazzled, "and multiply this sixteen by four again for a month's total—four t'm's six is twenty-four, four t'm's one is four and two to carry, is—! Selina, you must have a round-necked, real party dress now!" happily."And two to carry is what, Lavinia?" from Auntie anxiously. "Sixty-four dollars?" in answer to her sister-in-law's triumphant reply. "I can't believe it! Selina, you must have a hat with a soft feather, too!"Selina was dazzled, too, but endeavoring to hold herself steady. Fifteen dollars was the most she had had for her own at any one time in her life. She had held on to it hoardingly, letting a dozen things go by that she really wanted, to lose her head in the end and spend it for a thing she didn't want atall as it proved. She was going to keep her head and her dignity this time over this sudden wealth opening to her."I shall pay Aunt Viney from now on; that's to be my part," she said with finality. "Remember that, please, Mamma, in making your calculations.""But nothing more," from Auntie."Not one thing more, other than for yourself," from Mamma, "and I shall mention the matter to your father, now," happily, "there's nothing in it for him to feel worried over now."Her father spoke to Selina that evening, stopping her on her way up the stairs as he came down."Your mother has told me about this teaching, since I got home," he said. "Stop a moment, Selina."He lifted her face by a hand placed softly beneath her chin as they stood there on the steps. The refined, rather delicate face with the close brown beard she perforce thus looked up into, was sensitive as her own.The eyes seemed to be regarding her as from a new viewpoint. His own little daughter, this young person with the all too heavy flaxen plaits and the dress-skirt down to her instep!"Your mother assures me you chose to do this teaching yourself, Selina? Am I to decry it, or applaud it?"She was horribly embarrassed, not being accustomed to discuss her affairs in this way with him, communications of an intimate nature between themalways being through her mother. The thing was to end the interview as quickly as possible and get away from the disturbing proximity."It's settled, Papa, so don't decry it," she spoke stiffly and even while doing so was ashamed of it.He was regarding her a little wistfully. "Your mother tells me, Selina, that you will need a winter dress?" Was he groping, perhaps sorrowfully, trying to find some point through which to reach her? "See to it that it comes from me, will you, and that it is a nice one?"Again she was ashamed, this time of the relief with which she fled from his kiss and the touch of his hand on her shoulder.Apparently there is everything in an undertaking being a success, even when it is teaching for your living, and you a woman. Selina told Juliette, what her four pupils were to bring her, and she told the others, they who had been so plainly shocked and full of distress for her, and they came hurrying over, filled with excitement and admiration now.It was the afternoon following Selina's second day of teaching. She was in her own room which overlooked the backyard and Auntie's beds of salvias and dahlias still braving the first light frosts. Now Selina felt that her room didn't lack distinction. She would have preferred a set of cottage furniture like Maud's, of course, white with decalcomania decorations on it in flowers and landscapes, instead of the despised mahogany set that had belonged to thegrandmother she was named for. Selina belonged to her own day and hour."Cottage furniture is adorable and mahogany relegated to attics and junk shops," she once had said discontentedly to her mother.Still, with her books and her pictures, a panel in oils done by Cousin Anna, of cat-tails, and the companion to it in pond-lilies, and a Japanese parasol over her mantelpiece, her room did not lack for distinction.She was looking over the first-reader books she had ordered for her pupils, and wondering what she was to do with them, when there was a tap at her door and Amanthus came in. Lashing the laughter of her cheeks and eyes, and Amanthus did not often stop being enchanted for side matters, this loveliest of creatures came hurrying to her and kissed her."I've been wanting to tell you, Selina, that Tommy and Bliss and the other boys think you're wonderful and a dear about teaching." Tommy Bacon and Bliss were the quite especial two with Amanthus just now, there never being less than two in her case. "But I came in now because Juliette has told me! Think of you earning all that!"Juliette, who had come with Amanthus and had lingered to speak with Mrs. Wistar and Auntie in the front room, came flashing in here."Isn't Amanthus' new dress enchanting, Selina? Who but Mrs. Harrison would have thought of fawn color and rose? I heard ribbon bows astrimming were coming in, and I must say I like them. We've been discussing you, Selina. Maudie says you didn't want to teach, and that every step we take toward the thing we don't want to do, as you did, strengthens our characters. She is choosing something for me to take up, that I won't care for, because she says I'm volatile and changeable. Think of you really earning all that, Selina!" The crimson staining Juliette's cheeks was glorious!"I'm not sure Maudie is such a safe one for you to follow, Judy," considered Selina, the fair-skinned. "You're not as volatile, if I know what volatile is, as she is."Amanthus turned away from the bureau where she had been fluffing her sunny yellow hair, and came and sat down before the open coal fire with the two. "Mamma says Maudie is laughable if she wasn't so masterful, taking you all after strange gods. I asked her what strange gods meant, and she laughed and told me I'd never need to find out.""You won't, Amanthus," said little Judy omnisciently, with a nod of her small dark head, "the rest of us, I kind of feel," with big solemnity, "will go far." Then she took a lighter tone. "It's Maudie who's always proposing something to the rest of us, but when you come to think about it, we always fall in. There she is now, calling to your mother, Selina, as she comes up the stairs. She said she'd be over."Handsome Maud, bringing energy and unrest withher, burst forth with her plaint before even she had found a seat, Selina vacating one of the three chairs for her, and taking a place on the bed."It's giving me such concern, what I ought to be making of myself, Selina, now you've set the way, I didn't sleep last night for considering it. I said so to Papa, and he said 'stuff' which wasn't polite. And anyway, I know I'm right; everyone should center on some talent, only I can't decide on which. Think of the proved value of yours!"And here Adele came in. She had gone by for one and the other, and then followed them here. If Juliette was flashing, and Amanthus enchanting, and Maudie with her red-brown hair and red and white skin, undeniably handsome, Adele, seemingly, should have been lovely. Her eyes were dark, and her cheeks softly oval. But somehow she lacked what Maud called the vital fire. Or was it confidence she lacked? She herself explained it by saying she never was allowed by her family to respect the things she had the slightest bent for doing.As Adele came in now, her dark eyes looked their worry. She took the place indicated beside Selina on the bed. "You're working for what you'll get, Selina, giving something for something? It's just come to me, thinking it over. It must be a self-respecting feeling it gives. It makes me begin to wonder if I've really any right to my allowance from Papa.""While Selina's busy with her teaching, maybe it would be a good thing for the rest of us to get togetherand keep up our German," burst forth Maud. "Oh, I know, Adele, you mean a different thing, something highly moral and uncomfortable, but meanwhile let's be doingsomething. It's inaction that's galling.""You said the other day," from little Juliette, indignantly, "we'd get a chart and find out something about the stars and astronomy. I went and bought me a book!"Amanthus, flower-like and lovely creature, looked from one to the other of them as they talked. The wonder on her face and the bother in her violet eyes made her sweet and irresistible."You're so queer," protestingly, "you Maudie and Adele, and yes, Juliette, too. You do get so worked up. I don't see what it is you're always thinking you're about. Selina needed the money. I don't see what more there is to it than that. It's certainly fine she is going to make all she is by teaching. And, Selina, I mustn't forget, Mamma told me to give you her love and consummations, no, I guess I mean congratulations." Amanthus was given to these lapses in her English. "Are the rest of you going to stay longer? I've got to go."When Culpepper came around a night later and heard the astounding news of Selma's good fortune, he pretended to a loss of his usually sober head."Come go to the theater with me to-night, Selina, to celebrate? That is if your mother agrees? No, certainly I can't afford it. I see the question in youraccusing eyes, but you needn't rub it in that I'm a plodding dependent and you're the opulent earner."At the close of her first week at teaching William the gloomy and Rupy and Willy and Henry, Selina did not bring home her expected sixteen dollars. "It probably is customary to pay monthly. I didn't like to ask," she told Mamma and Auntie. "Settle with Aunt Viney for me until I get it, Mamma; she pays the rent for her room by the week, I know, and I'll give it to you in a lump sum at the end of the month."And when that time came, she did, a pale, incredulous, crushed Selina, and fell weeping against Mamma's neck with a hand outstretched to be cherished by Auntie."She said four dollars a pupil. I supposed she meant a week the same as we pay Aunt Viney. I thought that was little enough. She is amazed I could have dreamed of such a thing. She says I ought to have known, that my common-sense should have told me, that I could have investigated for myself. She meant four dollars a month for a pupil. Education comes cheaper than cooks. The money from all four of them—- here it is." Selina stretched forth the other hand passionately. "It will not quite pay Aunt Viney.""She was a McIntosh, as your Aunt says. I never did think it was much of an alliance for a Williams," from Mamma scathingly."I said from the start that boy William's head was too large" from Auntie as one justified.CHAPTER FIVEThat evening at the dinner table, Mamma looked around the castor and spoke briskly to Papa, tall and slight gentleman that he was, with temples hollowing a bit."We made a foolish miscalculation in the amount Selina is to receive for her teaching. We women are poor arithmeticians. With her lack of experience it is gratifying that she will be commanding the customary price as it is."By this Selina understood that her father was to be spared as much of her disappointment as possible. She really owed this gentleman something on account in this teaching business, if she were given to considering money received from him after any such fashion. He had smilingly, at her mother's request, advanced the amount needed for books and other material for her teaching, and a second sum for carfare to the Williams' in bad weather. But these transactions were not on the mind of Selina at all. Just as the economic end rather than Aunt Viney was the thing considered by Mamma in the readjustment of the family wash, so Papa, as a source of supply was taken for granted by Selina. It would not have occurred to her, nor yet to Mamma or Auntie, or to any of the mothers and aunts and daughters whom they knew, that the sum of her earnings was offset by the amount advanced for her equipping. On the other hand Selina was loving, and quite understood that it should be the feelings of her father she must spare."Mamma looked around the castor and spoke briskly.""The experience will mean everything," she claimed briskly and promptly to her mother's cue, "I ought to be glad to teach for nothing, I daresay, to get it."Auntie looked alarmed at any such view of the matter. "I knew of an apprentice in my young days, our gardener's son, bound out for the experience in a rope-walk, who carried thirty-seven boils at one time from the mildewed cornmeal they fed him. I don't approve of anyone working for anybody for nothing. We're sure to undervalue what we don't pay the price for. It's a poor plan.""How you wander," from Mamma."Not from my point," from Auntie stoutly. "I've made it."After dinner Juliette and Maud who lived next door to each other, and Amanthus and Adele who lived at the opposite ends of the block, came in in a body. It was a way the group had of getting together at one house when there was nothing else especial on hand. They trooped gaily in, dropping their wraps in the hall and coming into the parlor. No more were they and Selina seated about the open grate fire and Auntie's burnished brasses, and prepared to talk volubly, than Culpepper walked in. He found a chair and joined the group."Judy and I," Maud was saying to Selina who waspale though nobody noticed this, "saw you starting out this morning to your teaching. We think if you'd coil your plaits round your head, instead of looping them, you'd look older.""If four infant pupils bring in one swollen fortune," speculated Culpepper blandly, "how many fortunes, through how many infant pupils, is one Selina, now she's started, likely to amass?"It was as well! The mistaken matter of such banter indeed was uppermost in Selina's thoughts. The minds of these five friends had to be disabused of their rosy misinformation about her earnings, and the sooner the better. Selina, who in general had a gay little way in talking to these friends, endeavored to take that way now."I've some interesting data about the market value of education with some other things," she said briskly. "I'm thinking I'd get rich sooner, Culpepper, if I abandoned pupils and decided to cook. I'll have to ask you to divide by four"—did Selina choke a little here?—"that Fortunatus salary I thought I was getting for teaching William and the others.""Selina! Divide by four? What do you mean? Oh, I do wish," plaintively, "you all would ever say what it is you mean, plain out," from Amanthus."Selina!" from Adele, "Oh, I'm sorry!""Let me help you choose a better vocation if that's the case," indignantly from Maud. "Don't waste yourself on it.""How did you make such a mistake, Selina? Or was it your mistake?" from Juliette."Mrs. Williams said I ought to have known what she meant, I should have investigated—" Selina thus was taking up the tale of it once more when she stopped."Yes?" from Culpepper. "We're waiting?"But with a brisk air of not hearing him, Selina changed the subject. Her father whom she had forgotten was sitting in the back parlor with her mother and her aunt, had lowered his paper and was listening, too. By all the precedents and traditions of her up-bringing, it was hers to change the subject.Her audience all were acquainted with the personnel of her little class of boys by now, for when Selina was interested in a thing she talked about it. They were familiar, too, with Auntie's grievance about the cranial peculiarity of William. The thing now was to turn the matter off with what Maudie would call sprightly nonchalance."William's head certainly is growing smaller, you must know," said Selina with gayety. "Isn't it some sort of reflection on me? As his teacher? I would have thought it would be the other way."Culpepper from across the circle was looking at her with those boldly blue eyes of his, beneath half-raised lids. Papa's paper was lowered to his knee in the next room. Something was wrong, this brave gayety was assumed and they showed that they knew it was."Bluffed," said Culpepper still with that keen and appraising gaze upon her, "she's going to quit."Papa's paper floated unnoticed from his knee to the floor. Was he listening for what was to come?"I'm not," said Selina indignantly, stung by these attitudes as of watchers noting her on trial, "I've just begun.""Still, it seems to me, Mrs. Williams was right," from little Judy here in the front room. "You ought to have investigated; you should have known for yourself. Somehow girls and women never seem to know for themselves. I wonder why?"Mrs. Wistar's voice murmuring defensively came in from the next room. "I hardly follow you, Mr. Wistar! I'm sure it was harder on me than on Selina to have her so disappointed. No girl was ever more shielded than she has been from all possible disappointments, and such things, up to now, nor spared where it was possible to spare her!"The murmuring voice in reply came from Auntie. "My father's mother with her eight children followed her husband, she by wagon, he on horseback, over the old wilderness road to settle here where this town is now. She learned to use a gun and an axe as well as she used a spinning wheel, because she had to. She bore him seven more children after they were here. Nobody spared women or children then. Maybe it's been our mistake to spare her too much, Lavinia."CHAPTER SIXThere are Olympians in each group of us, and Mrs. Gwinne Tuttle not only was of the Olympians in Selina's community, but was held by some to betheOlympian. Such is the magic of pre-eminence the name Tuttle sounded chaste and euphonious to the ear.Selina's aunt and this lady who had gone to school together and were old friends, met down street. If the weakness of Mrs. Tuttle, who was an august but kindly soul, lay in a palpable enjoyment in the overdressing of her large person, her virtues lay in a well-intentioned heart. Though the details of the meeting between these two ladies were not all given to Selina, what happened at the underwear counter of the drygoods store where they met, was this:"Selina is teaching, Emmeline, teaching in a private way," Auntie told Mrs. Tuttle. "It does not pay, but it is an opening wedge," an explanation she made everybody."You mean to say, Ann Eliza Wistar, that Robert's child is old enough for that! Her name, Selina, is for your mother, I remember. And a mighty capable and resolute woman she is named for. Thatstock in our mothers one generation removed from pioneer blood and bone, was fine stock, Ann Eliza. How is Lavinia taking the child's doing it?""Well, she feels it's a pity, and so do I, and so, I think, does Robert. Selina is pretty, Emmeline.""H'm, I see. I remember now she is. I used to see her once a year at least at the dancing school balls. You send her to me, Ann Eliza, whenever an invitation comes to her from me this winter. No, better, now I come to think about it, you tell her I want her at my house to-morrow night. I'm having a musicale. I'll look out for her. Somewhere before nine o'clock."Selina reached home that day in excellent spirits anyway. She had been teaching her class of four for two months now, and William had been embarrassingly slow starting at reading in his first reader. He seemed to feel he had enough of reading when he finished his primer. This morning Mrs. Williams had come to her in the sewing-room, with reassuring news."We find William has begun to read at last, Selina. Day before yesterday he couldn't, and last night he seized his book, when we urged him, and deliberately read his father a page about a baby robin, without a mistake. We think it's wonderful how it's come about all at once."Selina thought so, too, but was none the less relieved for that. Not that she was not conscientious, for with the best will in the world she was applyingthe printed page to her four pupils and her pupils to the page, the moment of flux unfortunately being unpredictable but exceedingly reassuring when it came. Evidently there is more in the phrase "born teacher" than she had been aware of, and she grew a bit heady with the relief of this news.And here when she reached home was the invitation from Mrs. Tuttle awaiting her! Honors were crowding her! She and Mamma and Auntie talked it over eagerly at the lunch table."There's no ease like that from going about to the best places," said Mamma. "I can't be too glad this has come just when it has. It defines Selina's position. I don't suppose," musingly, "Amelia Williams ever was asked to the Tuttle home in her life. The McIntoshes never were anybody. Not that I'd have you mention to her, Selina, that you're going to this musicale.""Emmeline's even more given to dress now than when she was a girl," said Auntie. "She had trimming in steel and jet all over the bosom of her dress this morning, and big as she is, it looked too much."Just here, as Aunt Viney brought in the plum preserves for dessert, Culpepper walked in with a note from his mother, inclosed in his weekly letter from home."It says 'Ann Eliza' on the outside, ole miss, so I'll have to reckon it's for you."Auntie took her note, then broke forth with the more immediate news happily: "Selina's going toa grown-up party at one of my old friend's to-morrow night."Culpepper was bantering but practical. He got his pleasure out of these dear ladies, too. "Tomorrow night? How's she going to get there?"True! They all three had forgotten! "To be sure, Selina!" said her mother, "it is your father's whist night.""I can't see why she wants to go. I never see much in these things myself," from Culpepper, "but if you do, Selina, I'll come around and take you, wherever it is, and get you later and bring you home."After he was gone Mamma and Auntie sang his praises. "It was both nice and thoughtful in him to remember about your father and his neighborhood whist club," said Mamma."I hope he's not inconveniencing himself to do it," from Auntie.It would seem that all those honors right now crowding Selina were gone to her head. Resenting quite so much solicitude for Culpepper under the circumstances, she all but tossed that head."He wouldn't put himself out, let me assure you Mamma, and you, Auntie, too, if he didn't want to."During the afternoon Cousin Anna Tomlinson, who lived a block away, came around, having heard the news through Aunt Viney, who had stopped to chat with the servants on her way to the grocery."I always meant to give Selina gold beads," shesaid as she came in, as if the enormity of the present crisis exonerated her from doing so now. "What has she to wear, Lavinia? Why certainly she can't go in her graduating dress. She's worn it on every occasion since she's had it. It's been dabby for some time."Cousin Anna was rich, the money belonging to her and not to Cousin Willoughby Tomlinson, her husband. Her house impeccably swept and garnished, year after year, was brought up to date though nobody ever went there, Cousin Willoughby entertaining his friends at that newly established thing, the club. And Cousin Anna, who had finery in quantity though she never went anywhere, was fussily dressy, but in last year's clothes. Just as she could not bear to use her house, so time had to take the edge of value off her clothes before she wore them. She had a straight and unswerving backbone; her coiffure as she styled it, was elaborate; and she settled her watch chain and her rings constantly."And she is every bit as old as I am," Mamma never failed to say.Cousin Willoughby Tomlinson's mother had been a Wistar, and it was commonly told among the older set, that he had tried for Emmeline Knight, she that was now Mrs. Gwinne Tuttle, before he came round to Cousin Anna.This person gazed from Mamma to Auntie. "Certainly Selina can't be allowed to go to a Tuttle entertainment dabby," she said sharply. "You'venever had a real dressmaker dress in your life, have you, Selina? Emmeline Tuttle is a little too inclined to look on her invitations as distributed favors. You're going to this musicale in a Vincent dress of mine, if you can wear it, and judging by the eye, I think you can. I'll go right home and send it round."Madame Vincent was the last cry in the community among what Mamma and Cousin Anna and Auntie called mantua-makers.Oh, why should the spirit of mortal be proud? Juliette Caldwell, little vivid, affectionate body, and Adele Carter, impersonation of consideration for others, coming over as Cousin Anna left, Selina snubbed them.They were such slaving and believing followers of Maud! And she, Selina herself? Well, she was a follower, too, but with reservations. Maud recently had made sweeping assertions, saying that the group of them as social entities were sadly limited, and she followed up the charge by proposing they each commit a passage of poetry to heart each day, saying she had read, and this really was at base of the whole matter, that it would strengthen the mind, add to the vocabulary, and furnish food for quotation and ready repartee. At the time they all had agreed but Amanthus, who said she did not feel any need for vocabulary or repartee, and in truth as they could see, she did not need them in the least as assets in her business of life.Juliette and Adele were come over now about this matter. They were full of enthusiasm."We were to begin with our committed passages to-day, you remember," explained Juliette."We both have ours," added Adele."I'm really pleased with my way of selecting," from Juliette. "I opened our volume of Scott and took the lines my eyes fell on:""Stern was her look and wild her air,Back from her shoulders streamed her hair.""I chose mine from a little volume of selections called 'Pearls of Wisdom,'" said Adele:"Man's love is of man's life a thing apart,'Tis woman's whole existence."Selina was at both impatient and intolerant. "I was fearfully angry at Culpepper one day when he said that girls play at being educated and boys are educated. Sometimes I think Maud is responsible for our seeming to play at it. Don't you see, Judy dear, if there's anything really in this idea of Maud's you must choose your quotation? You want lines that are apt and quotable if you're going to do it at all? These of yours are relevant to nothing.""You can't say that of mine," from Adele, pacific enough in general, but disposed to resent this manner toward Juliette, and from Selina of all persons, usually so full of concern and appreciation.This undreamed of Selina answered promptly. "I certainly can't applaud your choice. Our sex should be the last to admit such an epigram exists."Cousin Anna did not send the dress around until the next morning, a note to Mrs. Wistar which accompanied it, explaining the delay:"Emmeline Tuttle is a little too pleased with being Emmeline Tuttle. I am sending a dress this moment home from Vincent for Selina to wear."On reaching home from the morning's teaching, Selina came hurrying up to her mother's room to see it. Unboxed and laid on the bed, it was an impressive affair, and the color rushed to her cheeks, and her hands sought each other rapturously. Satin puffs in a high-light green obtruded through slashes in a myrtle-green satin waist and sleeves. From the throat arose something akin to a Medici collar, and the skirt flowed away in plenitude. A beaded headdress for the hair of a seemingly fish-net nature completed the whole.There was no question Mrs. Wistar and Auntie were dubious. They looked their worry."Is it Mary, Queen of Scots, in a steel engraving, it makes me think of," from Auntie in an anxiously low voice to Mamma, "or is it Amy Robsart in our pictorial volume of Scott's heroines?""Madame Vincent is always so ahead and so extreme in her styles," fretted Mamma, "and yet,"still more fretted, "Anna may be depended on never to forgive us if she isn't allowed to wear it.""Before the mirror trying on the dress from Cousin Anna."They looked at Selina with her eager color and prettily disordered hair and shining eyes, already slipped out of her everyday dress of sober plaids, dear loving child, and before the mirror, trying on the dress from Cousin Anna."Mull and lace and a sash is the proper thing for her at her age, I don't care if her dress is dabby. And it's a poor rule to be beholden to anybody," held Auntie."We can't get her dress washed and ironed now," from Mrs. Wistar, "and she took her sash down town to be cleaned and has not gotten it home. We'll have to give in this time and let her wear this dress of Anna's.""Come feel the satin of it, Mamma," exulted Selina, "put your cheek against its sheen, Auntie. Or can one feel a sheen?" she laughed happily. "Maud says let the love of dress get in your blood and it will poison your life at its spring, and you even might come to marry for what a man could give you! She meant it for Juliette who cried because her mother wouldn't let her have high heels to make her taller. But I'm not sure I see Maud's logic. When we marry, we take from the man anyhow, don't we? Why shouldn't one care then, in the ratio of what one takes? Don't look so shocked, Auntie, I'm only thinking it out.""Sometimes, Selina," said Auntie, dismayed, "you talk like you weren't the girl we brought you up to be! The dress fits well enough, that's all I can say for it.""It looks a little like a fancy costume," admitted Selina doubtfully, "but anyhow it's wonderful and I love it. I think, Auntie dear," reassuringly, "it isn't that Maud and the rest of us are undependable. It'sthat we want something, and we don't know what we want. When we're with people who're grandly mental, we think it's that, or religious, it's that, or when it's someone who's a social personage, then it seems as if it's that. Does it sound weak-minded Auntie, veering so?"This evening of the musicale Culpepper came for Selina on the moment, which he did not always do, and he and she in her gorgeousness, went off gayly together, Mamma and Auntie seeing them to the door."She's really a child at heart, Lavinia," worried Auntie, after they were gone, "a child, I sometimes fear, that has had so little experience in life that it's pitiful. And yet this afternoon she spoke shockingly. I wouldn't have her too helpless and inexperienced, but neither would I have her lose her illusions. There's mighty little left a woman when she parts with these.""If I only felt more comfortable in my mind about that dress," from Mrs. Wistar. "Sometimes I could wish I were a person of more courage and finality; I didn't want to let her wear it.""No, I wouldn't want her to feel we had failed her about it," agreed Auntie. "I wouldn't want her ever to feel we'd failed her anywhere, but sometimes I'm afraid she's going to."
CHAPTER THREEWhen Selina came down to breakfast the next morning Papa was gone but Mamma and Auntie were lingering over their coffee and waffles, waiting for her.She explained her tardiness. "I'm late because I didn't know just what to put on to teach in. I got out my cloth dress, but that seemed reckless when it's my best, so I put on the old plaid and this linen collar and cuffs.""Which are tasty and yet severe," said Mamma approvingly, "and somehow in keeping."The implication proved unfortunate. Selina's profile as it flashed about on Mamma flushed. Such a young, young profile. Such a young Selina in the plaid dress and the linen collar and the cuffs. Such a child quivering with abhorrence of the act of going to work, and wincing with shame because of the abhorrence. In her pitiful state she was inclined to take umbrage at anything. And what did her mother mean?"Linen collar and cuffs are in keeping with what, Mamma?" she asked in reply, even sharply.Mamma hastened to conciliate and again was unfortunate."In keeping with the very worthy calling you are entering on. The pettifogic calling as we spoke of it under Mr. Aristides Welkin. He had a proper respect for his occupation as a teacher and saw to it that his pupils had.""If he meant pedagogic, Mamma, he probably said so. And can't you understand if there's one thingI wouldn'twant it to be, it's a calling? Mamma,pleasedon't let's discuss the teaching any more. Yes, I've had all I want to eat. Idideat my egg, and I don'twantany waffles.""Selina, come here and kiss Auntie before you go," from that dear person. "I learned my a-b, abs, and my parlez-vous's, before the day of Mr. Welkin. In my time we all went to old Madame Noël de Jourde de Vaux, wife of a guillotined French nobleman, as I've often told you. In a little four-roomed cottage it was, not far from the market-house. I tasted my first olive there and sipped orange-flower water and sugar. She was a tiny old personage with twinkling eyes and manners that had served her well at court. She called it her A B C school for the babies."Darling Auntie! Selina threw grateful, passionate arms around her and kissed her. One could see Madame de Vaux and her babies in the cottage near the market-house through a glamour, but one hated Mr. Aristides Welkin in his calling. Why? Selina couldn't have said. Then in a rush of self-reproach, she swept about and kissed Mamma."It's a quarter past eight and I said I'd be there at nine. I'll have to hurry."She walked the ten blocks out to the opener neighborhood of the Williams'. The early morning of the Indian summer day was tinged with blue mistiness and underfoot was the pleasant rustle and crackle of leaves along the pavement. On the way she stopped in a drugstore that dealt in school supplies. She had told Mrs. Williams to have a primer and first reader for William and she must have one of each herself. As the man brought them she recognized them as the same she had used inherday, the primer with a salmon-pink cover in paper, the first reader in a blue cover in pasteboards.She took them in their package and left. In her day? That meant at the little private school where she went at first and where she learned to read. What did happen in her day at that school? She had to teach William, and it might help her to remember?She had held to Auntie's hand who took her to school that first day, she remembered that, and cried bitterly because she was frightened. And then? What had happened then?Why Amanthus had happened then, the most lovely little girl Selina seemed ever to have seen, with bronze shoes on with tassels. And because of Amanthus and the shoes, and more particularly perhaps,the tassels, she had let go of Auntie's hand and consented to stay.And then Maudie had happened, a taller little girl with plaits that were almost red. And after her a little, little girl with black curls in tiers, whose name turned out to be Juliette, and next a little girl with straight hair and big eyes named Adele. And following these, some little boys occurred named Bliss and Brent and Sam and Tommy.And on this first day did lessons begin? Just as lessons were to begin this morning with William? If only she could recall!Miss Dellie Black taught that school, and as Mamma intimated about the stiff collar and the cuffs, her alpaca apron and the gloves upon her hands with their fingers neatly cut off across the knuckles, seemed to be in keeping with her calling. She had a ruler and rapped with it, and a pointer with which she pointed to a primer chart and a blackboard.But what had she taught? And how had she taught it? Selina shut her mental eyes as it were, as she went along, and concentrated all her forces at recalling.Absurd! This picture that came to her of that first day! Auntie had gone, and the class came out and stood in a row before Miss Dellie because she said stand so. Andshestood before the chart with the pointer and with a tap of the wood on the page beneath a black mark, said,"This is A."Everybody was polite about it, but even so MissDellie tapped again and harder as though they had disputed it, and said again and louder, "This is A."Everybody accepted it again, but Miss Dellie seemed to want proof of this."Now say it after me, everybody, 'This is A.'"Everybody said it after Miss Dellie."Now say it again without me," from Miss Dellie.And after they had said it again without her, the little, little girl with the black curls, the little girl whose name proved to be Juliette, looked up into Miss Dellie's face, her own little face and her eyes full of wondering interest."Why's it A?" she asked the lady."What? What's that?" from Miss Dellie Black sharply. "Don't you know I'm talking, little girl? And you must listen!"Half a dozen volunteers explained what she had said, Maudie with the red plaits, Tommy, Sam and others."She sayswhy'sit A?""She's a naughty little girl not to know her place in school," said Miss Dellie? Black firmly, "and if she can't be quiet she can go to her seat and stay there."Absurd again! So Selina told herself as before. Much good a recall like this could do her this morning! She'd try again.But this time it wasn't a picture of school that came to her at all. But of herself at home going to Papa full of pride in her achievementsat school, and carryingwith her to his knee, her primer open at a picture."What's this?" Papa had said, full of flattering concern. "A big, big ox gazing down on a frog on a lily-pad? What? No? It isn't any ox? Miss Lizzie gave it to you for your lesson to-morrow, and she said so? Though it may be a frog? If it isn't an ox, then what is it, Selina?"She had told him clear and sure, that funny little fair-haired girl. "'Tain't an ox. Miss Dellie told us what it was when she held up the picture. It's a fable!"Absurd again! And ridiculous! How was any of all this going to help her, the grown Selina, to teach William?The Williams' house stood in a long, narrow corner lot. Its windows were tall and narrow; its front door was narrow and high. A white maid, whose manner as she surveyed you, at once seemed to disqualify you, opened the door. Selina remembered her from the other day.It was a very proper house within, very exact, very shining, very precise. One's heart opened a little way for William doomed to live his infant days amid it.Yet it almost would seem Selina had misjudged Mrs. Williams. She appeared now at the head of the stairs as Selina came in, Amazonian, handsome, impressive, and called down to her quite as anybodymight. She was so pleasantly excited she forgot to be condescending and reassuring."Come right up, Selina. I'm sure you're going to feel I've done my best for you. I couldn't feel I quitecouldlet you come way out here for justWilliam."She actually radiated enthusiasm as Selina reached the head of the stairs. "I made up my mind some of the mothers in this neighborhood had to be made to take advantage of this opportunity I was offering them. Come with me to the sewing-room. I've turned that over to you for the present. I've put the lap-board across chairs for two to sit at, and the checker-board on a chair for another. William has his own desk. I've got you four pupils."Selina followed Mrs. Williams through the hall toward the sewing-room."Rupy Dodd and Willy Dodd are midway of the seven Dodd children. Their mother will be over to see you as soon as she can. It was a mercy on my part to insist she enter these two. Henry Revis is our doctor's son. It'll take him off the street, as I pointed out to his father. His mother also will be over to see you."They went into the sewing-room, Mrs. Williams ahead, making the introductions."Rupy and Willy and Henry and William, this is Miss Wistar, Miss Selina Wistar, the young lady, the very lovely and kind young lady I think we may say, who is coming every day to teach you. Rupy!"And at this one of the two little boys seated at the lap-board, partially desisted from his absorption with some crimson rose-hips and looked up. The lap-board was strewn with stems and husks and some of the rose-hip contents."Rupy," sharply, "are you quite sure they'regoodto eat?""Aw, who's eatin' 'em?" said Rupy the sturdy, red-haired and freckled, spewing out rose-hip fuzz along with disgust at woman's blindness and interference in what she didn't understand. "I took 'em away f'om Willy to bust 'em an' see what's in 'em. Mummer sent 'em over to the teacher.""I'll bust some myse'f soon as he'll lemme," from Willy anxiously, not quite so sturdy and with hair not quite so red and paler freckles."Rupy's the oldest," from Mrs. Williams as if it were apology and accounted for the whole business. "Willy's his twin. William, you and Henry come and speak to Miss Wistar."Mrs. Williams had withdrawn. Selma's coat and hat were on the sofa in the corner and she had taken the chair provided for her beside a small table. Her color came and went, her hair shone with pale luster, her manner was pretty and the collar and cuffs were becoming.At desk, checker-board and lap-board her pupils sat before her and gazed at her.William was at the desk. He was very clean, veryshining and very gloomy. His headwastoo large. It looked tired as from the carrying of an overweight of suspicion. Patiently he eyed her and the whole business about to be with distrust. In a curious way it warmed Selina's heart, causing her to feel banded with William as against some outside cunning force. It was as if she found a friend and ally here in William.Rupy Dodd and Willy Dodd sat at the lap-board. As said before, they had red hair and freckles wherever freckles supposedly might be. Rupy having abandoned the rose-hips by request, looked alert and Willy, his twin, looked at Rupy.Henry at the checker-board was small and lean with a keen blue eye and a keener air. Asked by Selina to tell her again what his name was he gave it with briskness and every off-hand due, as Hennery. A minute before she had heard this Henry sum her up to Rupy."Aw, she ain't a teacher, she's a girl."And she had heard the contumely of Rupy's reply: "With molasses-candy plaits round her head."Selina in the chair before her class held a slate in her hand. She had borrowed it from William and with a bit of chalk supplied her by Mrs. Williams from the machine drawer, had made a certain symbol upon it. This slate with the symbol in chalk upon it she now held up to the class."This, William and Rupy and Willy and Henry,"she said a little tremulously, even while trying to make it sound firm, "this is A."William looked tired with distrust of the whole doubtless tricky business. He'd been fooled into this thing called life for a starter, his manner seemed to say, and he'd be wary and watchful about the rest. Let it be A, it was her business since she was claiming it was A, not his.Henry spoke disparagingly. "Pshaw, I know the whole durned business from A to Izzard. It don't need any teacher to tellmewhat's A."Willy was peevish. But then, as everybody's manner of bearing with him said, including his brother, what was he but a twin? "What's Izzard?" from Willy, peevishly. "I know A. My Mummer, she taught us A. What you meanin' by Izzard, Henry?"But Rupy the flame-headed, spewing some more just-discovered rose-hip fuzz out his mouth through a gap made by two missing incisors, here spread himself across the lap-board and asked a question. Asked it as one asked a question he long has wanted to know. Asked it in faith with a demanding eye, as one who means to bite into more fruits in life than mere rose-hips and reveal their hearts, or know the reason."Why's it A?"And the girl-teacher, this Selina, looked back at him. Why was it A, indeed? Rupy of this decade was asking as Juliette of the last decade had done. AndJuliettehad had no answer.William spoke up out of what one gathered wasthe gloom of his own experience, addressing himself to Rupy. "She'll tell you it's because God says so. Eve'ybody tells you that."Rupy flung himself back off the lap-board against his chair with the air of one who had her. "Why's it A?" he repeated.Henry, small, lean, knowing, never had remitted his shrewd gaze fixed appraisingly upon her. Suddenly now he relaxed and his manner changed from challenging to protective, from aggressive to benignant. "Aw, gwan an' say it out. Don't you be afraid. You say what you wanter say about why it's A."For Henry had read her and discovered her.She didn't know why it was A!And Selina drawing enlightenment from Henry upon the wise path to tread, said what she wanted to say, just as he bade her do."I don't know why it's A. The first day I ever went to school we asked why it was A, but nobody told us.""An' you don't know yet?" from William with the triumph of the certain if gloomy prognostigator.Rupy seemed to feel that he had started all this and was responsible. His air, too, like Henry's, had changed from the demanding and the challenging to the protective. She was a girl, and she didn't know! What further proof needed that she was here to be taken care of?"Well, anyhow this one's A. Go on. The next one's B. We all know 'em."Willy came to as though the burden of the proof suddenly was put upon him."B bit it, C cut it, D dealt it——""Aw, Willy," from Rupy disgustedly, "you go on like a girl when she thinks she knows it."William emerged into an outraged being. "Don't go on like a girl. You gimme back them rose-hips. They was mine to give the teacher.""Well," grumbled Rupy as with one willing to take part of it back, "if, 'tain't like a girl, it's like a twin, then."They knew their letters, they knew their numbers, up to ten at least, they all had primers and had them with them, and proved to her they knew cat, and rat, and mat, and hen, and pen and men, on the page.Selina didn't believe, however, that any of them could read. As well make a start somewhere and find out. She turned to a page well on in the primer, a page she had met before in her day. She held it up to them. It showed a benevolent bovine gazing downward at a frog on a lily-pad."Everybody turn to this page. It's a fable and we'll start there."They were on to her at once with contumely and derision, Rupy the freckled, Henry the lean, William the tired because as now of the very inadequateness of most creatures."Fable?" from Rupy. "What for's it any fable? What's a fable?" pityingly."Aw, 'tain't no fable, can't you see it ain't?" from Henry in disgust.From William with gloomy patience. "It's an ox. And the thing it's talking to is a frog."Willy bobbed up. He was nothing but a twin, poor soul! But even so,he'dshow her! "O-x, ox, f-r-o-g, frog, p-r-i-m, prim, e-r, er, primer.""Aw, Willy," from Rupy in tones of even greater disgust. "Whut's the matter with you? This here'sherschool. Let her talk. It ain't your'n."For she was a girl! And discovered to be pretty! And twice proven under test not to know! She was here to be taken care of and protected! What further proofs of this were needed?Mrs. Williams came out to the hall as Selina was leaving at noon. "I hope you feel you got along fairly well? That your first morning gave you encouragement?"Selina hesitated. Her linen collar was a bit awry and the crown of flaxen plaits about her head had sagged. "It's—it's different from what I thought. I don't think I knew what little boys were like. It's—it's interesting, and I dare say I'll like it. Little girls, as I remember us, tried to think the way we were told to think. It's as if little boys feel that's a reason for thinking the other way.""I dare say," from Mrs. Williams absently. She wasn't following what Selina had to say. But thenSelina wasn't at all certain she was following herself."I feel you're quite justified in coming to us now," Mrs. Williams was saying. "It's a great relief to me that I succeeded in convincing two mothers at least of how greatly it was to their advantage to send their children over. You understand, of course, Selina, that Rupert and Willy and Henry mean four dollars for you, the same as my William?"It was what Selina had been anxious to know but had not quite liked to ask.
When Selina came down to breakfast the next morning Papa was gone but Mamma and Auntie were lingering over their coffee and waffles, waiting for her.
She explained her tardiness. "I'm late because I didn't know just what to put on to teach in. I got out my cloth dress, but that seemed reckless when it's my best, so I put on the old plaid and this linen collar and cuffs."
"Which are tasty and yet severe," said Mamma approvingly, "and somehow in keeping."
The implication proved unfortunate. Selina's profile as it flashed about on Mamma flushed. Such a young, young profile. Such a young Selina in the plaid dress and the linen collar and the cuffs. Such a child quivering with abhorrence of the act of going to work, and wincing with shame because of the abhorrence. In her pitiful state she was inclined to take umbrage at anything. And what did her mother mean?
"Linen collar and cuffs are in keeping with what, Mamma?" she asked in reply, even sharply.
Mamma hastened to conciliate and again was unfortunate."In keeping with the very worthy calling you are entering on. The pettifogic calling as we spoke of it under Mr. Aristides Welkin. He had a proper respect for his occupation as a teacher and saw to it that his pupils had."
"If he meant pedagogic, Mamma, he probably said so. And can't you understand if there's one thingI wouldn'twant it to be, it's a calling? Mamma,pleasedon't let's discuss the teaching any more. Yes, I've had all I want to eat. Idideat my egg, and I don'twantany waffles."
"Selina, come here and kiss Auntie before you go," from that dear person. "I learned my a-b, abs, and my parlez-vous's, before the day of Mr. Welkin. In my time we all went to old Madame Noël de Jourde de Vaux, wife of a guillotined French nobleman, as I've often told you. In a little four-roomed cottage it was, not far from the market-house. I tasted my first olive there and sipped orange-flower water and sugar. She was a tiny old personage with twinkling eyes and manners that had served her well at court. She called it her A B C school for the babies."
Darling Auntie! Selina threw grateful, passionate arms around her and kissed her. One could see Madame de Vaux and her babies in the cottage near the market-house through a glamour, but one hated Mr. Aristides Welkin in his calling. Why? Selina couldn't have said. Then in a rush of self-reproach, she swept about and kissed Mamma.
"It's a quarter past eight and I said I'd be there at nine. I'll have to hurry."
She walked the ten blocks out to the opener neighborhood of the Williams'. The early morning of the Indian summer day was tinged with blue mistiness and underfoot was the pleasant rustle and crackle of leaves along the pavement. On the way she stopped in a drugstore that dealt in school supplies. She had told Mrs. Williams to have a primer and first reader for William and she must have one of each herself. As the man brought them she recognized them as the same she had used inherday, the primer with a salmon-pink cover in paper, the first reader in a blue cover in pasteboards.
She took them in their package and left. In her day? That meant at the little private school where she went at first and where she learned to read. What did happen in her day at that school? She had to teach William, and it might help her to remember?
She had held to Auntie's hand who took her to school that first day, she remembered that, and cried bitterly because she was frightened. And then? What had happened then?
Why Amanthus had happened then, the most lovely little girl Selina seemed ever to have seen, with bronze shoes on with tassels. And because of Amanthus and the shoes, and more particularly perhaps,the tassels, she had let go of Auntie's hand and consented to stay.
And then Maudie had happened, a taller little girl with plaits that were almost red. And after her a little, little girl with black curls in tiers, whose name turned out to be Juliette, and next a little girl with straight hair and big eyes named Adele. And following these, some little boys occurred named Bliss and Brent and Sam and Tommy.
And on this first day did lessons begin? Just as lessons were to begin this morning with William? If only she could recall!
Miss Dellie Black taught that school, and as Mamma intimated about the stiff collar and the cuffs, her alpaca apron and the gloves upon her hands with their fingers neatly cut off across the knuckles, seemed to be in keeping with her calling. She had a ruler and rapped with it, and a pointer with which she pointed to a primer chart and a blackboard.
But what had she taught? And how had she taught it? Selina shut her mental eyes as it were, as she went along, and concentrated all her forces at recalling.
Absurd! This picture that came to her of that first day! Auntie had gone, and the class came out and stood in a row before Miss Dellie because she said stand so. Andshestood before the chart with the pointer and with a tap of the wood on the page beneath a black mark, said,"This is A."
Everybody was polite about it, but even so MissDellie tapped again and harder as though they had disputed it, and said again and louder, "This is A."
Everybody accepted it again, but Miss Dellie seemed to want proof of this.
"Now say it after me, everybody, 'This is A.'"
Everybody said it after Miss Dellie.
"Now say it again without me," from Miss Dellie.
And after they had said it again without her, the little, little girl with the black curls, the little girl whose name proved to be Juliette, looked up into Miss Dellie's face, her own little face and her eyes full of wondering interest.
"Why's it A?" she asked the lady.
"What? What's that?" from Miss Dellie Black sharply. "Don't you know I'm talking, little girl? And you must listen!"
Half a dozen volunteers explained what she had said, Maudie with the red plaits, Tommy, Sam and others.
"She sayswhy'sit A?"
"She's a naughty little girl not to know her place in school," said Miss Dellie? Black firmly, "and if she can't be quiet she can go to her seat and stay there."
Absurd again! So Selina told herself as before. Much good a recall like this could do her this morning! She'd try again.
But this time it wasn't a picture of school that came to her at all. But of herself at home going to Papa full of pride in her achievementsat school, and carryingwith her to his knee, her primer open at a picture.
"What's this?" Papa had said, full of flattering concern. "A big, big ox gazing down on a frog on a lily-pad? What? No? It isn't any ox? Miss Lizzie gave it to you for your lesson to-morrow, and she said so? Though it may be a frog? If it isn't an ox, then what is it, Selina?"
She had told him clear and sure, that funny little fair-haired girl. "'Tain't an ox. Miss Dellie told us what it was when she held up the picture. It's a fable!"
Absurd again! And ridiculous! How was any of all this going to help her, the grown Selina, to teach William?
The Williams' house stood in a long, narrow corner lot. Its windows were tall and narrow; its front door was narrow and high. A white maid, whose manner as she surveyed you, at once seemed to disqualify you, opened the door. Selina remembered her from the other day.
It was a very proper house within, very exact, very shining, very precise. One's heart opened a little way for William doomed to live his infant days amid it.
Yet it almost would seem Selina had misjudged Mrs. Williams. She appeared now at the head of the stairs as Selina came in, Amazonian, handsome, impressive, and called down to her quite as anybodymight. She was so pleasantly excited she forgot to be condescending and reassuring.
"Come right up, Selina. I'm sure you're going to feel I've done my best for you. I couldn't feel I quitecouldlet you come way out here for justWilliam."
She actually radiated enthusiasm as Selina reached the head of the stairs. "I made up my mind some of the mothers in this neighborhood had to be made to take advantage of this opportunity I was offering them. Come with me to the sewing-room. I've turned that over to you for the present. I've put the lap-board across chairs for two to sit at, and the checker-board on a chair for another. William has his own desk. I've got you four pupils."
Selina followed Mrs. Williams through the hall toward the sewing-room.
"Rupy Dodd and Willy Dodd are midway of the seven Dodd children. Their mother will be over to see you as soon as she can. It was a mercy on my part to insist she enter these two. Henry Revis is our doctor's son. It'll take him off the street, as I pointed out to his father. His mother also will be over to see you."
They went into the sewing-room, Mrs. Williams ahead, making the introductions.
"Rupy and Willy and Henry and William, this is Miss Wistar, Miss Selina Wistar, the young lady, the very lovely and kind young lady I think we may say, who is coming every day to teach you. Rupy!"
And at this one of the two little boys seated at the lap-board, partially desisted from his absorption with some crimson rose-hips and looked up. The lap-board was strewn with stems and husks and some of the rose-hip contents.
"Rupy," sharply, "are you quite sure they'regoodto eat?"
"Aw, who's eatin' 'em?" said Rupy the sturdy, red-haired and freckled, spewing out rose-hip fuzz along with disgust at woman's blindness and interference in what she didn't understand. "I took 'em away f'om Willy to bust 'em an' see what's in 'em. Mummer sent 'em over to the teacher."
"I'll bust some myse'f soon as he'll lemme," from Willy anxiously, not quite so sturdy and with hair not quite so red and paler freckles.
"Rupy's the oldest," from Mrs. Williams as if it were apology and accounted for the whole business. "Willy's his twin. William, you and Henry come and speak to Miss Wistar."
Mrs. Williams had withdrawn. Selma's coat and hat were on the sofa in the corner and she had taken the chair provided for her beside a small table. Her color came and went, her hair shone with pale luster, her manner was pretty and the collar and cuffs were becoming.
At desk, checker-board and lap-board her pupils sat before her and gazed at her.
William was at the desk. He was very clean, veryshining and very gloomy. His headwastoo large. It looked tired as from the carrying of an overweight of suspicion. Patiently he eyed her and the whole business about to be with distrust. In a curious way it warmed Selina's heart, causing her to feel banded with William as against some outside cunning force. It was as if she found a friend and ally here in William.
Rupy Dodd and Willy Dodd sat at the lap-board. As said before, they had red hair and freckles wherever freckles supposedly might be. Rupy having abandoned the rose-hips by request, looked alert and Willy, his twin, looked at Rupy.
Henry at the checker-board was small and lean with a keen blue eye and a keener air. Asked by Selina to tell her again what his name was he gave it with briskness and every off-hand due, as Hennery. A minute before she had heard this Henry sum her up to Rupy.
"Aw, she ain't a teacher, she's a girl."
And she had heard the contumely of Rupy's reply: "With molasses-candy plaits round her head."
Selina in the chair before her class held a slate in her hand. She had borrowed it from William and with a bit of chalk supplied her by Mrs. Williams from the machine drawer, had made a certain symbol upon it. This slate with the symbol in chalk upon it she now held up to the class.
"This, William and Rupy and Willy and Henry,"she said a little tremulously, even while trying to make it sound firm, "this is A."
William looked tired with distrust of the whole doubtless tricky business. He'd been fooled into this thing called life for a starter, his manner seemed to say, and he'd be wary and watchful about the rest. Let it be A, it was her business since she was claiming it was A, not his.
Henry spoke disparagingly. "Pshaw, I know the whole durned business from A to Izzard. It don't need any teacher to tellmewhat's A."
Willy was peevish. But then, as everybody's manner of bearing with him said, including his brother, what was he but a twin? "What's Izzard?" from Willy, peevishly. "I know A. My Mummer, she taught us A. What you meanin' by Izzard, Henry?"
But Rupy the flame-headed, spewing some more just-discovered rose-hip fuzz out his mouth through a gap made by two missing incisors, here spread himself across the lap-board and asked a question. Asked it as one asked a question he long has wanted to know. Asked it in faith with a demanding eye, as one who means to bite into more fruits in life than mere rose-hips and reveal their hearts, or know the reason.
"Why's it A?"
And the girl-teacher, this Selina, looked back at him. Why was it A, indeed? Rupy of this decade was asking as Juliette of the last decade had done. AndJuliettehad had no answer.
William spoke up out of what one gathered wasthe gloom of his own experience, addressing himself to Rupy. "She'll tell you it's because God says so. Eve'ybody tells you that."
Rupy flung himself back off the lap-board against his chair with the air of one who had her. "Why's it A?" he repeated.
Henry, small, lean, knowing, never had remitted his shrewd gaze fixed appraisingly upon her. Suddenly now he relaxed and his manner changed from challenging to protective, from aggressive to benignant. "Aw, gwan an' say it out. Don't you be afraid. You say what you wanter say about why it's A."
For Henry had read her and discovered her.She didn't know why it was A!
And Selina drawing enlightenment from Henry upon the wise path to tread, said what she wanted to say, just as he bade her do.
"I don't know why it's A. The first day I ever went to school we asked why it was A, but nobody told us."
"An' you don't know yet?" from William with the triumph of the certain if gloomy prognostigator.
Rupy seemed to feel that he had started all this and was responsible. His air, too, like Henry's, had changed from the demanding and the challenging to the protective. She was a girl, and she didn't know! What further proof needed that she was here to be taken care of?
"Well, anyhow this one's A. Go on. The next one's B. We all know 'em."
Willy came to as though the burden of the proof suddenly was put upon him.
"B bit it, C cut it, D dealt it——"
"Aw, Willy," from Rupy disgustedly, "you go on like a girl when she thinks she knows it."
William emerged into an outraged being. "Don't go on like a girl. You gimme back them rose-hips. They was mine to give the teacher."
"Well," grumbled Rupy as with one willing to take part of it back, "if, 'tain't like a girl, it's like a twin, then."
They knew their letters, they knew their numbers, up to ten at least, they all had primers and had them with them, and proved to her they knew cat, and rat, and mat, and hen, and pen and men, on the page.
Selina didn't believe, however, that any of them could read. As well make a start somewhere and find out. She turned to a page well on in the primer, a page she had met before in her day. She held it up to them. It showed a benevolent bovine gazing downward at a frog on a lily-pad.
"Everybody turn to this page. It's a fable and we'll start there."
They were on to her at once with contumely and derision, Rupy the freckled, Henry the lean, William the tired because as now of the very inadequateness of most creatures.
"Fable?" from Rupy. "What for's it any fable? What's a fable?" pityingly.
"Aw, 'tain't no fable, can't you see it ain't?" from Henry in disgust.
From William with gloomy patience. "It's an ox. And the thing it's talking to is a frog."
Willy bobbed up. He was nothing but a twin, poor soul! But even so,he'dshow her! "O-x, ox, f-r-o-g, frog, p-r-i-m, prim, e-r, er, primer."
"Aw, Willy," from Rupy in tones of even greater disgust. "Whut's the matter with you? This here'sherschool. Let her talk. It ain't your'n."
For she was a girl! And discovered to be pretty! And twice proven under test not to know! She was here to be taken care of and protected! What further proofs of this were needed?
Mrs. Williams came out to the hall as Selina was leaving at noon. "I hope you feel you got along fairly well? That your first morning gave you encouragement?"
Selina hesitated. Her linen collar was a bit awry and the crown of flaxen plaits about her head had sagged. "It's—it's different from what I thought. I don't think I knew what little boys were like. It's—it's interesting, and I dare say I'll like it. Little girls, as I remember us, tried to think the way we were told to think. It's as if little boys feel that's a reason for thinking the other way."
"I dare say," from Mrs. Williams absently. She wasn't following what Selina had to say. But thenSelina wasn't at all certain she was following herself.
"I feel you're quite justified in coming to us now," Mrs. Williams was saying. "It's a great relief to me that I succeeded in convincing two mothers at least of how greatly it was to their advantage to send their children over. You understand, of course, Selina, that Rupert and Willy and Henry mean four dollars for you, the same as my William?"
It was what Selina had been anxious to know but had not quite liked to ask.
CHAPTER FOURWhen Selina returned from her first morning's teaching, she had much to tell. She almost felt she was growing sordid and mercenary herself. "When I got to Mrs. Williams', Mamma, I found three other pupils waiting for me.""It's an ugly brick front, that house of the Williams', so tall and spare," said her mother, not just grasping what was significant in the information."Three more pupils it means, Mamma and Auntie, makingfourin all.""I'm sure I'm glad she proved as good as her word," said Auntie. "I suppose because she needed the others to make up the class for her own child, she made those mothers feel it was entirely her interest in their children's welfare bringing it about. People always go down before that sort of zeal for their benefit. That's Amelia McIntosh, exactly!"Selina tried again. She herself was tremendously excited. If when she arrived at the Williams' and found those four wide-eyed little boys awaiting her, her heart misgave her as to what she was going to do with them, she had no intention of telling it at home, and if damage seemed likely to be done ather novice hands to the innocent William and his equally innocent companions, she was not thinking of that part of it at all! What she was trying to make plain was of a different nature."Don't you realize what it means, Mamma? Four pupils at four dollars a pupil! Think of that, Auntie!"They saw the point at last and dropping their sewing in their laps, sat up animated and excited."Four pupils at four dollars a pupil?" said Auntie. "That's how much for a week's teaching, Lavinia?" Auntie always succumbed before figures."Four and four's eight, and eight's sixteen," said Mamma, dazzled, "and multiply this sixteen by four again for a month's total—four t'm's six is twenty-four, four t'm's one is four and two to carry, is—! Selina, you must have a round-necked, real party dress now!" happily."And two to carry is what, Lavinia?" from Auntie anxiously. "Sixty-four dollars?" in answer to her sister-in-law's triumphant reply. "I can't believe it! Selina, you must have a hat with a soft feather, too!"Selina was dazzled, too, but endeavoring to hold herself steady. Fifteen dollars was the most she had had for her own at any one time in her life. She had held on to it hoardingly, letting a dozen things go by that she really wanted, to lose her head in the end and spend it for a thing she didn't want atall as it proved. She was going to keep her head and her dignity this time over this sudden wealth opening to her."I shall pay Aunt Viney from now on; that's to be my part," she said with finality. "Remember that, please, Mamma, in making your calculations.""But nothing more," from Auntie."Not one thing more, other than for yourself," from Mamma, "and I shall mention the matter to your father, now," happily, "there's nothing in it for him to feel worried over now."Her father spoke to Selina that evening, stopping her on her way up the stairs as he came down."Your mother has told me about this teaching, since I got home," he said. "Stop a moment, Selina."He lifted her face by a hand placed softly beneath her chin as they stood there on the steps. The refined, rather delicate face with the close brown beard she perforce thus looked up into, was sensitive as her own.The eyes seemed to be regarding her as from a new viewpoint. His own little daughter, this young person with the all too heavy flaxen plaits and the dress-skirt down to her instep!"Your mother assures me you chose to do this teaching yourself, Selina? Am I to decry it, or applaud it?"She was horribly embarrassed, not being accustomed to discuss her affairs in this way with him, communications of an intimate nature between themalways being through her mother. The thing was to end the interview as quickly as possible and get away from the disturbing proximity."It's settled, Papa, so don't decry it," she spoke stiffly and even while doing so was ashamed of it.He was regarding her a little wistfully. "Your mother tells me, Selina, that you will need a winter dress?" Was he groping, perhaps sorrowfully, trying to find some point through which to reach her? "See to it that it comes from me, will you, and that it is a nice one?"Again she was ashamed, this time of the relief with which she fled from his kiss and the touch of his hand on her shoulder.Apparently there is everything in an undertaking being a success, even when it is teaching for your living, and you a woman. Selina told Juliette, what her four pupils were to bring her, and she told the others, they who had been so plainly shocked and full of distress for her, and they came hurrying over, filled with excitement and admiration now.It was the afternoon following Selina's second day of teaching. She was in her own room which overlooked the backyard and Auntie's beds of salvias and dahlias still braving the first light frosts. Now Selina felt that her room didn't lack distinction. She would have preferred a set of cottage furniture like Maud's, of course, white with decalcomania decorations on it in flowers and landscapes, instead of the despised mahogany set that had belonged to thegrandmother she was named for. Selina belonged to her own day and hour."Cottage furniture is adorable and mahogany relegated to attics and junk shops," she once had said discontentedly to her mother.Still, with her books and her pictures, a panel in oils done by Cousin Anna, of cat-tails, and the companion to it in pond-lilies, and a Japanese parasol over her mantelpiece, her room did not lack for distinction.She was looking over the first-reader books she had ordered for her pupils, and wondering what she was to do with them, when there was a tap at her door and Amanthus came in. Lashing the laughter of her cheeks and eyes, and Amanthus did not often stop being enchanted for side matters, this loveliest of creatures came hurrying to her and kissed her."I've been wanting to tell you, Selina, that Tommy and Bliss and the other boys think you're wonderful and a dear about teaching." Tommy Bacon and Bliss were the quite especial two with Amanthus just now, there never being less than two in her case. "But I came in now because Juliette has told me! Think of you earning all that!"Juliette, who had come with Amanthus and had lingered to speak with Mrs. Wistar and Auntie in the front room, came flashing in here."Isn't Amanthus' new dress enchanting, Selina? Who but Mrs. Harrison would have thought of fawn color and rose? I heard ribbon bows astrimming were coming in, and I must say I like them. We've been discussing you, Selina. Maudie says you didn't want to teach, and that every step we take toward the thing we don't want to do, as you did, strengthens our characters. She is choosing something for me to take up, that I won't care for, because she says I'm volatile and changeable. Think of you really earning all that, Selina!" The crimson staining Juliette's cheeks was glorious!"I'm not sure Maudie is such a safe one for you to follow, Judy," considered Selina, the fair-skinned. "You're not as volatile, if I know what volatile is, as she is."Amanthus turned away from the bureau where she had been fluffing her sunny yellow hair, and came and sat down before the open coal fire with the two. "Mamma says Maudie is laughable if she wasn't so masterful, taking you all after strange gods. I asked her what strange gods meant, and she laughed and told me I'd never need to find out.""You won't, Amanthus," said little Judy omnisciently, with a nod of her small dark head, "the rest of us, I kind of feel," with big solemnity, "will go far." Then she took a lighter tone. "It's Maudie who's always proposing something to the rest of us, but when you come to think about it, we always fall in. There she is now, calling to your mother, Selina, as she comes up the stairs. She said she'd be over."Handsome Maud, bringing energy and unrest withher, burst forth with her plaint before even she had found a seat, Selina vacating one of the three chairs for her, and taking a place on the bed."It's giving me such concern, what I ought to be making of myself, Selina, now you've set the way, I didn't sleep last night for considering it. I said so to Papa, and he said 'stuff' which wasn't polite. And anyway, I know I'm right; everyone should center on some talent, only I can't decide on which. Think of the proved value of yours!"And here Adele came in. She had gone by for one and the other, and then followed them here. If Juliette was flashing, and Amanthus enchanting, and Maudie with her red-brown hair and red and white skin, undeniably handsome, Adele, seemingly, should have been lovely. Her eyes were dark, and her cheeks softly oval. But somehow she lacked what Maud called the vital fire. Or was it confidence she lacked? She herself explained it by saying she never was allowed by her family to respect the things she had the slightest bent for doing.As Adele came in now, her dark eyes looked their worry. She took the place indicated beside Selina on the bed. "You're working for what you'll get, Selina, giving something for something? It's just come to me, thinking it over. It must be a self-respecting feeling it gives. It makes me begin to wonder if I've really any right to my allowance from Papa.""While Selina's busy with her teaching, maybe it would be a good thing for the rest of us to get togetherand keep up our German," burst forth Maud. "Oh, I know, Adele, you mean a different thing, something highly moral and uncomfortable, but meanwhile let's be doingsomething. It's inaction that's galling.""You said the other day," from little Juliette, indignantly, "we'd get a chart and find out something about the stars and astronomy. I went and bought me a book!"Amanthus, flower-like and lovely creature, looked from one to the other of them as they talked. The wonder on her face and the bother in her violet eyes made her sweet and irresistible."You're so queer," protestingly, "you Maudie and Adele, and yes, Juliette, too. You do get so worked up. I don't see what it is you're always thinking you're about. Selina needed the money. I don't see what more there is to it than that. It's certainly fine she is going to make all she is by teaching. And, Selina, I mustn't forget, Mamma told me to give you her love and consummations, no, I guess I mean congratulations." Amanthus was given to these lapses in her English. "Are the rest of you going to stay longer? I've got to go."When Culpepper came around a night later and heard the astounding news of Selma's good fortune, he pretended to a loss of his usually sober head."Come go to the theater with me to-night, Selina, to celebrate? That is if your mother agrees? No, certainly I can't afford it. I see the question in youraccusing eyes, but you needn't rub it in that I'm a plodding dependent and you're the opulent earner."At the close of her first week at teaching William the gloomy and Rupy and Willy and Henry, Selina did not bring home her expected sixteen dollars. "It probably is customary to pay monthly. I didn't like to ask," she told Mamma and Auntie. "Settle with Aunt Viney for me until I get it, Mamma; she pays the rent for her room by the week, I know, and I'll give it to you in a lump sum at the end of the month."And when that time came, she did, a pale, incredulous, crushed Selina, and fell weeping against Mamma's neck with a hand outstretched to be cherished by Auntie."She said four dollars a pupil. I supposed she meant a week the same as we pay Aunt Viney. I thought that was little enough. She is amazed I could have dreamed of such a thing. She says I ought to have known, that my common-sense should have told me, that I could have investigated for myself. She meant four dollars a month for a pupil. Education comes cheaper than cooks. The money from all four of them—- here it is." Selina stretched forth the other hand passionately. "It will not quite pay Aunt Viney.""She was a McIntosh, as your Aunt says. I never did think it was much of an alliance for a Williams," from Mamma scathingly."I said from the start that boy William's head was too large" from Auntie as one justified.
When Selina returned from her first morning's teaching, she had much to tell. She almost felt she was growing sordid and mercenary herself. "When I got to Mrs. Williams', Mamma, I found three other pupils waiting for me."
"It's an ugly brick front, that house of the Williams', so tall and spare," said her mother, not just grasping what was significant in the information.
"Three more pupils it means, Mamma and Auntie, makingfourin all."
"I'm sure I'm glad she proved as good as her word," said Auntie. "I suppose because she needed the others to make up the class for her own child, she made those mothers feel it was entirely her interest in their children's welfare bringing it about. People always go down before that sort of zeal for their benefit. That's Amelia McIntosh, exactly!"
Selina tried again. She herself was tremendously excited. If when she arrived at the Williams' and found those four wide-eyed little boys awaiting her, her heart misgave her as to what she was going to do with them, she had no intention of telling it at home, and if damage seemed likely to be done ather novice hands to the innocent William and his equally innocent companions, she was not thinking of that part of it at all! What she was trying to make plain was of a different nature.
"Don't you realize what it means, Mamma? Four pupils at four dollars a pupil! Think of that, Auntie!"
They saw the point at last and dropping their sewing in their laps, sat up animated and excited.
"Four pupils at four dollars a pupil?" said Auntie. "That's how much for a week's teaching, Lavinia?" Auntie always succumbed before figures.
"Four and four's eight, and eight's sixteen," said Mamma, dazzled, "and multiply this sixteen by four again for a month's total—four t'm's six is twenty-four, four t'm's one is four and two to carry, is—! Selina, you must have a round-necked, real party dress now!" happily.
"And two to carry is what, Lavinia?" from Auntie anxiously. "Sixty-four dollars?" in answer to her sister-in-law's triumphant reply. "I can't believe it! Selina, you must have a hat with a soft feather, too!"
Selina was dazzled, too, but endeavoring to hold herself steady. Fifteen dollars was the most she had had for her own at any one time in her life. She had held on to it hoardingly, letting a dozen things go by that she really wanted, to lose her head in the end and spend it for a thing she didn't want atall as it proved. She was going to keep her head and her dignity this time over this sudden wealth opening to her.
"I shall pay Aunt Viney from now on; that's to be my part," she said with finality. "Remember that, please, Mamma, in making your calculations."
"But nothing more," from Auntie.
"Not one thing more, other than for yourself," from Mamma, "and I shall mention the matter to your father, now," happily, "there's nothing in it for him to feel worried over now."
Her father spoke to Selina that evening, stopping her on her way up the stairs as he came down.
"Your mother has told me about this teaching, since I got home," he said. "Stop a moment, Selina."
He lifted her face by a hand placed softly beneath her chin as they stood there on the steps. The refined, rather delicate face with the close brown beard she perforce thus looked up into, was sensitive as her own.
The eyes seemed to be regarding her as from a new viewpoint. His own little daughter, this young person with the all too heavy flaxen plaits and the dress-skirt down to her instep!
"Your mother assures me you chose to do this teaching yourself, Selina? Am I to decry it, or applaud it?"
She was horribly embarrassed, not being accustomed to discuss her affairs in this way with him, communications of an intimate nature between themalways being through her mother. The thing was to end the interview as quickly as possible and get away from the disturbing proximity.
"It's settled, Papa, so don't decry it," she spoke stiffly and even while doing so was ashamed of it.
He was regarding her a little wistfully. "Your mother tells me, Selina, that you will need a winter dress?" Was he groping, perhaps sorrowfully, trying to find some point through which to reach her? "See to it that it comes from me, will you, and that it is a nice one?"
Again she was ashamed, this time of the relief with which she fled from his kiss and the touch of his hand on her shoulder.
Apparently there is everything in an undertaking being a success, even when it is teaching for your living, and you a woman. Selina told Juliette, what her four pupils were to bring her, and she told the others, they who had been so plainly shocked and full of distress for her, and they came hurrying over, filled with excitement and admiration now.
It was the afternoon following Selina's second day of teaching. She was in her own room which overlooked the backyard and Auntie's beds of salvias and dahlias still braving the first light frosts. Now Selina felt that her room didn't lack distinction. She would have preferred a set of cottage furniture like Maud's, of course, white with decalcomania decorations on it in flowers and landscapes, instead of the despised mahogany set that had belonged to thegrandmother she was named for. Selina belonged to her own day and hour.
"Cottage furniture is adorable and mahogany relegated to attics and junk shops," she once had said discontentedly to her mother.
Still, with her books and her pictures, a panel in oils done by Cousin Anna, of cat-tails, and the companion to it in pond-lilies, and a Japanese parasol over her mantelpiece, her room did not lack for distinction.
She was looking over the first-reader books she had ordered for her pupils, and wondering what she was to do with them, when there was a tap at her door and Amanthus came in. Lashing the laughter of her cheeks and eyes, and Amanthus did not often stop being enchanted for side matters, this loveliest of creatures came hurrying to her and kissed her.
"I've been wanting to tell you, Selina, that Tommy and Bliss and the other boys think you're wonderful and a dear about teaching." Tommy Bacon and Bliss were the quite especial two with Amanthus just now, there never being less than two in her case. "But I came in now because Juliette has told me! Think of you earning all that!"
Juliette, who had come with Amanthus and had lingered to speak with Mrs. Wistar and Auntie in the front room, came flashing in here.
"Isn't Amanthus' new dress enchanting, Selina? Who but Mrs. Harrison would have thought of fawn color and rose? I heard ribbon bows astrimming were coming in, and I must say I like them. We've been discussing you, Selina. Maudie says you didn't want to teach, and that every step we take toward the thing we don't want to do, as you did, strengthens our characters. She is choosing something for me to take up, that I won't care for, because she says I'm volatile and changeable. Think of you really earning all that, Selina!" The crimson staining Juliette's cheeks was glorious!
"I'm not sure Maudie is such a safe one for you to follow, Judy," considered Selina, the fair-skinned. "You're not as volatile, if I know what volatile is, as she is."
Amanthus turned away from the bureau where she had been fluffing her sunny yellow hair, and came and sat down before the open coal fire with the two. "Mamma says Maudie is laughable if she wasn't so masterful, taking you all after strange gods. I asked her what strange gods meant, and she laughed and told me I'd never need to find out."
"You won't, Amanthus," said little Judy omnisciently, with a nod of her small dark head, "the rest of us, I kind of feel," with big solemnity, "will go far." Then she took a lighter tone. "It's Maudie who's always proposing something to the rest of us, but when you come to think about it, we always fall in. There she is now, calling to your mother, Selina, as she comes up the stairs. She said she'd be over."
Handsome Maud, bringing energy and unrest withher, burst forth with her plaint before even she had found a seat, Selina vacating one of the three chairs for her, and taking a place on the bed.
"It's giving me such concern, what I ought to be making of myself, Selina, now you've set the way, I didn't sleep last night for considering it. I said so to Papa, and he said 'stuff' which wasn't polite. And anyway, I know I'm right; everyone should center on some talent, only I can't decide on which. Think of the proved value of yours!"
And here Adele came in. She had gone by for one and the other, and then followed them here. If Juliette was flashing, and Amanthus enchanting, and Maudie with her red-brown hair and red and white skin, undeniably handsome, Adele, seemingly, should have been lovely. Her eyes were dark, and her cheeks softly oval. But somehow she lacked what Maud called the vital fire. Or was it confidence she lacked? She herself explained it by saying she never was allowed by her family to respect the things she had the slightest bent for doing.
As Adele came in now, her dark eyes looked their worry. She took the place indicated beside Selina on the bed. "You're working for what you'll get, Selina, giving something for something? It's just come to me, thinking it over. It must be a self-respecting feeling it gives. It makes me begin to wonder if I've really any right to my allowance from Papa."
"While Selina's busy with her teaching, maybe it would be a good thing for the rest of us to get togetherand keep up our German," burst forth Maud. "Oh, I know, Adele, you mean a different thing, something highly moral and uncomfortable, but meanwhile let's be doingsomething. It's inaction that's galling."
"You said the other day," from little Juliette, indignantly, "we'd get a chart and find out something about the stars and astronomy. I went and bought me a book!"
Amanthus, flower-like and lovely creature, looked from one to the other of them as they talked. The wonder on her face and the bother in her violet eyes made her sweet and irresistible.
"You're so queer," protestingly, "you Maudie and Adele, and yes, Juliette, too. You do get so worked up. I don't see what it is you're always thinking you're about. Selina needed the money. I don't see what more there is to it than that. It's certainly fine she is going to make all she is by teaching. And, Selina, I mustn't forget, Mamma told me to give you her love and consummations, no, I guess I mean congratulations." Amanthus was given to these lapses in her English. "Are the rest of you going to stay longer? I've got to go."
When Culpepper came around a night later and heard the astounding news of Selma's good fortune, he pretended to a loss of his usually sober head.
"Come go to the theater with me to-night, Selina, to celebrate? That is if your mother agrees? No, certainly I can't afford it. I see the question in youraccusing eyes, but you needn't rub it in that I'm a plodding dependent and you're the opulent earner."
At the close of her first week at teaching William the gloomy and Rupy and Willy and Henry, Selina did not bring home her expected sixteen dollars. "It probably is customary to pay monthly. I didn't like to ask," she told Mamma and Auntie. "Settle with Aunt Viney for me until I get it, Mamma; she pays the rent for her room by the week, I know, and I'll give it to you in a lump sum at the end of the month."
And when that time came, she did, a pale, incredulous, crushed Selina, and fell weeping against Mamma's neck with a hand outstretched to be cherished by Auntie.
"She said four dollars a pupil. I supposed she meant a week the same as we pay Aunt Viney. I thought that was little enough. She is amazed I could have dreamed of such a thing. She says I ought to have known, that my common-sense should have told me, that I could have investigated for myself. She meant four dollars a month for a pupil. Education comes cheaper than cooks. The money from all four of them—- here it is." Selina stretched forth the other hand passionately. "It will not quite pay Aunt Viney."
"She was a McIntosh, as your Aunt says. I never did think it was much of an alliance for a Williams," from Mamma scathingly.
"I said from the start that boy William's head was too large" from Auntie as one justified.
CHAPTER FIVEThat evening at the dinner table, Mamma looked around the castor and spoke briskly to Papa, tall and slight gentleman that he was, with temples hollowing a bit."We made a foolish miscalculation in the amount Selina is to receive for her teaching. We women are poor arithmeticians. With her lack of experience it is gratifying that she will be commanding the customary price as it is."By this Selina understood that her father was to be spared as much of her disappointment as possible. She really owed this gentleman something on account in this teaching business, if she were given to considering money received from him after any such fashion. He had smilingly, at her mother's request, advanced the amount needed for books and other material for her teaching, and a second sum for carfare to the Williams' in bad weather. But these transactions were not on the mind of Selina at all. Just as the economic end rather than Aunt Viney was the thing considered by Mamma in the readjustment of the family wash, so Papa, as a source of supply was taken for granted by Selina. It would not have occurred to her, nor yet to Mamma or Auntie, or to any of the mothers and aunts and daughters whom they knew, that the sum of her earnings was offset by the amount advanced for her equipping. On the other hand Selina was loving, and quite understood that it should be the feelings of her father she must spare."Mamma looked around the castor and spoke briskly.""The experience will mean everything," she claimed briskly and promptly to her mother's cue, "I ought to be glad to teach for nothing, I daresay, to get it."Auntie looked alarmed at any such view of the matter. "I knew of an apprentice in my young days, our gardener's son, bound out for the experience in a rope-walk, who carried thirty-seven boils at one time from the mildewed cornmeal they fed him. I don't approve of anyone working for anybody for nothing. We're sure to undervalue what we don't pay the price for. It's a poor plan.""How you wander," from Mamma."Not from my point," from Auntie stoutly. "I've made it."After dinner Juliette and Maud who lived next door to each other, and Amanthus and Adele who lived at the opposite ends of the block, came in in a body. It was a way the group had of getting together at one house when there was nothing else especial on hand. They trooped gaily in, dropping their wraps in the hall and coming into the parlor. No more were they and Selina seated about the open grate fire and Auntie's burnished brasses, and prepared to talk volubly, than Culpepper walked in. He found a chair and joined the group."Judy and I," Maud was saying to Selina who waspale though nobody noticed this, "saw you starting out this morning to your teaching. We think if you'd coil your plaits round your head, instead of looping them, you'd look older.""If four infant pupils bring in one swollen fortune," speculated Culpepper blandly, "how many fortunes, through how many infant pupils, is one Selina, now she's started, likely to amass?"It was as well! The mistaken matter of such banter indeed was uppermost in Selina's thoughts. The minds of these five friends had to be disabused of their rosy misinformation about her earnings, and the sooner the better. Selina, who in general had a gay little way in talking to these friends, endeavored to take that way now."I've some interesting data about the market value of education with some other things," she said briskly. "I'm thinking I'd get rich sooner, Culpepper, if I abandoned pupils and decided to cook. I'll have to ask you to divide by four"—did Selina choke a little here?—"that Fortunatus salary I thought I was getting for teaching William and the others.""Selina! Divide by four? What do you mean? Oh, I do wish," plaintively, "you all would ever say what it is you mean, plain out," from Amanthus."Selina!" from Adele, "Oh, I'm sorry!""Let me help you choose a better vocation if that's the case," indignantly from Maud. "Don't waste yourself on it.""How did you make such a mistake, Selina? Or was it your mistake?" from Juliette."Mrs. Williams said I ought to have known what she meant, I should have investigated—" Selina thus was taking up the tale of it once more when she stopped."Yes?" from Culpepper. "We're waiting?"But with a brisk air of not hearing him, Selina changed the subject. Her father whom she had forgotten was sitting in the back parlor with her mother and her aunt, had lowered his paper and was listening, too. By all the precedents and traditions of her up-bringing, it was hers to change the subject.Her audience all were acquainted with the personnel of her little class of boys by now, for when Selina was interested in a thing she talked about it. They were familiar, too, with Auntie's grievance about the cranial peculiarity of William. The thing now was to turn the matter off with what Maudie would call sprightly nonchalance."William's head certainly is growing smaller, you must know," said Selina with gayety. "Isn't it some sort of reflection on me? As his teacher? I would have thought it would be the other way."Culpepper from across the circle was looking at her with those boldly blue eyes of his, beneath half-raised lids. Papa's paper was lowered to his knee in the next room. Something was wrong, this brave gayety was assumed and they showed that they knew it was."Bluffed," said Culpepper still with that keen and appraising gaze upon her, "she's going to quit."Papa's paper floated unnoticed from his knee to the floor. Was he listening for what was to come?"I'm not," said Selina indignantly, stung by these attitudes as of watchers noting her on trial, "I've just begun.""Still, it seems to me, Mrs. Williams was right," from little Judy here in the front room. "You ought to have investigated; you should have known for yourself. Somehow girls and women never seem to know for themselves. I wonder why?"Mrs. Wistar's voice murmuring defensively came in from the next room. "I hardly follow you, Mr. Wistar! I'm sure it was harder on me than on Selina to have her so disappointed. No girl was ever more shielded than she has been from all possible disappointments, and such things, up to now, nor spared where it was possible to spare her!"The murmuring voice in reply came from Auntie. "My father's mother with her eight children followed her husband, she by wagon, he on horseback, over the old wilderness road to settle here where this town is now. She learned to use a gun and an axe as well as she used a spinning wheel, because she had to. She bore him seven more children after they were here. Nobody spared women or children then. Maybe it's been our mistake to spare her too much, Lavinia."
That evening at the dinner table, Mamma looked around the castor and spoke briskly to Papa, tall and slight gentleman that he was, with temples hollowing a bit.
"We made a foolish miscalculation in the amount Selina is to receive for her teaching. We women are poor arithmeticians. With her lack of experience it is gratifying that she will be commanding the customary price as it is."
By this Selina understood that her father was to be spared as much of her disappointment as possible. She really owed this gentleman something on account in this teaching business, if she were given to considering money received from him after any such fashion. He had smilingly, at her mother's request, advanced the amount needed for books and other material for her teaching, and a second sum for carfare to the Williams' in bad weather. But these transactions were not on the mind of Selina at all. Just as the economic end rather than Aunt Viney was the thing considered by Mamma in the readjustment of the family wash, so Papa, as a source of supply was taken for granted by Selina. It would not have occurred to her, nor yet to Mamma or Auntie, or to any of the mothers and aunts and daughters whom they knew, that the sum of her earnings was offset by the amount advanced for her equipping. On the other hand Selina was loving, and quite understood that it should be the feelings of her father she must spare.
"Mamma looked around the castor and spoke briskly."
"Mamma looked around the castor and spoke briskly."
"Mamma looked around the castor and spoke briskly."
"The experience will mean everything," she claimed briskly and promptly to her mother's cue, "I ought to be glad to teach for nothing, I daresay, to get it."
Auntie looked alarmed at any such view of the matter. "I knew of an apprentice in my young days, our gardener's son, bound out for the experience in a rope-walk, who carried thirty-seven boils at one time from the mildewed cornmeal they fed him. I don't approve of anyone working for anybody for nothing. We're sure to undervalue what we don't pay the price for. It's a poor plan."
"How you wander," from Mamma.
"Not from my point," from Auntie stoutly. "I've made it."
After dinner Juliette and Maud who lived next door to each other, and Amanthus and Adele who lived at the opposite ends of the block, came in in a body. It was a way the group had of getting together at one house when there was nothing else especial on hand. They trooped gaily in, dropping their wraps in the hall and coming into the parlor. No more were they and Selina seated about the open grate fire and Auntie's burnished brasses, and prepared to talk volubly, than Culpepper walked in. He found a chair and joined the group.
"Judy and I," Maud was saying to Selina who waspale though nobody noticed this, "saw you starting out this morning to your teaching. We think if you'd coil your plaits round your head, instead of looping them, you'd look older."
"If four infant pupils bring in one swollen fortune," speculated Culpepper blandly, "how many fortunes, through how many infant pupils, is one Selina, now she's started, likely to amass?"
It was as well! The mistaken matter of such banter indeed was uppermost in Selina's thoughts. The minds of these five friends had to be disabused of their rosy misinformation about her earnings, and the sooner the better. Selina, who in general had a gay little way in talking to these friends, endeavored to take that way now.
"I've some interesting data about the market value of education with some other things," she said briskly. "I'm thinking I'd get rich sooner, Culpepper, if I abandoned pupils and decided to cook. I'll have to ask you to divide by four"—did Selina choke a little here?—"that Fortunatus salary I thought I was getting for teaching William and the others."
"Selina! Divide by four? What do you mean? Oh, I do wish," plaintively, "you all would ever say what it is you mean, plain out," from Amanthus.
"Selina!" from Adele, "Oh, I'm sorry!"
"Let me help you choose a better vocation if that's the case," indignantly from Maud. "Don't waste yourself on it."
"How did you make such a mistake, Selina? Or was it your mistake?" from Juliette.
"Mrs. Williams said I ought to have known what she meant, I should have investigated—" Selina thus was taking up the tale of it once more when she stopped.
"Yes?" from Culpepper. "We're waiting?"
But with a brisk air of not hearing him, Selina changed the subject. Her father whom she had forgotten was sitting in the back parlor with her mother and her aunt, had lowered his paper and was listening, too. By all the precedents and traditions of her up-bringing, it was hers to change the subject.
Her audience all were acquainted with the personnel of her little class of boys by now, for when Selina was interested in a thing she talked about it. They were familiar, too, with Auntie's grievance about the cranial peculiarity of William. The thing now was to turn the matter off with what Maudie would call sprightly nonchalance.
"William's head certainly is growing smaller, you must know," said Selina with gayety. "Isn't it some sort of reflection on me? As his teacher? I would have thought it would be the other way."
Culpepper from across the circle was looking at her with those boldly blue eyes of his, beneath half-raised lids. Papa's paper was lowered to his knee in the next room. Something was wrong, this brave gayety was assumed and they showed that they knew it was.
"Bluffed," said Culpepper still with that keen and appraising gaze upon her, "she's going to quit."
Papa's paper floated unnoticed from his knee to the floor. Was he listening for what was to come?
"I'm not," said Selina indignantly, stung by these attitudes as of watchers noting her on trial, "I've just begun."
"Still, it seems to me, Mrs. Williams was right," from little Judy here in the front room. "You ought to have investigated; you should have known for yourself. Somehow girls and women never seem to know for themselves. I wonder why?"
Mrs. Wistar's voice murmuring defensively came in from the next room. "I hardly follow you, Mr. Wistar! I'm sure it was harder on me than on Selina to have her so disappointed. No girl was ever more shielded than she has been from all possible disappointments, and such things, up to now, nor spared where it was possible to spare her!"
The murmuring voice in reply came from Auntie. "My father's mother with her eight children followed her husband, she by wagon, he on horseback, over the old wilderness road to settle here where this town is now. She learned to use a gun and an axe as well as she used a spinning wheel, because she had to. She bore him seven more children after they were here. Nobody spared women or children then. Maybe it's been our mistake to spare her too much, Lavinia."
CHAPTER SIXThere are Olympians in each group of us, and Mrs. Gwinne Tuttle not only was of the Olympians in Selina's community, but was held by some to betheOlympian. Such is the magic of pre-eminence the name Tuttle sounded chaste and euphonious to the ear.Selina's aunt and this lady who had gone to school together and were old friends, met down street. If the weakness of Mrs. Tuttle, who was an august but kindly soul, lay in a palpable enjoyment in the overdressing of her large person, her virtues lay in a well-intentioned heart. Though the details of the meeting between these two ladies were not all given to Selina, what happened at the underwear counter of the drygoods store where they met, was this:"Selina is teaching, Emmeline, teaching in a private way," Auntie told Mrs. Tuttle. "It does not pay, but it is an opening wedge," an explanation she made everybody."You mean to say, Ann Eliza Wistar, that Robert's child is old enough for that! Her name, Selina, is for your mother, I remember. And a mighty capable and resolute woman she is named for. Thatstock in our mothers one generation removed from pioneer blood and bone, was fine stock, Ann Eliza. How is Lavinia taking the child's doing it?""Well, she feels it's a pity, and so do I, and so, I think, does Robert. Selina is pretty, Emmeline.""H'm, I see. I remember now she is. I used to see her once a year at least at the dancing school balls. You send her to me, Ann Eliza, whenever an invitation comes to her from me this winter. No, better, now I come to think about it, you tell her I want her at my house to-morrow night. I'm having a musicale. I'll look out for her. Somewhere before nine o'clock."Selina reached home that day in excellent spirits anyway. She had been teaching her class of four for two months now, and William had been embarrassingly slow starting at reading in his first reader. He seemed to feel he had enough of reading when he finished his primer. This morning Mrs. Williams had come to her in the sewing-room, with reassuring news."We find William has begun to read at last, Selina. Day before yesterday he couldn't, and last night he seized his book, when we urged him, and deliberately read his father a page about a baby robin, without a mistake. We think it's wonderful how it's come about all at once."Selina thought so, too, but was none the less relieved for that. Not that she was not conscientious, for with the best will in the world she was applyingthe printed page to her four pupils and her pupils to the page, the moment of flux unfortunately being unpredictable but exceedingly reassuring when it came. Evidently there is more in the phrase "born teacher" than she had been aware of, and she grew a bit heady with the relief of this news.And here when she reached home was the invitation from Mrs. Tuttle awaiting her! Honors were crowding her! She and Mamma and Auntie talked it over eagerly at the lunch table."There's no ease like that from going about to the best places," said Mamma. "I can't be too glad this has come just when it has. It defines Selina's position. I don't suppose," musingly, "Amelia Williams ever was asked to the Tuttle home in her life. The McIntoshes never were anybody. Not that I'd have you mention to her, Selina, that you're going to this musicale.""Emmeline's even more given to dress now than when she was a girl," said Auntie. "She had trimming in steel and jet all over the bosom of her dress this morning, and big as she is, it looked too much."Just here, as Aunt Viney brought in the plum preserves for dessert, Culpepper walked in with a note from his mother, inclosed in his weekly letter from home."It says 'Ann Eliza' on the outside, ole miss, so I'll have to reckon it's for you."Auntie took her note, then broke forth with the more immediate news happily: "Selina's going toa grown-up party at one of my old friend's to-morrow night."Culpepper was bantering but practical. He got his pleasure out of these dear ladies, too. "Tomorrow night? How's she going to get there?"True! They all three had forgotten! "To be sure, Selina!" said her mother, "it is your father's whist night.""I can't see why she wants to go. I never see much in these things myself," from Culpepper, "but if you do, Selina, I'll come around and take you, wherever it is, and get you later and bring you home."After he was gone Mamma and Auntie sang his praises. "It was both nice and thoughtful in him to remember about your father and his neighborhood whist club," said Mamma."I hope he's not inconveniencing himself to do it," from Auntie.It would seem that all those honors right now crowding Selina were gone to her head. Resenting quite so much solicitude for Culpepper under the circumstances, she all but tossed that head."He wouldn't put himself out, let me assure you Mamma, and you, Auntie, too, if he didn't want to."During the afternoon Cousin Anna Tomlinson, who lived a block away, came around, having heard the news through Aunt Viney, who had stopped to chat with the servants on her way to the grocery."I always meant to give Selina gold beads," shesaid as she came in, as if the enormity of the present crisis exonerated her from doing so now. "What has she to wear, Lavinia? Why certainly she can't go in her graduating dress. She's worn it on every occasion since she's had it. It's been dabby for some time."Cousin Anna was rich, the money belonging to her and not to Cousin Willoughby Tomlinson, her husband. Her house impeccably swept and garnished, year after year, was brought up to date though nobody ever went there, Cousin Willoughby entertaining his friends at that newly established thing, the club. And Cousin Anna, who had finery in quantity though she never went anywhere, was fussily dressy, but in last year's clothes. Just as she could not bear to use her house, so time had to take the edge of value off her clothes before she wore them. She had a straight and unswerving backbone; her coiffure as she styled it, was elaborate; and she settled her watch chain and her rings constantly."And she is every bit as old as I am," Mamma never failed to say.Cousin Willoughby Tomlinson's mother had been a Wistar, and it was commonly told among the older set, that he had tried for Emmeline Knight, she that was now Mrs. Gwinne Tuttle, before he came round to Cousin Anna.This person gazed from Mamma to Auntie. "Certainly Selina can't be allowed to go to a Tuttle entertainment dabby," she said sharply. "You'venever had a real dressmaker dress in your life, have you, Selina? Emmeline Tuttle is a little too inclined to look on her invitations as distributed favors. You're going to this musicale in a Vincent dress of mine, if you can wear it, and judging by the eye, I think you can. I'll go right home and send it round."Madame Vincent was the last cry in the community among what Mamma and Cousin Anna and Auntie called mantua-makers.Oh, why should the spirit of mortal be proud? Juliette Caldwell, little vivid, affectionate body, and Adele Carter, impersonation of consideration for others, coming over as Cousin Anna left, Selina snubbed them.They were such slaving and believing followers of Maud! And she, Selina herself? Well, she was a follower, too, but with reservations. Maud recently had made sweeping assertions, saying that the group of them as social entities were sadly limited, and she followed up the charge by proposing they each commit a passage of poetry to heart each day, saying she had read, and this really was at base of the whole matter, that it would strengthen the mind, add to the vocabulary, and furnish food for quotation and ready repartee. At the time they all had agreed but Amanthus, who said she did not feel any need for vocabulary or repartee, and in truth as they could see, she did not need them in the least as assets in her business of life.Juliette and Adele were come over now about this matter. They were full of enthusiasm."We were to begin with our committed passages to-day, you remember," explained Juliette."We both have ours," added Adele."I'm really pleased with my way of selecting," from Juliette. "I opened our volume of Scott and took the lines my eyes fell on:""Stern was her look and wild her air,Back from her shoulders streamed her hair.""I chose mine from a little volume of selections called 'Pearls of Wisdom,'" said Adele:"Man's love is of man's life a thing apart,'Tis woman's whole existence."Selina was at both impatient and intolerant. "I was fearfully angry at Culpepper one day when he said that girls play at being educated and boys are educated. Sometimes I think Maud is responsible for our seeming to play at it. Don't you see, Judy dear, if there's anything really in this idea of Maud's you must choose your quotation? You want lines that are apt and quotable if you're going to do it at all? These of yours are relevant to nothing.""You can't say that of mine," from Adele, pacific enough in general, but disposed to resent this manner toward Juliette, and from Selina of all persons, usually so full of concern and appreciation.This undreamed of Selina answered promptly. "I certainly can't applaud your choice. Our sex should be the last to admit such an epigram exists."Cousin Anna did not send the dress around until the next morning, a note to Mrs. Wistar which accompanied it, explaining the delay:"Emmeline Tuttle is a little too pleased with being Emmeline Tuttle. I am sending a dress this moment home from Vincent for Selina to wear."On reaching home from the morning's teaching, Selina came hurrying up to her mother's room to see it. Unboxed and laid on the bed, it was an impressive affair, and the color rushed to her cheeks, and her hands sought each other rapturously. Satin puffs in a high-light green obtruded through slashes in a myrtle-green satin waist and sleeves. From the throat arose something akin to a Medici collar, and the skirt flowed away in plenitude. A beaded headdress for the hair of a seemingly fish-net nature completed the whole.There was no question Mrs. Wistar and Auntie were dubious. They looked their worry."Is it Mary, Queen of Scots, in a steel engraving, it makes me think of," from Auntie in an anxiously low voice to Mamma, "or is it Amy Robsart in our pictorial volume of Scott's heroines?""Madame Vincent is always so ahead and so extreme in her styles," fretted Mamma, "and yet,"still more fretted, "Anna may be depended on never to forgive us if she isn't allowed to wear it.""Before the mirror trying on the dress from Cousin Anna."They looked at Selina with her eager color and prettily disordered hair and shining eyes, already slipped out of her everyday dress of sober plaids, dear loving child, and before the mirror, trying on the dress from Cousin Anna."Mull and lace and a sash is the proper thing for her at her age, I don't care if her dress is dabby. And it's a poor rule to be beholden to anybody," held Auntie."We can't get her dress washed and ironed now," from Mrs. Wistar, "and she took her sash down town to be cleaned and has not gotten it home. We'll have to give in this time and let her wear this dress of Anna's.""Come feel the satin of it, Mamma," exulted Selina, "put your cheek against its sheen, Auntie. Or can one feel a sheen?" she laughed happily. "Maud says let the love of dress get in your blood and it will poison your life at its spring, and you even might come to marry for what a man could give you! She meant it for Juliette who cried because her mother wouldn't let her have high heels to make her taller. But I'm not sure I see Maud's logic. When we marry, we take from the man anyhow, don't we? Why shouldn't one care then, in the ratio of what one takes? Don't look so shocked, Auntie, I'm only thinking it out.""Sometimes, Selina," said Auntie, dismayed, "you talk like you weren't the girl we brought you up to be! The dress fits well enough, that's all I can say for it.""It looks a little like a fancy costume," admitted Selina doubtfully, "but anyhow it's wonderful and I love it. I think, Auntie dear," reassuringly, "it isn't that Maud and the rest of us are undependable. It'sthat we want something, and we don't know what we want. When we're with people who're grandly mental, we think it's that, or religious, it's that, or when it's someone who's a social personage, then it seems as if it's that. Does it sound weak-minded Auntie, veering so?"This evening of the musicale Culpepper came for Selina on the moment, which he did not always do, and he and she in her gorgeousness, went off gayly together, Mamma and Auntie seeing them to the door."She's really a child at heart, Lavinia," worried Auntie, after they were gone, "a child, I sometimes fear, that has had so little experience in life that it's pitiful. And yet this afternoon she spoke shockingly. I wouldn't have her too helpless and inexperienced, but neither would I have her lose her illusions. There's mighty little left a woman when she parts with these.""If I only felt more comfortable in my mind about that dress," from Mrs. Wistar. "Sometimes I could wish I were a person of more courage and finality; I didn't want to let her wear it.""No, I wouldn't want her to feel we had failed her about it," agreed Auntie. "I wouldn't want her ever to feel we'd failed her anywhere, but sometimes I'm afraid she's going to."
There are Olympians in each group of us, and Mrs. Gwinne Tuttle not only was of the Olympians in Selina's community, but was held by some to betheOlympian. Such is the magic of pre-eminence the name Tuttle sounded chaste and euphonious to the ear.
Selina's aunt and this lady who had gone to school together and were old friends, met down street. If the weakness of Mrs. Tuttle, who was an august but kindly soul, lay in a palpable enjoyment in the overdressing of her large person, her virtues lay in a well-intentioned heart. Though the details of the meeting between these two ladies were not all given to Selina, what happened at the underwear counter of the drygoods store where they met, was this:
"Selina is teaching, Emmeline, teaching in a private way," Auntie told Mrs. Tuttle. "It does not pay, but it is an opening wedge," an explanation she made everybody.
"You mean to say, Ann Eliza Wistar, that Robert's child is old enough for that! Her name, Selina, is for your mother, I remember. And a mighty capable and resolute woman she is named for. Thatstock in our mothers one generation removed from pioneer blood and bone, was fine stock, Ann Eliza. How is Lavinia taking the child's doing it?"
"Well, she feels it's a pity, and so do I, and so, I think, does Robert. Selina is pretty, Emmeline."
"H'm, I see. I remember now she is. I used to see her once a year at least at the dancing school balls. You send her to me, Ann Eliza, whenever an invitation comes to her from me this winter. No, better, now I come to think about it, you tell her I want her at my house to-morrow night. I'm having a musicale. I'll look out for her. Somewhere before nine o'clock."
Selina reached home that day in excellent spirits anyway. She had been teaching her class of four for two months now, and William had been embarrassingly slow starting at reading in his first reader. He seemed to feel he had enough of reading when he finished his primer. This morning Mrs. Williams had come to her in the sewing-room, with reassuring news.
"We find William has begun to read at last, Selina. Day before yesterday he couldn't, and last night he seized his book, when we urged him, and deliberately read his father a page about a baby robin, without a mistake. We think it's wonderful how it's come about all at once."
Selina thought so, too, but was none the less relieved for that. Not that she was not conscientious, for with the best will in the world she was applyingthe printed page to her four pupils and her pupils to the page, the moment of flux unfortunately being unpredictable but exceedingly reassuring when it came. Evidently there is more in the phrase "born teacher" than she had been aware of, and she grew a bit heady with the relief of this news.
And here when she reached home was the invitation from Mrs. Tuttle awaiting her! Honors were crowding her! She and Mamma and Auntie talked it over eagerly at the lunch table.
"There's no ease like that from going about to the best places," said Mamma. "I can't be too glad this has come just when it has. It defines Selina's position. I don't suppose," musingly, "Amelia Williams ever was asked to the Tuttle home in her life. The McIntoshes never were anybody. Not that I'd have you mention to her, Selina, that you're going to this musicale."
"Emmeline's even more given to dress now than when she was a girl," said Auntie. "She had trimming in steel and jet all over the bosom of her dress this morning, and big as she is, it looked too much."
Just here, as Aunt Viney brought in the plum preserves for dessert, Culpepper walked in with a note from his mother, inclosed in his weekly letter from home.
"It says 'Ann Eliza' on the outside, ole miss, so I'll have to reckon it's for you."
Auntie took her note, then broke forth with the more immediate news happily: "Selina's going toa grown-up party at one of my old friend's to-morrow night."
Culpepper was bantering but practical. He got his pleasure out of these dear ladies, too. "Tomorrow night? How's she going to get there?"
True! They all three had forgotten! "To be sure, Selina!" said her mother, "it is your father's whist night."
"I can't see why she wants to go. I never see much in these things myself," from Culpepper, "but if you do, Selina, I'll come around and take you, wherever it is, and get you later and bring you home."
After he was gone Mamma and Auntie sang his praises. "It was both nice and thoughtful in him to remember about your father and his neighborhood whist club," said Mamma.
"I hope he's not inconveniencing himself to do it," from Auntie.
It would seem that all those honors right now crowding Selina were gone to her head. Resenting quite so much solicitude for Culpepper under the circumstances, she all but tossed that head.
"He wouldn't put himself out, let me assure you Mamma, and you, Auntie, too, if he didn't want to."
During the afternoon Cousin Anna Tomlinson, who lived a block away, came around, having heard the news through Aunt Viney, who had stopped to chat with the servants on her way to the grocery.
"I always meant to give Selina gold beads," shesaid as she came in, as if the enormity of the present crisis exonerated her from doing so now. "What has she to wear, Lavinia? Why certainly she can't go in her graduating dress. She's worn it on every occasion since she's had it. It's been dabby for some time."
Cousin Anna was rich, the money belonging to her and not to Cousin Willoughby Tomlinson, her husband. Her house impeccably swept and garnished, year after year, was brought up to date though nobody ever went there, Cousin Willoughby entertaining his friends at that newly established thing, the club. And Cousin Anna, who had finery in quantity though she never went anywhere, was fussily dressy, but in last year's clothes. Just as she could not bear to use her house, so time had to take the edge of value off her clothes before she wore them. She had a straight and unswerving backbone; her coiffure as she styled it, was elaborate; and she settled her watch chain and her rings constantly.
"And she is every bit as old as I am," Mamma never failed to say.
Cousin Willoughby Tomlinson's mother had been a Wistar, and it was commonly told among the older set, that he had tried for Emmeline Knight, she that was now Mrs. Gwinne Tuttle, before he came round to Cousin Anna.
This person gazed from Mamma to Auntie. "Certainly Selina can't be allowed to go to a Tuttle entertainment dabby," she said sharply. "You'venever had a real dressmaker dress in your life, have you, Selina? Emmeline Tuttle is a little too inclined to look on her invitations as distributed favors. You're going to this musicale in a Vincent dress of mine, if you can wear it, and judging by the eye, I think you can. I'll go right home and send it round."
Madame Vincent was the last cry in the community among what Mamma and Cousin Anna and Auntie called mantua-makers.
Oh, why should the spirit of mortal be proud? Juliette Caldwell, little vivid, affectionate body, and Adele Carter, impersonation of consideration for others, coming over as Cousin Anna left, Selina snubbed them.
They were such slaving and believing followers of Maud! And she, Selina herself? Well, she was a follower, too, but with reservations. Maud recently had made sweeping assertions, saying that the group of them as social entities were sadly limited, and she followed up the charge by proposing they each commit a passage of poetry to heart each day, saying she had read, and this really was at base of the whole matter, that it would strengthen the mind, add to the vocabulary, and furnish food for quotation and ready repartee. At the time they all had agreed but Amanthus, who said she did not feel any need for vocabulary or repartee, and in truth as they could see, she did not need them in the least as assets in her business of life.
Juliette and Adele were come over now about this matter. They were full of enthusiasm.
"We were to begin with our committed passages to-day, you remember," explained Juliette.
"We both have ours," added Adele.
"I'm really pleased with my way of selecting," from Juliette. "I opened our volume of Scott and took the lines my eyes fell on:"
"Stern was her look and wild her air,Back from her shoulders streamed her hair."
"I chose mine from a little volume of selections called 'Pearls of Wisdom,'" said Adele:
"Man's love is of man's life a thing apart,'Tis woman's whole existence."
Selina was at both impatient and intolerant. "I was fearfully angry at Culpepper one day when he said that girls play at being educated and boys are educated. Sometimes I think Maud is responsible for our seeming to play at it. Don't you see, Judy dear, if there's anything really in this idea of Maud's you must choose your quotation? You want lines that are apt and quotable if you're going to do it at all? These of yours are relevant to nothing."
"You can't say that of mine," from Adele, pacific enough in general, but disposed to resent this manner toward Juliette, and from Selina of all persons, usually so full of concern and appreciation.
This undreamed of Selina answered promptly. "I certainly can't applaud your choice. Our sex should be the last to admit such an epigram exists."
Cousin Anna did not send the dress around until the next morning, a note to Mrs. Wistar which accompanied it, explaining the delay:
"Emmeline Tuttle is a little too pleased with being Emmeline Tuttle. I am sending a dress this moment home from Vincent for Selina to wear."
On reaching home from the morning's teaching, Selina came hurrying up to her mother's room to see it. Unboxed and laid on the bed, it was an impressive affair, and the color rushed to her cheeks, and her hands sought each other rapturously. Satin puffs in a high-light green obtruded through slashes in a myrtle-green satin waist and sleeves. From the throat arose something akin to a Medici collar, and the skirt flowed away in plenitude. A beaded headdress for the hair of a seemingly fish-net nature completed the whole.
There was no question Mrs. Wistar and Auntie were dubious. They looked their worry.
"Is it Mary, Queen of Scots, in a steel engraving, it makes me think of," from Auntie in an anxiously low voice to Mamma, "or is it Amy Robsart in our pictorial volume of Scott's heroines?"
"Madame Vincent is always so ahead and so extreme in her styles," fretted Mamma, "and yet,"still more fretted, "Anna may be depended on never to forgive us if she isn't allowed to wear it."
"Before the mirror trying on the dress from Cousin Anna."
"Before the mirror trying on the dress from Cousin Anna."
"Before the mirror trying on the dress from Cousin Anna."
They looked at Selina with her eager color and prettily disordered hair and shining eyes, already slipped out of her everyday dress of sober plaids, dear loving child, and before the mirror, trying on the dress from Cousin Anna.
"Mull and lace and a sash is the proper thing for her at her age, I don't care if her dress is dabby. And it's a poor rule to be beholden to anybody," held Auntie.
"We can't get her dress washed and ironed now," from Mrs. Wistar, "and she took her sash down town to be cleaned and has not gotten it home. We'll have to give in this time and let her wear this dress of Anna's."
"Come feel the satin of it, Mamma," exulted Selina, "put your cheek against its sheen, Auntie. Or can one feel a sheen?" she laughed happily. "Maud says let the love of dress get in your blood and it will poison your life at its spring, and you even might come to marry for what a man could give you! She meant it for Juliette who cried because her mother wouldn't let her have high heels to make her taller. But I'm not sure I see Maud's logic. When we marry, we take from the man anyhow, don't we? Why shouldn't one care then, in the ratio of what one takes? Don't look so shocked, Auntie, I'm only thinking it out."
"Sometimes, Selina," said Auntie, dismayed, "you talk like you weren't the girl we brought you up to be! The dress fits well enough, that's all I can say for it."
"It looks a little like a fancy costume," admitted Selina doubtfully, "but anyhow it's wonderful and I love it. I think, Auntie dear," reassuringly, "it isn't that Maud and the rest of us are undependable. It'sthat we want something, and we don't know what we want. When we're with people who're grandly mental, we think it's that, or religious, it's that, or when it's someone who's a social personage, then it seems as if it's that. Does it sound weak-minded Auntie, veering so?"
This evening of the musicale Culpepper came for Selina on the moment, which he did not always do, and he and she in her gorgeousness, went off gayly together, Mamma and Auntie seeing them to the door.
"She's really a child at heart, Lavinia," worried Auntie, after they were gone, "a child, I sometimes fear, that has had so little experience in life that it's pitiful. And yet this afternoon she spoke shockingly. I wouldn't have her too helpless and inexperienced, but neither would I have her lose her illusions. There's mighty little left a woman when she parts with these."
"If I only felt more comfortable in my mind about that dress," from Mrs. Wistar. "Sometimes I could wish I were a person of more courage and finality; I didn't want to let her wear it."
"No, I wouldn't want her to feel we had failed her about it," agreed Auntie. "I wouldn't want her ever to feel we'd failed her anywhere, but sometimes I'm afraid she's going to."