CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIXThere were escorts for everybody and Selina and Mr. Jones started out alone. He guided her down the Harrisons' snow-laden front steps."Give me your hand. There's enough snow to be treacherous. Put your foot here, and here, and here."Was there snow enough in truth on the steps to be treacherous? Selina concluded that perhaps there was but that his solicitude about it was excessive.He led her down the even snowier flagging to the gate. "This drift has piled up since I went in half an hour ago. I don't know that I'd have brought you out in it if I'd realized."Outside the gate he took her hand and placed it on his arm. "Right about," encouragingly. "Only the length of the block and you're there."Then the out-streaming path of light from the Harrisons' doorway was left behind, and the dusk and the silently descending snow shut them in disquietingly and together.Or was it, rather than the storm and dusk, the careof her by Tuttle which brought this disquieting sense of nearness and intimacy?"This way—the snow's deeper near the fence. And yet don't stumble over the broken pavements."And because of this increasing sense of disquiet, she began to talk hurriedly with the gay volubility of embarrassment. "You were wondering about Aunt Juanita and her questions about women? Mrs. Harrison says so many bothering things about women herself. I never feel certain I know just what she means."Tuttle dropped her arm—they had gone possibly twenty steps—placed himself on the other side of her, lifted that hand and put it on his arm."The wind's veered more to this side. I can protect you better here. I rather suspect Mrs. Bruce is a shrewd enough woman, and we know Mrs. Harrison is a charming one. But what do we care after all, you and I, about their meanings?"Was there just emphasis enough about that "you and I" to render it disquieting, too? Selina clung to her point and talked more volubly."Miss Pocahontas Boswell, that I met at your aunt's musicale, says things of the same sort as Mrs. Harrison, things that evidently Aunt Juanita means, too, things that won't let you alone afterward for wondering if they're true, and that hurt your self-respect to think they are true.""Give me the end of that scarf," Tuttle referred to the little affair of crêpe about her throat, a presentnot so long ago from Juliette, and which in the swirl of wind and snow was proving refractory. He caught the end, and halting her there in the snow and dusk again, they had gone perhaps thirty feet farther now, found its mate, and retied them. There was something like a woman in the skilful way he did it, and yet as he put her hand back on his arm for the third time, there was that which was not in the least like any woman, in the overlength of time he took in placing that hand where he wanted it. And there was that not in the least suggestive of any woman either, in the tiny pressure of reassurance he put upon those fingers as he left them.And just what was it these manifestations from Tuttle meant?Even in Selina's day a prude was a prude and no girl wanted to be one. On the one side, Mrs. Harrison and Miss 'Hontas Boswell and Aunt Juanita, possibly, too, would have said bluntly, "Look at the facts and try to find out what he means."On the other hand, Mamma and Auntie, by their profound reticence, conveyed the idea, that once let a young man's attentions to a girl be so marked as to be a fact, and every instinct of maidenliness must erect itself in her mind, making blind alleys of all inquiry, wonder or surmise on her part, as to what such attentions mean.And the facts in this case of Tuttle and Selina, were what? That a really prominent young man in the local little world of fashion, was devoting himselfwith pertinence and even pertinacity, to a pretty girl unknown in his world, an evenquitepretty girl who unless she married, must find some way to earn a living and take care of herself.The point might be held to be, were these attentions from Tuttle a passing thing, or sincere?There was a good deal to make it reasonable that they were but passing. Tuttle was the son of Mr. Samuel Jones, wealthy and eminent citizen. True, some claimed that he was an eminent citizen last because he was a wealthy pork-packer first, but that may be permitted to pass. Tuttle was the son of this Mr. Samuel Jones by a second marriage. His mother in her public contributions to charity signed herself Alicia Tuttle Jones, which is all that needs be said on that score. And Tuttle, twenty-four years of age, neat, dapper, with sense enough of his own, was a beau, a great beau according to his aunt, a beau of such undoubted repute in his world, he even was dubbed the Oswald of it by those outside it and unkind to it, Preston Cannon and Culpepper, for example.He also had the reputation according to his aunt once more, of being rather shrewdly unsusceptible. Or in other words, the words of Mr. Tate this time, used in defending him from the jocular side-thrusts of Preston and Culpepper, "he had a proper sense of his own value."So much for Tuttle.And the assets of this Selina, without a dollar ofher own, or of her family's, shabbily established and obscure? Her assets, beyond the lure of nature through her youth and fairness were what? A sound young body. A nature plastic as yet to any mold through place and standing that might be hers. A nature appealingly innocent and unspoiled.And these points on either side ascertained, what did these attentions from Tuttle to this pretty Selina mean? His manner of singling her out? Of separating her from whatever group of the moment she was in, and isolating her to himself? Or as now, of touching her fingers if ever so lightly, with a meaning in the touch that seemed to have a language of its own?Selina being the outcome of Mamma's and Auntie's raising, might not ask herself these things. That tiny wedge of doubt first inserted by Miss 'Hontas Boswell, and again of late driven further by Mrs. Harrison, as to the soundness of the older ideas and traditions and customs, was a mere prick as yet, for the admission of some wonderment and some perturbation. She still was the product of her day and time and up-bringing and being this product, must close the doors of maidenliness and modesty as she knew them upon any such avenues to comprehension and honest understanding.And so she chattered to Tuttle down the length of the snowy block, chattered volubly and prettily, fate having granted her this, that she did most things prettily, chattered gayly and volubly and withal a bit shyly, as cover to her greater embarrassment."He below, lifting his hat."And so down the length of the snowy block also, he guided her, and in at her own gate, and to her door. And his solicitude, with its silent language, was all but actually caressing.It was even that. He brought her to her door. A pause here, a space, and his hand left her arm where it had guided her up the steps and dropped, the breath of a touch only, the shadow of a hold—and yet, the blood leaped to it, and the heart stopped—as this Tuttle's hand sought and found hers at her side."And you changed the wearing of your hair, your pale, lovely hair that would be a poet's joy, as that little Juliette said of it to me, because I asked you?"The touch of his hand on hers was gone, she was on the snow-wet step, he below, lifting his hat—correct Tuttle!—even in the swirling snow, bidding her hurry in and change her damp garments, saying good night, gone.And she? Giving herself one moment to stand there, one pulsing, palpitating, trembling moment before she opened the door and went in to shabby, dreary, ordinary things, might not ask herself what this come upon her was? Nor what it meant? Nor what it portended? This warm, stealing, permeating, this vitalizing glow, this rush as of rosiness through her body?Might not ask herself this, but being Selina Wistar, fruit of Mamma's and Auntie's rearing, must close the doors of a so-called nicety upon life and truth and nature, and deny to herself by all she was bred to hold modest and seemly, that it was so. For was she not product of her day and time and up-bringing?CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVENIt seemed to Selina that at times she failed to get the satisfaction from her mother she could have desired."Mamma," she said to this little person the morning after the Harrison tea-party, "I can't be comfortable while I owe that fifty dollars to Cousin Anna Tomlinson.""I'm glad to hear that," from Auntie in her own room through the open door.Mrs. Wistar, however, spoke from her place at the window almost peevishly."Why must you bring up uncomfortable subjects, Selina? And here it is eleven o'clock in the morning and the house just straightened and I this moment sitting down to my church paper!""But Mamma, I've kept hoping you'd say something about it. You haven't and I felt I'd have to ask you.""I try to spare people, myself," severely. "And just as long as I did not speak you might know it was because there was nothing to say. I must say I think Anna is niggardly to want it back. But one can't help one's blood and she's a Pope. 'Hungryas a Pope nigger,' the saying used to be in slave times, or was it a Groghan nigger? Yes, I believe it was a Groghan.""'You haven't spoken to Papa about it?'""You haven't spoken to Papa about it? Then I'm going to, Mamma," Selina spoke with irritation. Her moods were uncertain these days.She opened the door to her father that evening. It was a raw and shivery day. She helped him off with his coat and followed him back to the stove in the hall where he stood warming his hands at the glowing mica. By some unfortunate chance his glance wandered about, resting on the shabby papering and paint, the old sofa, the carpet worn to a monotone almost guiltless of pattern."Pretty hopeless, Selina? Everything past even patching up this time?""Papa, why did you take this evening to say it? When I'm here to worry you more? It's hateful to come to you only for one sort of thing. I'm looking about, I'm telling everybody I want almost any sort of teaching, but in the meantime I'm worrying about that money I owe Cousin Anna."Her father smiled. He was a comfort in his looks, tall, slight and refined. "I returned the loan to Anna the day after you came home.""Papa!" She forgot her relief in her greater feeling of indignation. The debt was paid and he had not told her! Had not mentioned it to her mother! She resented it, and only the timidity of a life-time where he was concerned kept her from saying so.He was continuing gazing at the glowing mica rather than at her. "I don't mean the money is not still owing, only that it's always better, or seems so to me, to owe on a business footing and not apersonal one. Especially I've never had a fancy for owing one's relations," dryly."Papa?" The tone was different now. He was taking her into his counsels where she ought to be. Indignation had given place to understanding of the situation and sympathy."Selina?""I'm wondering why I haven't come to you about every sort of thing? It's very satisfactory when I do come.""Thank you, Selina.""I'm wondering, seriously wondering, why I haven't come all this time?""I'm to regard this as an arraignment?" smiling."Arraignment, Papa?""Of my American fatherhood? That I've allowed my womenkind to usurp my prerogatives? That it's being borne in on you and me, that somehow we've been kept out of our rights in each other?"Selina hesitated. Then, "Papa, may I ask you something else?""It's because you haven't, we're both complaining.""It's this," her color came and went a little rapidly, but she stood to her colors; "since you did settle this matter with Cousin Anna, don't you think it was only fair to have told Mamma and me?""Is indictment added to arraignment, Selina? Culpable as a husband as well as a father?""Papa, I didn't say so." She threw herself on him, this fair-haired daughter, and went to crying with her face and tears on his poor innocent shirt-front, and her arm around his neck. It was sweet to have her there, and so new and rare a thing for him to see anything but the veriest surface of her nature, that he was willing to take the toll of her tears from her to receive the rest.Selina was a creature of many moods these days. She said she wanted work and when it came she acted as badly as possible about it.This same evening as she and her three elders were finishing dinner, the doorbell rang. Miss Emma McRanney who went to the same church as the Wistars and who set type at the State Institute for the Blind, followed Aunt Viney into the front parlor. Auntie and Papa who were through their meal, went in at once to speak to her, and Mamma, waiting only to finish her bit of pudding, followed.Selina poured more cream on her own bit of pudding, and dallied. In her present mood, though what that mood was she hardly could have said herself, other than it savored of a captious disposition to be short with everybody and everything, she felt the one thing she couldn't stand was Miss McRanney. It wasn't that she disliked this person herself so much as she disliked the thing that characterized her."It's her air of having accepted," Selina told herpudding crossly, with a vicious stab with her spoon into it, "of having accepted and stayed decently cheerful at that!"Accepted! Given in and taken your allotment, however meager, and settled down to it! It's a thing youth cannot conceive of, cannot forgive. For Selina's part, passionately communing with her pudding, she never would accept. Nothing ever, ever, should make her consent to feel poor or to give in to shabbiness. She might be and was amid both these conditions, but nothing but her own will and submission could make her of them. It was feeling this way about them, loathing them, repudiating them, refusing to admit them, that made them possible.Her elders as they went in the parlor had shaken hands with the visitor, a thick-set person with large features, whose dress, cloak, and hat, Mamma would have described as "plain but perfectly decent and genteel."Time was when Selina thought this kindly and cordial attitude of her family toward Miss McRanney came from pity of her because she worked. She knew now that it was because they considered her a fine woman. But, for Selina's part, and again she stabbed the wee remaining morsel of her pudding—if fine character consists in cheerful acceptance of a sordid lot, then she had no patience with it herself. The thing is to repudiate any such lot.Miss McRanney had a paralytic brother, a blacksheep whose by-gone peccadilloes had left the two of them poorer even than they might have been. She lived with this brother in rooms over a drugstore, setting type from nine to five and taking care of him and doing light housekeeping between times. It was a shabby and unrelieved picture. Selina hated it. She hated another thing, too—though this one she would not admit—she hated the thought of herself as a wage-earner when she thought of Miss Emma McRanney as one!The visitor was speaking in the parlor in a good-humored voice."I'm glad of this chance to say howdy," she was saying, "but what I'm here for is to see Selina. No indeed, Mr. Wistar, I don't want you to go, you or Mrs. Wistar, either, and Miss Ann Eliza mustn't go in any event, as I've got my missionary dues in my pocket; I want to pay her. It's only that what I've come to say has to be said to Selina."But Papa and Mamma retreated, the latter calling to Selina for fear she had not followed the conversation. The last vestige of her pudding being gone, this person arose and went into the next room and shook hands with the guest, after which the three of them, Auntie, Miss McRanney and she herself, took chairs."I want to know, Selina, if you'll coach me for an examination. A teacher out at the Institute where I am, is going to quit. I can't do that myself, so the next best thing is to get his place if Ican, as it pays better than my own. I understand the finger-reading, both the Roman and the Braille, working in the type I found myself interested, but the position calls for a grade-school teacher's certificate which I have to pass an examination to get.""Emma!" said Auntie. "And you have the courage? You must have been well along when you went to work and taught yourself how to set type? And to get yourself ready again——""That's right, Miss Ann Eliza, I'm forty last month. But what's forty when you come to think about it? It's ten, fifteen years younger than it used to be. My grandmother died when she was forty-eight, and I always think of her as an old person in a frilly cap.""I'm forty-eight myself. You're quite right about it, for I certainly haven't any disposition yet toward caps. Emma," almost wistfully, "if I had your advantage of those eight years I'd ask you to show me how to fit myself for something. Many's the time I've asked myself if I wasn't capable of something beyond rolling and whipping cambric bands and polishing brasses. I've looked at you more than once in church, and envied you."Auntie! Darling Auntie! Confessing to Miss Emma McRanney that she envied her! It filled Selina with a greater fury of dislike and distaste for this person. She did want work, and had said so, but she didn't want to teach Miss Emma McRanney!This lady was speaking again. "After I'm home in the evening, I get supper for my brother and myself. Try it a while, Miss Ann Eliza, before you quite envy me. So I'll have to ask you to give me an hour in the evenings, Selina, say three times a week."If anything could make the proposition more distasteful it was this."I taught in our orphan asylum after I graduated, until I got my present place, Selina, so I'm not on altogether new ground, though no certificate was required there. It's not quite such a crime against your fellow-man to be blind, so I've discovered, as to be an orphan. Anything, even Emma McRanney with no certificate, was good enough for orphans, whereas I have to be guaranteed in this case. You're unfortunate if you're blind, but the state does look after you, but to be an orphan, leaves you convicted of your own guilt, and not a leg to stand on. If you're ever compelled to choose between these things, Selina, don't be foolish enough to be an orphan. They pay teachers so little to instruct them, even I had to leave. I ought to tell you these examinations I want to take come late in March. That'll give us six weeks. I'm promised the place if I can get the certificate, and I've got some former questions from the examining board thinking we could find out from these where I stand and what there is to do."Selina roused herself. She didn't want to teach Miss McRanney! "I've had so little experience,Miss Emma, I ought to tell you I'm not at all sure I'm competent.""Neither was I," said Miss Emma good-humoredly if unexpectedly. "I graduated through our high school, myself, the second class put through after it was established. And looking back in the light of what I've found out since, I'll say there don't seem to be anything in the way of real, actual, everyday sense that a body ought to have, that I didn't succeed in failing to have—I and most of my class.""Why, Emma," from Auntie, "and you had the leading honor, what is it that it's called, the valedictory?""That's the surest and most damning evidence against me, Miss Ann Eliza; it takes years to live it down," continued Miss Emma. "I thought about you in church Sunday, Selina, wondering if you'd do, and then went and asked Mrs. Williams about you, knowing you'd taught there. She said you did fairly well with your little class, and toward the end of the year seemed to be doing better, but as you told her you were going South to coach in Latin and Algebra, she judged these were your specialties. Well, they're mine, too, where I'm likeliest to fall down, and that decided me."Do our assumptions, then, like our sins, live on to confront us? "But there was no coaching to do when I got there," hurriedly explained Selina. "I never had a pupil!""Well, that don't prevent its being your specialtyeven so. I'm the one to risk it. And I'll have to say what convinced me there's something to you, is that you stood Mrs. Williams and her condescension all those months you were in her house and didn't murder her. I have to swallow a good deal of such patronage anyhow, because I'm poor, or because I work, or both, and I'm guiltless of violence only because I can't hope to commit assault and battery on people's persons and not pay the penalty. But it never would do to tempt me too far with that woman. But to get back to the point, are you going to undertake me?"Try as Selina would, she didn't seem to know how to get out of it. She endeavored to throw some cordiality into her manner. "We'll begin whenever you say, Miss Emma. Have you those questions with you, you spoke about? We might go over them and see what there is to do."Auntie got up to leave them. "Thank you for remembering your missionary dues, Emma. You're an amazing person to me. If I was forty instead of forty-eight," longingly, "I'd certainly follow your example."CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHTAbout half-past eight Culpepper Buxton arrived at the Wistar house. He was good-humored and unruffled. Selina had turned him down the evening before for the first time in history. The pretty and lovable little minx! She was waking then! Juliette, who was clever with her dark eyes and her flashing smiles, or Amanthus herself, could not have done it any better.As he came up, Selina was at the door saying good night to a stout, rather pleasant-voiced person.He waited until this guest had gone, then went in with Selina."Who's your friend?" inquired Culpepper.Selina diagramed the lady and her business briefly, so briefly that Culpepper might have taken it as cue to drop a dangerous subject. "She has to take an examination and wants me to coach her for it."But Culpepper, in his unruffled good humor, failed to know his cue. "That's good. Just the sort of thing you've been wanting. No?"For Selina, having started to push chairs and footstools back into place, here ceased abruptly and swung about on him furiously. "It's not good. Iloathe everything she stands for. I hate shabbiness. I hate poverty, I don't like to be near either of them, they always seem to be reaching out fingers to drag me down to them. You're altogether and entirely wrong. I don't want to teach Miss McRanney."Hoity-toity! As Culpepper's stepmother used to say to his early and childish bursts of temper. Shewasa little minx all at once! He didn't know that he'd put up with it."You'd better not teach her then, you won't do it halfway right," from Culpepper coolly."You're very priggish," from Selina, in return, and hot as he was cool. "You speak, I suppose, from the heights of masculine superiority?""I'll run on up to ole Miss' door, if I may," from Culpepper. "I've a message for her in my home letter to-day from my mother, and I want to get back to the rooms. We've a crowd on for to-night by nine."She heard him run up the stairs, tap at her aunt's door, and at the answer, enter. Whereupon she herself sped up the steps, too, and past that door and in at her own, which she closed softly, if passionately. When he came down again, to call a cool good-bye as he went out, he should not find her waiting there!"Selina ... fell on her knees."Within her room this child, Selina, young and crude, her tragedies pitiful in their tininess but tragedies to her none the less who did not know them for tiny, fell on her knees beside her big and tolerated poster-bed, and sobbed into her marseilles spread, and passionately arraigned that which she called God. First, because Culpepper had hurt her feelings and next, though she would not have admitted either, because she did not want to teach Miss Emma McRanney. For while Selina said her formulas in prayer, night and morning, dutifully and onher knees, it was only in moments of hurt and passionate outcry against the hurt that she really approached her God. Though she, dear child, did not know this.Self-examined, even here now upon her knees, she would have decided and honestly so far as she was concerned in the opinion, that she was a religious person. She had been brought up so to be. On her little book-rack on her table, stood her Bible, her Thomas à Kempis, "The Lives of the Saints" (in miniature, a rather daring acquisition which pleased her, savoring of Rome as it did), "The History of the Church and Its Liturgy," and a few other volumes. She even felt that she was rather better informed in religious matters than her friends, and in some ways, more catholic in her interests. She talked predestination and free-will with Maud; St. Francis of Assisi, St. Paul and conversion with Juliette, who longed for a light from Heaven; conscience and duty with Adele, and even life after death; and she and Maud found themselves in conversation on virgin birth with a converted Armenian lady missionary staying at Maud's house, though with a startled consciousness, in the light of the lady's contribution to the subject, that they evidently did not know either what they or she were talking about.Selina, honest child, looked on matters such as these as being religious. It did not dawn on her that it was only when the world went amiss for her thatshe prayed. Only at times, such as now, after the door was pushed to and the bolt passionately shot, and she fell on her knees to that Something brooding somehow and somewhere above its created creatures, only when she held out her arms to it and cried to it through sobs, and even though that cry be but appeal against her own discomfiture, that she prayed, that she ever had prayed, ever had sought a God through need."I want admiration for what I am, I want applause for what I do, I want my part to be favored and enviable according to my choosing of what is favored and enviable," may be said to be the unformulated gist of this unwitting child's poor little human prayer.As indeed, for the pitiful part of that, it is the prayer of millions of us, every day. But prayer for all its paucity, prayer for all that.And meanwhile in Auntie's room, a room of ponderous mahogany akin to Selina's, with a great deal of red and an equally cheerful predominance of green in carpet, curtains and lambrequin, she and Culpepper were having a real heart-to-heart confidence."I didn't suppose she'd tiff with me. What's got in her all at once, ole Miss?"Ole Miss patted the hand that was holding hers. They were mighty fond of each other, these two, to use their own vernacular about it. But she didn'treply. Yet there was that in her manner which implied she could have done so if she would."What's the use us two beating about the bush with each other, ole sport?" from Culpepper, who meant she should. "You know just as well as my mother, or Cousin Robert, and I've made a clean breast to 'em both, what's the state I'm in as to Selina. The trouble's the other way round. When she was about ten or eleven, up there at home in the summers, I used to catch and kiss her to tease her. I don't believe she'd read a bit more in it if I caught her and did it now."Ole Miss spoke. "There never can be but one first for a girl, Culpepper. There never was but the one, first and last, for me. I'd like you to know that it was your father. The truth with Selina is, she's waking. She's cross because she's coming to be conscious. It's a trying time and we're human, and we've all got tempers. I think it will break my old worthless heart if it's Emmeline's Tuttle Jones, and not John Buxton's Culpepper who's responsible for it."A pause. Then a breath long and deep and gloriously big and gloriously confident from Culpepper."And that's it! You've put heart in me altogether, ole sport! You've pointed me the road and shown me the gait. Gimme one before I go, like a real lady!"Ole Miss roused to her own defence. "Stop rightnow, Culpepper. No, I don't want to be mauled and teased, stop smacking that kiss into my ear—well, put it on my cheek if that's what you meant to do. No, I won't discuss the subject further either now or any other time. I haven't another word to say concerning it, and if that's what you're waiting for, you may as well go long."CHAPTER TWENTY-NINEMiss McRanney proved worth while enough, and rather good fun if Selina would have allowed this. She arrived on the appointed evening with a satchel of schoolbooks and an avowed poor opinion of examinations as tests of teachers. She followed Selina to the dining-room where they were to work, and where Auntie was lingering to say howdy, and as she emptied the satchel of the textbooks, emptied her mind of this opinion."Drat such a test, it's all wrong. What life asks teachers to put into their pupils, or get out of them, as you prefer it, is character. To take a wild flight into the fanciful, and I'm not strong there, one might call it the universal language recognized everywhere and anywhere, whether in a Choctaw or a Charlemagne. Right now I couldn't pass the examination that gave me that valedictory at eighteen, no, Miss Ann Eliza, and don't look so distressed about it, not if Mazeppa's ride in duplicate for me was the consequence of failing. Whereas any character I've got of my own to help a child to his, I've found since then.""Any characteryou'vegot, Emma?" from Auntie indignantly. "And starting out again at forty?" The wild daring of this act, as she saw it, seemed to fascinate Auntie."Well," said Miss Emma, "he must needs go whom the devil doth drive, my devil having been necessity. I've never had a man to rest back on, or I probably would have done so. However we're keeping Selina waiting. The digressions of middle age are mighty tiresome, aren't they, Selina? Well, don't forget they are when you get there. Since I've got to pass this examination I suppose we'd better get to work, especially in your specialties, algebra and Latin, that are my pitfalls."The next lesson came on a Monday evening and Miss Emma had been at church the day before. "There's many a thing to amuse a body, Selina," she said good-humoredly as she took off her wraps. "I earn my way and occupy my small place in the army of producers. The rest of the women in that congregation of ours live sweetly and unconcernedly upon the general store that other people produce. And yet, if their unfailing and admirably ordered patronage of me could overwhelm, I'd long ago have been washed away in the flood."Auntie's voice expostulating, came in from the next room where she was reading the paper laid down by Papa. "Why Emma——""Here, keep out of this, Miss Aunt Eliza. I'm talking to the next generation. I want to point outa few things to it that may make the way easier for its journeying. Selina, if you're going to teach, come on along with me and take this examination and get your certificate. You've got something to show then, something to go on so long as the public demands certificates."Selina had been thinking about this herself, and wishing she'd done it sooner. If the suggestion had come from anyone but Miss Emma she'd have taken it. As it was——"What pitiful fools we are!" from Miss Emma at the next lesson. "Far from respecting my job when I first started out teaching, and getting everything out of it there was in it for me and everybody else, I lost my first years at it being ashamed of it. Nowadays I set type well, the job seeks me, and I don't mind saying so. I'll have to feel this same capacity in myself for the new job if I get it. It's a good thing to feel, capacity in yourself for your work, and respect for yourself in it."The doorbell rang. Of course! The wonder to Selina had been that it hadn't rung before on these lesson evenings. The fear that it would ring had been one among many reasons she was so averse to the undertaking. Papa, however, had his instructions in this event to close the folding doors and leave them to their work in the dining-room undisturbed. But Papa now forgot the folding doors. He opened the front door and after a moment's delayin the hall for the removal of hat and coat, ushered the caller in.It was Mr. Tuttle Jones. Again, of course! Who could Selina less have wanted it to be?And here at the dining-table, all too visible to the front room, sat Miss Emma McRanney, plain, shabby and busy. Her textbooks, open over the table, were shabby as herself, and unlovely. Her hands showed manual work. Selina was ashamed of Miss McRanney, ashamed of teaching Miss McRanney, ashamed of being found thus teaching her by Tuttle Jones. Alas for you, Mamma, once again! You with your strained anxiety, your every effort bent toward that front in life which must be kept up! Your one ewe lamb would have been the happier for the truer values held by Auntie!Mr. Jones came smilingly back through the parlor to the dining-room, his hand outstretched to—not Selina at all, but Miss McRanney! Indeed, and indeed, you never can tell!"Well, Tuttle, and how's your mother?" from this lady. "Tuttle's mother and I are old friends from grade and high school days, Selina. Admirable and democratic meeting-ground for the classes with the masses," dryly. "How'd you say your mother is, Tuttle?""Quite well. Miss Emma, and grumbling only yesterday that you'd not been around for a month to put her in a better humor with the world. What's wrong with my telling her you'll come for dinnerSunday?" He was shaking hands with Selina now. "But I'm in the way here?"Selina was overswept with a passion of loathing for herself, and a need for abasement and self-punishment."Miss Emma came to me to get some coaching and's finding I'm a very poor teacher. Oh, but she is, and she's too considerate and kind to say so. For fifteen minutes now she's been showing me how to do a page in algebra I, the teacher, couldn't showher.""Sit down, Tuttle," from Miss Emma, cheerfully, "and see what's wrong. I'll be jiggered if I've got it either. Figures used to be your strong suit when you were a boy."Selina meant for herself to go the whole way now. Being ashamed, she was very much ashamed. "I've been following every clue and chance for teaching I could hear of since I came home in November," she told Tuttle, "and nobody wanted me. I never quite understood until Miss Emma pointed out that I wasn't qualified as a teacher. I'm going to try for a certificate along with her in March."Miss Emma nodded approval. "Now she's talking, Tuttle. Get busy and applaud her. This child's been going through that circle of purgatory Dante forgot to set down, finding herself a woman that's got to make her way, and taking her cue from the rest of the woman world, ashamed of the fact."Selina dropped her head right down on the page of the open textbook before her on the table. The sob was coming and she could not stop it. Bye and bye when the pretty head with its masses of flaxen hair lifted, they all laughed together. For Miss Emma McRanney was chafing one of Selina's hands and Tuttle Jones the other one.*******Culpepper's visits these days were to Auntie. He got in the way of running in and up to her room for a brief while in the evenings, and out again."She won't have a thing to do with me, ole Miss, and there's nothing for it but for me to take my medicine! 'Oh, yes, she's quite well, thank you!' when I do stop and speak to her 'and very busy.' She's not only getting Miss McRanney ready as far as she knows how, but trying to get herself ready for these examinations in March. That's about what she says to me, coolly and loftily, and goes on about her own affairs.""I don't like it at all," from Auntie, stoutly, "And here's Emmeline's Tuttle around every lesson night looking like a model out of a store window, helping them with their algebra, both Emma and Selina." Auntie was innocent of guile. "It's his specialty, too, it seems," she added lamentingly."Why don't he stay where he's put?" grumbled Culpepper. "He's a dude, a dandy dude, you can tell it by his fashion, can't you, ole Miss? What's he got to do with our nice, humble, worthy ways,and with our Selina and her problems? I ask you that!"There came a morning late in March when Miss Emma McRanney at nine-thirty, in her 'plain but perfectly genteel' best wool dress, stood waiting at the drugstore over which she lived, instead of being at the Institute mounted on a stool, and wearing a blue calico apron with sleeves, setting type.Nor had she waited above two minutes when a rather breathless young person came hurrying in. A moderately tall, slim, pretty girl, with a good deal of flaxen hair, in obviously her soberest wool dress, and quietest head-gear."On time, am I, Miss Emma? After lying awake half the night saying over lists of dates and rules and the rest of it, I overslept this morning and Mamma wouldn't wake me.""Plenty of time, Selina. At leastyoudon't have to worry about your particular specialties, algebra and Latin——""Now, Miss Emma, you said you wouldn't——""Whereas between you and me, Selina, I'm weakest if anything in the one that's Tuttle's specialty too——"They boarded the street car, the stout, plain lady in her best wool dress, and the slim, pretty girl in her plainest dress. When they alighted before a tall, broad, ugly brick building that bore above its central doorway the words, "Board of Education,"a clock in a neighboring steeple said five minutes of ten."And the examinations are at ten. We're just in good time, Selina," said Miss Emma McRanney."They boarded the street car."One week from that day Selina Wistar arriving at her own gate at dusk from one direction, she had walked home from the office of the Board of Education in truth, to avoid getting there any sooner than she had to, met Miss Emma McRanney arriving from the other direction.If one did not fear conveying the impression that Selina was fast lapsing into an eighteenth century heroine so far as weeping goes, it could be mentioned there was that about her face, despite the dusk, which showed she had been crying. Just a preparatory cry, perhaps, of a scalding tear or two, that could be permitted as she hurried along in the dusk, and would not be noticed—an abeyant tear as it were, pending the unrestrained flow that would come when seclusion and her own room were reached."Well, Selina," from Miss Emma, cheerfully, "it's all over for me. I've just been by the school office to get my report. I'm a type-setter who knows her job and is doomed to stick at it. What—what? Don't tell me you've gone and failed, too?""Oh, Miss Emma——""Now, Selina, don't tell me a further thing, don't tell me you fell down in your own specialties——""Miss Emma——""Well, well, now that's exactly what I was afraid I'd do and that I did, but I'd said from the start they weremyweaknesses."Selina was crying bitterly."My child," from Miss Emma, "it isn't worthit. You've gained enough in other things to make up for the lost certificate. And as for me, I've something that will comfort you, that I've known for two days. It made my middle-aged blood so hot I didn't know if I'd take the place if I could get it. It's almost as despicable a thing to be a woman, as I discovered it was to be an orphan, Selina, and very seldom more remunerative to the individual. At the last meeting of the board out at the Institute, they agreed, to a man, in giving this place to a woman, that it wasn't worth as much, and reduced the salary to exactly what I'm getting now. They did the same thing when they gave me my present job as type-setter. No, I won't come in, thank you. I've got to get on home. One thing I'm as adamant about. I can't feel those blind babies would have missed that Latin and algebra in me, and I've been hungry to teach 'em ever since I've been there. Good night! I'm coming around some evening soon, with Tuttle. We've a date, so it's not good-bye."Whereupon Selina fled into the house and up to her room, and although, this time, it was an absolutelyfreshmarseilles spread, put on cleanthatmorning, flung herself upon it and cried and cried and cried bitterly.Mamma came in, worried and indignant. "Why did Emma McRanney expect you to know more than she did and instructher? It was a good deal for her to ask anyway. And I'm sure you've just said you failed, too. Why should all your worry be for her?"Auntie came in. "I'm sure Emma knows you did your best, Selina. And think what you've gained? A real friend in a real woman like Emma?"That night alone in her room, Selina took her pen and her paper. The note she wrote was to Culpepper whom she had ignored for six long weeks, and it said:Dear Culpepper:I want to tell you that I've been hateful and I am sorry. I did try, however, with my pupil after the first, and try my best. Evidently my best is an inadequate thing, and unflattering to me, for she has failed. And, deciding to try for a certificate, myself, I have failed, too.Selina.CHAPTER THIRTYThe next day, about noon, Culpepper Buxton rang the Wistar doorbell. Aunt Viney opened the door, still adjusting the apron she had tied on as she came."No, not Miss Ann Eliza this time, Aunt Viney. Is Miss Selina here?"Viney, cautious soul, true to her race in this, never was known to commit herself or her white household."I'll go up an' see, Mr. Culpepper.""Tell her it's only for a moment, I've run 'round between classes."Plump brown Viney, not without panting, mounted the stairs and went on back to Selina's room. "Yes'm, I knew you's here, an' I knew you's goin' to see him. But 'tain't my way, an' you know 'tain't, to keep my white folks too ready on tap. Get up f'om that sew-in'-machine, an' turn roun' an' lemme untie thet ap'on you got on. Think you's sewin' foh yo'se'f, don't you? Think it's a petticoat you's goin' to learn to make, don' you? An' firs' time you lay it down an' go off an' leave it, yo' aunt or yo' ma'll take it up foh you an' finish it.""Aunt Viney, you do understand, don't you? And you're the only one here that does! Tell 'em Iwantto do it, I want to make mistakes, and I want to rip 'em out and do it over again. Tell 'em so for me, won't you, Aunt Viney?""Go on down to thet thar youn' man. He ca'ies his haid high, but 'tain't no proof we don't ca'y our'n higher. He'n Miss Maria, his ma, ain't got it all; we're folks our own se'f."But for all this by way of support while she smoothed her hair, Selina went downstairs slowly and constrainedly, conscious in the sense she had been conscious when coming home through the snowstorm with Tuttle Jones.She had known Culpepperwouldcome from the moment she dropped her note to him in the letterbox at the corner last night. And now that he had come she was afraid to go down and meet him. Afraid of what? She couldn't have said; instinct didn't take her that far; it only sent her down the steps hesitatingly and constrainedly.Culpepper the undemonstrative, the coolly unflattering in his attitude always, swung about at the sound of her footsteps and met her at the parlor door.She held out a hand, a soft and pretty hand, its mate going up at the same time to push back some imaginary troublesome lock, a characteristic gesture with her when she was embarrassed.But Culpepper having taken the soft hand proffered, put it over into his left one, and——("Oh, Culpepper, no, I'm not ten now!")—with the frowning and horrific air of a fearsome captor, undoubtedly an ogre captor intent and not to be deterred, went creepingly after its mate and cunningly caught it and brought it down and put it, with even more diablerie of horrific cunning alongside the other upon his big left palm, and—("Culpepper, don't—don't do it, it frightens me still!")—like as when the compassionless keeper of the ogre dungeon into which the victim is thrust, lowers the overhead stone that fits into its place—lowered his big right hand upon these two soft ones——And why not? So he used to catch her and tease her when she was ten, playing the thing through in realistic pantomime until she, throwing herself on him, clung to him perforce! But she was not that little girl! Nor did she feel as a little girl feels any longer! She tried to take her hands away.As well try any other feat in strength which is impossible. And now Culpepper bending his head a little was trying to make her look up, those bold eyes in teasing wait to catch her gaze when she did.Not for worlds could Selina have looked up. Her heart beat wildly, and the blood pulsed in her throat and pounded at her ears. And as Culpepper holding the hands captive, went on bending to surprise her gaze, her lashes swept lower and yet lower upon her cheeks.As a picture of shy maidenliness, Mamma andAuntie, the thing as you fancy it in perfection, behold your handiwork!As a piteous young creature, ignorantly innocent, or innocently ignorant, as you prefer to put it, Mamma and Auntie, the choice in terms is yours, a piteous young creature suddenly overswept with conscious sex that nor you nor any creature has seen fit to explain to her, behold your handiwork! Groping by her young self, filled with terror and horror of self, of life, even of the God who made her as she was, you have left your child to battle as she may with things hideous to her distorted imaginings, rather than know them as attributes natural, decent, and sanctioned of God!Culpepper bent yet lower to find her eyes through the down sweep of those lashes. The warmth from his young, gloriously alive face, so close to hers, the lift and fall of his breathing, reached her consciousness."I had your note, Selina. I wonder, writing me that, if you knew how sweet you were being to me?"And here she got her hands away because in truth his heart was touched by her piteous terror, and he let her go. She found a chair and pointed one to him."You didn't come round any more," she said hurriedly.He looked across at her oddly, those blue eyes of his within their accentuating black lashes, even humorously baffled in their expression. Seeing thatthis speech from her was honest and not arch, it was disarming to a lover by its very nature. And yet allowing that it was the child in her that was honest, was he not to gather that the maid in her was disturbed?And again allowing that it was the child in her that spoke, was it not the maiden in her whose fingers even now were plaiting her dress nervously into folds, her eyes upon these fingers and her color coming and going? Peradventure, Mamma and Auntie, she does you proud, this proper and becoming picture of fluttered and timid maidenhood. You, Mamma, who have been girl, maiden, wife and mother, and have no woman's word for your woman-child! You, Auntie, who discussed the situation frankly enough with Culpepper, the man, but as with a flaming sword of vigilance, have stood guard lest even a breath of the truth reach the ignorance of Selina, the woman.Culpepper watching her as she sat there, lovely and drooping and fair-haired, with her clear young profile partly averted, spoke, and watched anew to note the effect upon her of what he said."I concluded I'd keep away, Selina. I wasn't in the least satisfied with what you were giving me. I'm an outspoken brute. If there's no show that my share's going to be any more, I'll go on keeping away."She shrank as though something had struck her. And in truth something had. Comprehensionof what he meant, so far as knowledge went with her, the lightning flash of it stunned while it revealed.Yet even as the poor child reeled pale with the shock, she rallied to her womanhood as she had had womanhood impressed on her. Courageously rallied! And bravely dissembled! A thing well-nigh synonymous with womanhood as taught to her!Which is to say the child restored herself with a long, deep breath, laughed with a disarming little throw back to the head, swept her hands across the plaits she had so busily gathered there in the breadths of her dress, as though she swept away with these all but an everyday interpretation of Culpepper's word, and spoke frankly, frankness being a most excellent dissembling weapon."It's good to have you back, Culpepper." Her voice, traitorous at first, gained in composure. As said before it was a nice voice, and under conditions, full of cadences. When she was ten, Culpepper used to kiss her in her pretty neck to tickle her, because he liked these cadences when she laughed.Meanwhile with the aid of that dissembling weapon, frankness, she was going on. "Don't stay away ever again. And, Oh, there's so much to ask you, and so much to tell you about!"He looked across at her and her pretty dissembling and laughed. "You little goose! You haven't known me all this while to think you can put me off if I'm really ready?"Her gaze at this was hurried, beseeching, pleading. It seemed to beg for time, respite, mercy!He laughed again, and she hurried on. "As I said, there's so, so much to talk about——""As for instance——?"One saw her hurriedly and desperately searching her mind. "Why, er—of course—Judy!"The tone even implied reproach that he could have thought it anything but Judy."All right, my lady," his name for her of old. "I accept the cue. Judy it's to be, is it? You're sparring for time, I'm to understand? The idea's planted now alongside any foolishness which Tuttle may have been putting there and I'm to let you get used to it awhile? And what's the trouble with Judy, now? Still sore with her father, or something fresh?""We're not supposed to know what she's doing," with a rush of evident relief at his docility, "but we do. She's being coached for her college examinations by some college chap Algy found and arranged with. It's mostly done through Algy, too, with an occasional meeting at the circulating library to outline more work. She'll have to go to Cincinnati for the examinations when they come, in June, which her father won't let her do, so we can't see how any of it's going to help her?""Go on," from Culpepper. "Talk along, amuse yourself. But one of these days when my time comes, my lady——"Selina's breath came piteously in its flutterings. And for all her rallyings to that womanhood, her heart had never ceased its cruel clamberings, and her blood its beatings in her ears and its pulsings in her throat. And on all that vast sea of terror fast returning on her again, terror not of him, that was secondary, but of that within her innocent self she could no longer deny as being there, on all this rising sea of fear and terror, she could see but the one absurd little spar of inconsequence to cling to still—Judy."We feel so sort of dishonorable toward her father and mother, Maud and Adele and I do, Culpepper. But we're not supposed to know she's doing this. And of all people, little Judy!""Certainly, by all means, little Judy."She rose with a pretty dignity which seemed to say she didn't like this tone from him.He rose with her. She had to look up to him when they stood thus, which gives the man the advantage."It's lunch time, Culpepper, though we'll be glad to have you stay?"No doubt he had really meant to be merciful and bide his time when he said he would. Instead, as she finished her little speech with its implied reproof, he laughed and with a mighty sweep of his arms, gathered this suddenly white-cheeked Selina up and kissed her, kissed her roughly, kissed her gloriously, kissed her exultingly. And set her down.She stayed white-cheeked and looked at him. She spoke so quietly it was a bit discomforting. "That was outrageous of you. And cruel. I'll listen to you if ever I make up my mind now I want to listen and not before. Right now I hate you! Yes, I'm sure that's it, hate you! Not so much because you're Culpepper—"and here it became evident she was going to cry, one hates to have to tell it on her so soon again—"but because of something in you that made you think you could!" And the storm of tears now upon her, she turned and fled upstairs.Late that afternoon when Selina went into her mother's room, she found Auntie talking about her paragon and favorite Culpepper. "He's his father right over again, Lavinia. Women like to be coerced and decided for. And anything that once belonged to Culpepper, he'd be fierce to the death caring for.""I don't agree with you about what women like, Auntie," from Selina, to this startled lady who didn't know she was around. "Why should a person like to be coerced because she's a woman? And why should she want to be decided for, for the same reason?"Auntie looked not only startled but alarmed. "Why, Selina!"Selina took a calmer tone. "Maybe we're beginning to feel differently about these things, Auntie," curiously, as if wondering about it herself. "Maybewomen are different from what you and the ones you knew were?""Lavinia," from Auntie, "do you hear your child?"Selina overswept by the fury of swift and sudden rage, stamped her foot and—terrible as it is to have to set it down again—burst into tears."But I'm not a child! That's the trouble! If anybody'd only understand and—help me!"

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIXThere were escorts for everybody and Selina and Mr. Jones started out alone. He guided her down the Harrisons' snow-laden front steps."Give me your hand. There's enough snow to be treacherous. Put your foot here, and here, and here."Was there snow enough in truth on the steps to be treacherous? Selina concluded that perhaps there was but that his solicitude about it was excessive.He led her down the even snowier flagging to the gate. "This drift has piled up since I went in half an hour ago. I don't know that I'd have brought you out in it if I'd realized."Outside the gate he took her hand and placed it on his arm. "Right about," encouragingly. "Only the length of the block and you're there."Then the out-streaming path of light from the Harrisons' doorway was left behind, and the dusk and the silently descending snow shut them in disquietingly and together.Or was it, rather than the storm and dusk, the careof her by Tuttle which brought this disquieting sense of nearness and intimacy?"This way—the snow's deeper near the fence. And yet don't stumble over the broken pavements."And because of this increasing sense of disquiet, she began to talk hurriedly with the gay volubility of embarrassment. "You were wondering about Aunt Juanita and her questions about women? Mrs. Harrison says so many bothering things about women herself. I never feel certain I know just what she means."Tuttle dropped her arm—they had gone possibly twenty steps—placed himself on the other side of her, lifted that hand and put it on his arm."The wind's veered more to this side. I can protect you better here. I rather suspect Mrs. Bruce is a shrewd enough woman, and we know Mrs. Harrison is a charming one. But what do we care after all, you and I, about their meanings?"Was there just emphasis enough about that "you and I" to render it disquieting, too? Selina clung to her point and talked more volubly."Miss Pocahontas Boswell, that I met at your aunt's musicale, says things of the same sort as Mrs. Harrison, things that evidently Aunt Juanita means, too, things that won't let you alone afterward for wondering if they're true, and that hurt your self-respect to think they are true.""Give me the end of that scarf," Tuttle referred to the little affair of crêpe about her throat, a presentnot so long ago from Juliette, and which in the swirl of wind and snow was proving refractory. He caught the end, and halting her there in the snow and dusk again, they had gone perhaps thirty feet farther now, found its mate, and retied them. There was something like a woman in the skilful way he did it, and yet as he put her hand back on his arm for the third time, there was that which was not in the least like any woman, in the overlength of time he took in placing that hand where he wanted it. And there was that not in the least suggestive of any woman either, in the tiny pressure of reassurance he put upon those fingers as he left them.And just what was it these manifestations from Tuttle meant?Even in Selina's day a prude was a prude and no girl wanted to be one. On the one side, Mrs. Harrison and Miss 'Hontas Boswell and Aunt Juanita, possibly, too, would have said bluntly, "Look at the facts and try to find out what he means."On the other hand, Mamma and Auntie, by their profound reticence, conveyed the idea, that once let a young man's attentions to a girl be so marked as to be a fact, and every instinct of maidenliness must erect itself in her mind, making blind alleys of all inquiry, wonder or surmise on her part, as to what such attentions mean.And the facts in this case of Tuttle and Selina, were what? That a really prominent young man in the local little world of fashion, was devoting himselfwith pertinence and even pertinacity, to a pretty girl unknown in his world, an evenquitepretty girl who unless she married, must find some way to earn a living and take care of herself.The point might be held to be, were these attentions from Tuttle a passing thing, or sincere?There was a good deal to make it reasonable that they were but passing. Tuttle was the son of Mr. Samuel Jones, wealthy and eminent citizen. True, some claimed that he was an eminent citizen last because he was a wealthy pork-packer first, but that may be permitted to pass. Tuttle was the son of this Mr. Samuel Jones by a second marriage. His mother in her public contributions to charity signed herself Alicia Tuttle Jones, which is all that needs be said on that score. And Tuttle, twenty-four years of age, neat, dapper, with sense enough of his own, was a beau, a great beau according to his aunt, a beau of such undoubted repute in his world, he even was dubbed the Oswald of it by those outside it and unkind to it, Preston Cannon and Culpepper, for example.He also had the reputation according to his aunt once more, of being rather shrewdly unsusceptible. Or in other words, the words of Mr. Tate this time, used in defending him from the jocular side-thrusts of Preston and Culpepper, "he had a proper sense of his own value."So much for Tuttle.And the assets of this Selina, without a dollar ofher own, or of her family's, shabbily established and obscure? Her assets, beyond the lure of nature through her youth and fairness were what? A sound young body. A nature plastic as yet to any mold through place and standing that might be hers. A nature appealingly innocent and unspoiled.And these points on either side ascertained, what did these attentions from Tuttle to this pretty Selina mean? His manner of singling her out? Of separating her from whatever group of the moment she was in, and isolating her to himself? Or as now, of touching her fingers if ever so lightly, with a meaning in the touch that seemed to have a language of its own?Selina being the outcome of Mamma's and Auntie's raising, might not ask herself these things. That tiny wedge of doubt first inserted by Miss 'Hontas Boswell, and again of late driven further by Mrs. Harrison, as to the soundness of the older ideas and traditions and customs, was a mere prick as yet, for the admission of some wonderment and some perturbation. She still was the product of her day and time and up-bringing and being this product, must close the doors of maidenliness and modesty as she knew them upon any such avenues to comprehension and honest understanding.And so she chattered to Tuttle down the length of the snowy block, chattered volubly and prettily, fate having granted her this, that she did most things prettily, chattered gayly and volubly and withal a bit shyly, as cover to her greater embarrassment."He below, lifting his hat."And so down the length of the snowy block also, he guided her, and in at her own gate, and to her door. And his solicitude, with its silent language, was all but actually caressing.It was even that. He brought her to her door. A pause here, a space, and his hand left her arm where it had guided her up the steps and dropped, the breath of a touch only, the shadow of a hold—and yet, the blood leaped to it, and the heart stopped—as this Tuttle's hand sought and found hers at her side."And you changed the wearing of your hair, your pale, lovely hair that would be a poet's joy, as that little Juliette said of it to me, because I asked you?"The touch of his hand on hers was gone, she was on the snow-wet step, he below, lifting his hat—correct Tuttle!—even in the swirling snow, bidding her hurry in and change her damp garments, saying good night, gone.And she? Giving herself one moment to stand there, one pulsing, palpitating, trembling moment before she opened the door and went in to shabby, dreary, ordinary things, might not ask herself what this come upon her was? Nor what it meant? Nor what it portended? This warm, stealing, permeating, this vitalizing glow, this rush as of rosiness through her body?Might not ask herself this, but being Selina Wistar, fruit of Mamma's and Auntie's rearing, must close the doors of a so-called nicety upon life and truth and nature, and deny to herself by all she was bred to hold modest and seemly, that it was so. For was she not product of her day and time and up-bringing?

There were escorts for everybody and Selina and Mr. Jones started out alone. He guided her down the Harrisons' snow-laden front steps.

"Give me your hand. There's enough snow to be treacherous. Put your foot here, and here, and here."

Was there snow enough in truth on the steps to be treacherous? Selina concluded that perhaps there was but that his solicitude about it was excessive.

He led her down the even snowier flagging to the gate. "This drift has piled up since I went in half an hour ago. I don't know that I'd have brought you out in it if I'd realized."

Outside the gate he took her hand and placed it on his arm. "Right about," encouragingly. "Only the length of the block and you're there."

Then the out-streaming path of light from the Harrisons' doorway was left behind, and the dusk and the silently descending snow shut them in disquietingly and together.

Or was it, rather than the storm and dusk, the careof her by Tuttle which brought this disquieting sense of nearness and intimacy?

"This way—the snow's deeper near the fence. And yet don't stumble over the broken pavements."

And because of this increasing sense of disquiet, she began to talk hurriedly with the gay volubility of embarrassment. "You were wondering about Aunt Juanita and her questions about women? Mrs. Harrison says so many bothering things about women herself. I never feel certain I know just what she means."

Tuttle dropped her arm—they had gone possibly twenty steps—placed himself on the other side of her, lifted that hand and put it on his arm.

"The wind's veered more to this side. I can protect you better here. I rather suspect Mrs. Bruce is a shrewd enough woman, and we know Mrs. Harrison is a charming one. But what do we care after all, you and I, about their meanings?"

Was there just emphasis enough about that "you and I" to render it disquieting, too? Selina clung to her point and talked more volubly.

"Miss Pocahontas Boswell, that I met at your aunt's musicale, says things of the same sort as Mrs. Harrison, things that evidently Aunt Juanita means, too, things that won't let you alone afterward for wondering if they're true, and that hurt your self-respect to think they are true."

"Give me the end of that scarf," Tuttle referred to the little affair of crêpe about her throat, a presentnot so long ago from Juliette, and which in the swirl of wind and snow was proving refractory. He caught the end, and halting her there in the snow and dusk again, they had gone perhaps thirty feet farther now, found its mate, and retied them. There was something like a woman in the skilful way he did it, and yet as he put her hand back on his arm for the third time, there was that which was not in the least like any woman, in the overlength of time he took in placing that hand where he wanted it. And there was that not in the least suggestive of any woman either, in the tiny pressure of reassurance he put upon those fingers as he left them.

And just what was it these manifestations from Tuttle meant?

Even in Selina's day a prude was a prude and no girl wanted to be one. On the one side, Mrs. Harrison and Miss 'Hontas Boswell and Aunt Juanita, possibly, too, would have said bluntly, "Look at the facts and try to find out what he means."

On the other hand, Mamma and Auntie, by their profound reticence, conveyed the idea, that once let a young man's attentions to a girl be so marked as to be a fact, and every instinct of maidenliness must erect itself in her mind, making blind alleys of all inquiry, wonder or surmise on her part, as to what such attentions mean.

And the facts in this case of Tuttle and Selina, were what? That a really prominent young man in the local little world of fashion, was devoting himselfwith pertinence and even pertinacity, to a pretty girl unknown in his world, an evenquitepretty girl who unless she married, must find some way to earn a living and take care of herself.

The point might be held to be, were these attentions from Tuttle a passing thing, or sincere?

There was a good deal to make it reasonable that they were but passing. Tuttle was the son of Mr. Samuel Jones, wealthy and eminent citizen. True, some claimed that he was an eminent citizen last because he was a wealthy pork-packer first, but that may be permitted to pass. Tuttle was the son of this Mr. Samuel Jones by a second marriage. His mother in her public contributions to charity signed herself Alicia Tuttle Jones, which is all that needs be said on that score. And Tuttle, twenty-four years of age, neat, dapper, with sense enough of his own, was a beau, a great beau according to his aunt, a beau of such undoubted repute in his world, he even was dubbed the Oswald of it by those outside it and unkind to it, Preston Cannon and Culpepper, for example.

He also had the reputation according to his aunt once more, of being rather shrewdly unsusceptible. Or in other words, the words of Mr. Tate this time, used in defending him from the jocular side-thrusts of Preston and Culpepper, "he had a proper sense of his own value."

So much for Tuttle.

And the assets of this Selina, without a dollar ofher own, or of her family's, shabbily established and obscure? Her assets, beyond the lure of nature through her youth and fairness were what? A sound young body. A nature plastic as yet to any mold through place and standing that might be hers. A nature appealingly innocent and unspoiled.

And these points on either side ascertained, what did these attentions from Tuttle to this pretty Selina mean? His manner of singling her out? Of separating her from whatever group of the moment she was in, and isolating her to himself? Or as now, of touching her fingers if ever so lightly, with a meaning in the touch that seemed to have a language of its own?

Selina being the outcome of Mamma's and Auntie's raising, might not ask herself these things. That tiny wedge of doubt first inserted by Miss 'Hontas Boswell, and again of late driven further by Mrs. Harrison, as to the soundness of the older ideas and traditions and customs, was a mere prick as yet, for the admission of some wonderment and some perturbation. She still was the product of her day and time and up-bringing and being this product, must close the doors of maidenliness and modesty as she knew them upon any such avenues to comprehension and honest understanding.

And so she chattered to Tuttle down the length of the snowy block, chattered volubly and prettily, fate having granted her this, that she did most things prettily, chattered gayly and volubly and withal a bit shyly, as cover to her greater embarrassment.

"He below, lifting his hat."

"He below, lifting his hat."

"He below, lifting his hat."

And so down the length of the snowy block also, he guided her, and in at her own gate, and to her door. And his solicitude, with its silent language, was all but actually caressing.

It was even that. He brought her to her door. A pause here, a space, and his hand left her arm where it had guided her up the steps and dropped, the breath of a touch only, the shadow of a hold—and yet, the blood leaped to it, and the heart stopped—as this Tuttle's hand sought and found hers at her side.

"And you changed the wearing of your hair, your pale, lovely hair that would be a poet's joy, as that little Juliette said of it to me, because I asked you?"

The touch of his hand on hers was gone, she was on the snow-wet step, he below, lifting his hat—correct Tuttle!—even in the swirling snow, bidding her hurry in and change her damp garments, saying good night, gone.

And she? Giving herself one moment to stand there, one pulsing, palpitating, trembling moment before she opened the door and went in to shabby, dreary, ordinary things, might not ask herself what this come upon her was? Nor what it meant? Nor what it portended? This warm, stealing, permeating, this vitalizing glow, this rush as of rosiness through her body?

Might not ask herself this, but being Selina Wistar, fruit of Mamma's and Auntie's rearing, must close the doors of a so-called nicety upon life and truth and nature, and deny to herself by all she was bred to hold modest and seemly, that it was so. For was she not product of her day and time and up-bringing?

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVENIt seemed to Selina that at times she failed to get the satisfaction from her mother she could have desired."Mamma," she said to this little person the morning after the Harrison tea-party, "I can't be comfortable while I owe that fifty dollars to Cousin Anna Tomlinson.""I'm glad to hear that," from Auntie in her own room through the open door.Mrs. Wistar, however, spoke from her place at the window almost peevishly."Why must you bring up uncomfortable subjects, Selina? And here it is eleven o'clock in the morning and the house just straightened and I this moment sitting down to my church paper!""But Mamma, I've kept hoping you'd say something about it. You haven't and I felt I'd have to ask you.""I try to spare people, myself," severely. "And just as long as I did not speak you might know it was because there was nothing to say. I must say I think Anna is niggardly to want it back. But one can't help one's blood and she's a Pope. 'Hungryas a Pope nigger,' the saying used to be in slave times, or was it a Groghan nigger? Yes, I believe it was a Groghan.""'You haven't spoken to Papa about it?'""You haven't spoken to Papa about it? Then I'm going to, Mamma," Selina spoke with irritation. Her moods were uncertain these days.She opened the door to her father that evening. It was a raw and shivery day. She helped him off with his coat and followed him back to the stove in the hall where he stood warming his hands at the glowing mica. By some unfortunate chance his glance wandered about, resting on the shabby papering and paint, the old sofa, the carpet worn to a monotone almost guiltless of pattern."Pretty hopeless, Selina? Everything past even patching up this time?""Papa, why did you take this evening to say it? When I'm here to worry you more? It's hateful to come to you only for one sort of thing. I'm looking about, I'm telling everybody I want almost any sort of teaching, but in the meantime I'm worrying about that money I owe Cousin Anna."Her father smiled. He was a comfort in his looks, tall, slight and refined. "I returned the loan to Anna the day after you came home.""Papa!" She forgot her relief in her greater feeling of indignation. The debt was paid and he had not told her! Had not mentioned it to her mother! She resented it, and only the timidity of a life-time where he was concerned kept her from saying so.He was continuing gazing at the glowing mica rather than at her. "I don't mean the money is not still owing, only that it's always better, or seems so to me, to owe on a business footing and not apersonal one. Especially I've never had a fancy for owing one's relations," dryly."Papa?" The tone was different now. He was taking her into his counsels where she ought to be. Indignation had given place to understanding of the situation and sympathy."Selina?""I'm wondering why I haven't come to you about every sort of thing? It's very satisfactory when I do come.""Thank you, Selina.""I'm wondering, seriously wondering, why I haven't come all this time?""I'm to regard this as an arraignment?" smiling."Arraignment, Papa?""Of my American fatherhood? That I've allowed my womenkind to usurp my prerogatives? That it's being borne in on you and me, that somehow we've been kept out of our rights in each other?"Selina hesitated. Then, "Papa, may I ask you something else?""It's because you haven't, we're both complaining.""It's this," her color came and went a little rapidly, but she stood to her colors; "since you did settle this matter with Cousin Anna, don't you think it was only fair to have told Mamma and me?""Is indictment added to arraignment, Selina? Culpable as a husband as well as a father?""Papa, I didn't say so." She threw herself on him, this fair-haired daughter, and went to crying with her face and tears on his poor innocent shirt-front, and her arm around his neck. It was sweet to have her there, and so new and rare a thing for him to see anything but the veriest surface of her nature, that he was willing to take the toll of her tears from her to receive the rest.Selina was a creature of many moods these days. She said she wanted work and when it came she acted as badly as possible about it.This same evening as she and her three elders were finishing dinner, the doorbell rang. Miss Emma McRanney who went to the same church as the Wistars and who set type at the State Institute for the Blind, followed Aunt Viney into the front parlor. Auntie and Papa who were through their meal, went in at once to speak to her, and Mamma, waiting only to finish her bit of pudding, followed.Selina poured more cream on her own bit of pudding, and dallied. In her present mood, though what that mood was she hardly could have said herself, other than it savored of a captious disposition to be short with everybody and everything, she felt the one thing she couldn't stand was Miss McRanney. It wasn't that she disliked this person herself so much as she disliked the thing that characterized her."It's her air of having accepted," Selina told herpudding crossly, with a vicious stab with her spoon into it, "of having accepted and stayed decently cheerful at that!"Accepted! Given in and taken your allotment, however meager, and settled down to it! It's a thing youth cannot conceive of, cannot forgive. For Selina's part, passionately communing with her pudding, she never would accept. Nothing ever, ever, should make her consent to feel poor or to give in to shabbiness. She might be and was amid both these conditions, but nothing but her own will and submission could make her of them. It was feeling this way about them, loathing them, repudiating them, refusing to admit them, that made them possible.Her elders as they went in the parlor had shaken hands with the visitor, a thick-set person with large features, whose dress, cloak, and hat, Mamma would have described as "plain but perfectly decent and genteel."Time was when Selina thought this kindly and cordial attitude of her family toward Miss McRanney came from pity of her because she worked. She knew now that it was because they considered her a fine woman. But, for Selina's part, and again she stabbed the wee remaining morsel of her pudding—if fine character consists in cheerful acceptance of a sordid lot, then she had no patience with it herself. The thing is to repudiate any such lot.Miss McRanney had a paralytic brother, a blacksheep whose by-gone peccadilloes had left the two of them poorer even than they might have been. She lived with this brother in rooms over a drugstore, setting type from nine to five and taking care of him and doing light housekeeping between times. It was a shabby and unrelieved picture. Selina hated it. She hated another thing, too—though this one she would not admit—she hated the thought of herself as a wage-earner when she thought of Miss Emma McRanney as one!The visitor was speaking in the parlor in a good-humored voice."I'm glad of this chance to say howdy," she was saying, "but what I'm here for is to see Selina. No indeed, Mr. Wistar, I don't want you to go, you or Mrs. Wistar, either, and Miss Ann Eliza mustn't go in any event, as I've got my missionary dues in my pocket; I want to pay her. It's only that what I've come to say has to be said to Selina."But Papa and Mamma retreated, the latter calling to Selina for fear she had not followed the conversation. The last vestige of her pudding being gone, this person arose and went into the next room and shook hands with the guest, after which the three of them, Auntie, Miss McRanney and she herself, took chairs."I want to know, Selina, if you'll coach me for an examination. A teacher out at the Institute where I am, is going to quit. I can't do that myself, so the next best thing is to get his place if Ican, as it pays better than my own. I understand the finger-reading, both the Roman and the Braille, working in the type I found myself interested, but the position calls for a grade-school teacher's certificate which I have to pass an examination to get.""Emma!" said Auntie. "And you have the courage? You must have been well along when you went to work and taught yourself how to set type? And to get yourself ready again——""That's right, Miss Ann Eliza, I'm forty last month. But what's forty when you come to think about it? It's ten, fifteen years younger than it used to be. My grandmother died when she was forty-eight, and I always think of her as an old person in a frilly cap.""I'm forty-eight myself. You're quite right about it, for I certainly haven't any disposition yet toward caps. Emma," almost wistfully, "if I had your advantage of those eight years I'd ask you to show me how to fit myself for something. Many's the time I've asked myself if I wasn't capable of something beyond rolling and whipping cambric bands and polishing brasses. I've looked at you more than once in church, and envied you."Auntie! Darling Auntie! Confessing to Miss Emma McRanney that she envied her! It filled Selina with a greater fury of dislike and distaste for this person. She did want work, and had said so, but she didn't want to teach Miss Emma McRanney!This lady was speaking again. "After I'm home in the evening, I get supper for my brother and myself. Try it a while, Miss Ann Eliza, before you quite envy me. So I'll have to ask you to give me an hour in the evenings, Selina, say three times a week."If anything could make the proposition more distasteful it was this."I taught in our orphan asylum after I graduated, until I got my present place, Selina, so I'm not on altogether new ground, though no certificate was required there. It's not quite such a crime against your fellow-man to be blind, so I've discovered, as to be an orphan. Anything, even Emma McRanney with no certificate, was good enough for orphans, whereas I have to be guaranteed in this case. You're unfortunate if you're blind, but the state does look after you, but to be an orphan, leaves you convicted of your own guilt, and not a leg to stand on. If you're ever compelled to choose between these things, Selina, don't be foolish enough to be an orphan. They pay teachers so little to instruct them, even I had to leave. I ought to tell you these examinations I want to take come late in March. That'll give us six weeks. I'm promised the place if I can get the certificate, and I've got some former questions from the examining board thinking we could find out from these where I stand and what there is to do."Selina roused herself. She didn't want to teach Miss McRanney! "I've had so little experience,Miss Emma, I ought to tell you I'm not at all sure I'm competent.""Neither was I," said Miss Emma good-humoredly if unexpectedly. "I graduated through our high school, myself, the second class put through after it was established. And looking back in the light of what I've found out since, I'll say there don't seem to be anything in the way of real, actual, everyday sense that a body ought to have, that I didn't succeed in failing to have—I and most of my class.""Why, Emma," from Auntie, "and you had the leading honor, what is it that it's called, the valedictory?""That's the surest and most damning evidence against me, Miss Ann Eliza; it takes years to live it down," continued Miss Emma. "I thought about you in church Sunday, Selina, wondering if you'd do, and then went and asked Mrs. Williams about you, knowing you'd taught there. She said you did fairly well with your little class, and toward the end of the year seemed to be doing better, but as you told her you were going South to coach in Latin and Algebra, she judged these were your specialties. Well, they're mine, too, where I'm likeliest to fall down, and that decided me."Do our assumptions, then, like our sins, live on to confront us? "But there was no coaching to do when I got there," hurriedly explained Selina. "I never had a pupil!""Well, that don't prevent its being your specialtyeven so. I'm the one to risk it. And I'll have to say what convinced me there's something to you, is that you stood Mrs. Williams and her condescension all those months you were in her house and didn't murder her. I have to swallow a good deal of such patronage anyhow, because I'm poor, or because I work, or both, and I'm guiltless of violence only because I can't hope to commit assault and battery on people's persons and not pay the penalty. But it never would do to tempt me too far with that woman. But to get back to the point, are you going to undertake me?"Try as Selina would, she didn't seem to know how to get out of it. She endeavored to throw some cordiality into her manner. "We'll begin whenever you say, Miss Emma. Have you those questions with you, you spoke about? We might go over them and see what there is to do."Auntie got up to leave them. "Thank you for remembering your missionary dues, Emma. You're an amazing person to me. If I was forty instead of forty-eight," longingly, "I'd certainly follow your example."

It seemed to Selina that at times she failed to get the satisfaction from her mother she could have desired.

"Mamma," she said to this little person the morning after the Harrison tea-party, "I can't be comfortable while I owe that fifty dollars to Cousin Anna Tomlinson."

"I'm glad to hear that," from Auntie in her own room through the open door.

Mrs. Wistar, however, spoke from her place at the window almost peevishly.

"Why must you bring up uncomfortable subjects, Selina? And here it is eleven o'clock in the morning and the house just straightened and I this moment sitting down to my church paper!"

"But Mamma, I've kept hoping you'd say something about it. You haven't and I felt I'd have to ask you."

"I try to spare people, myself," severely. "And just as long as I did not speak you might know it was because there was nothing to say. I must say I think Anna is niggardly to want it back. But one can't help one's blood and she's a Pope. 'Hungryas a Pope nigger,' the saying used to be in slave times, or was it a Groghan nigger? Yes, I believe it was a Groghan."

"'You haven't spoken to Papa about it?'"

"'You haven't spoken to Papa about it?'"

"'You haven't spoken to Papa about it?'"

"You haven't spoken to Papa about it? Then I'm going to, Mamma," Selina spoke with irritation. Her moods were uncertain these days.

She opened the door to her father that evening. It was a raw and shivery day. She helped him off with his coat and followed him back to the stove in the hall where he stood warming his hands at the glowing mica. By some unfortunate chance his glance wandered about, resting on the shabby papering and paint, the old sofa, the carpet worn to a monotone almost guiltless of pattern.

"Pretty hopeless, Selina? Everything past even patching up this time?"

"Papa, why did you take this evening to say it? When I'm here to worry you more? It's hateful to come to you only for one sort of thing. I'm looking about, I'm telling everybody I want almost any sort of teaching, but in the meantime I'm worrying about that money I owe Cousin Anna."

Her father smiled. He was a comfort in his looks, tall, slight and refined. "I returned the loan to Anna the day after you came home."

"Papa!" She forgot her relief in her greater feeling of indignation. The debt was paid and he had not told her! Had not mentioned it to her mother! She resented it, and only the timidity of a life-time where he was concerned kept her from saying so.

He was continuing gazing at the glowing mica rather than at her. "I don't mean the money is not still owing, only that it's always better, or seems so to me, to owe on a business footing and not apersonal one. Especially I've never had a fancy for owing one's relations," dryly.

"Papa?" The tone was different now. He was taking her into his counsels where she ought to be. Indignation had given place to understanding of the situation and sympathy.

"Selina?"

"I'm wondering why I haven't come to you about every sort of thing? It's very satisfactory when I do come."

"Thank you, Selina."

"I'm wondering, seriously wondering, why I haven't come all this time?"

"I'm to regard this as an arraignment?" smiling.

"Arraignment, Papa?"

"Of my American fatherhood? That I've allowed my womenkind to usurp my prerogatives? That it's being borne in on you and me, that somehow we've been kept out of our rights in each other?"

Selina hesitated. Then, "Papa, may I ask you something else?"

"It's because you haven't, we're both complaining."

"It's this," her color came and went a little rapidly, but she stood to her colors; "since you did settle this matter with Cousin Anna, don't you think it was only fair to have told Mamma and me?"

"Is indictment added to arraignment, Selina? Culpable as a husband as well as a father?"

"Papa, I didn't say so." She threw herself on him, this fair-haired daughter, and went to crying with her face and tears on his poor innocent shirt-front, and her arm around his neck. It was sweet to have her there, and so new and rare a thing for him to see anything but the veriest surface of her nature, that he was willing to take the toll of her tears from her to receive the rest.

Selina was a creature of many moods these days. She said she wanted work and when it came she acted as badly as possible about it.

This same evening as she and her three elders were finishing dinner, the doorbell rang. Miss Emma McRanney who went to the same church as the Wistars and who set type at the State Institute for the Blind, followed Aunt Viney into the front parlor. Auntie and Papa who were through their meal, went in at once to speak to her, and Mamma, waiting only to finish her bit of pudding, followed.

Selina poured more cream on her own bit of pudding, and dallied. In her present mood, though what that mood was she hardly could have said herself, other than it savored of a captious disposition to be short with everybody and everything, she felt the one thing she couldn't stand was Miss McRanney. It wasn't that she disliked this person herself so much as she disliked the thing that characterized her.

"It's her air of having accepted," Selina told herpudding crossly, with a vicious stab with her spoon into it, "of having accepted and stayed decently cheerful at that!"

Accepted! Given in and taken your allotment, however meager, and settled down to it! It's a thing youth cannot conceive of, cannot forgive. For Selina's part, passionately communing with her pudding, she never would accept. Nothing ever, ever, should make her consent to feel poor or to give in to shabbiness. She might be and was amid both these conditions, but nothing but her own will and submission could make her of them. It was feeling this way about them, loathing them, repudiating them, refusing to admit them, that made them possible.

Her elders as they went in the parlor had shaken hands with the visitor, a thick-set person with large features, whose dress, cloak, and hat, Mamma would have described as "plain but perfectly decent and genteel."

Time was when Selina thought this kindly and cordial attitude of her family toward Miss McRanney came from pity of her because she worked. She knew now that it was because they considered her a fine woman. But, for Selina's part, and again she stabbed the wee remaining morsel of her pudding—if fine character consists in cheerful acceptance of a sordid lot, then she had no patience with it herself. The thing is to repudiate any such lot.

Miss McRanney had a paralytic brother, a blacksheep whose by-gone peccadilloes had left the two of them poorer even than they might have been. She lived with this brother in rooms over a drugstore, setting type from nine to five and taking care of him and doing light housekeeping between times. It was a shabby and unrelieved picture. Selina hated it. She hated another thing, too—though this one she would not admit—she hated the thought of herself as a wage-earner when she thought of Miss Emma McRanney as one!

The visitor was speaking in the parlor in a good-humored voice.

"I'm glad of this chance to say howdy," she was saying, "but what I'm here for is to see Selina. No indeed, Mr. Wistar, I don't want you to go, you or Mrs. Wistar, either, and Miss Ann Eliza mustn't go in any event, as I've got my missionary dues in my pocket; I want to pay her. It's only that what I've come to say has to be said to Selina."

But Papa and Mamma retreated, the latter calling to Selina for fear she had not followed the conversation. The last vestige of her pudding being gone, this person arose and went into the next room and shook hands with the guest, after which the three of them, Auntie, Miss McRanney and she herself, took chairs.

"I want to know, Selina, if you'll coach me for an examination. A teacher out at the Institute where I am, is going to quit. I can't do that myself, so the next best thing is to get his place if Ican, as it pays better than my own. I understand the finger-reading, both the Roman and the Braille, working in the type I found myself interested, but the position calls for a grade-school teacher's certificate which I have to pass an examination to get."

"Emma!" said Auntie. "And you have the courage? You must have been well along when you went to work and taught yourself how to set type? And to get yourself ready again——"

"That's right, Miss Ann Eliza, I'm forty last month. But what's forty when you come to think about it? It's ten, fifteen years younger than it used to be. My grandmother died when she was forty-eight, and I always think of her as an old person in a frilly cap."

"I'm forty-eight myself. You're quite right about it, for I certainly haven't any disposition yet toward caps. Emma," almost wistfully, "if I had your advantage of those eight years I'd ask you to show me how to fit myself for something. Many's the time I've asked myself if I wasn't capable of something beyond rolling and whipping cambric bands and polishing brasses. I've looked at you more than once in church, and envied you."

Auntie! Darling Auntie! Confessing to Miss Emma McRanney that she envied her! It filled Selina with a greater fury of dislike and distaste for this person. She did want work, and had said so, but she didn't want to teach Miss Emma McRanney!

This lady was speaking again. "After I'm home in the evening, I get supper for my brother and myself. Try it a while, Miss Ann Eliza, before you quite envy me. So I'll have to ask you to give me an hour in the evenings, Selina, say three times a week."

If anything could make the proposition more distasteful it was this.

"I taught in our orphan asylum after I graduated, until I got my present place, Selina, so I'm not on altogether new ground, though no certificate was required there. It's not quite such a crime against your fellow-man to be blind, so I've discovered, as to be an orphan. Anything, even Emma McRanney with no certificate, was good enough for orphans, whereas I have to be guaranteed in this case. You're unfortunate if you're blind, but the state does look after you, but to be an orphan, leaves you convicted of your own guilt, and not a leg to stand on. If you're ever compelled to choose between these things, Selina, don't be foolish enough to be an orphan. They pay teachers so little to instruct them, even I had to leave. I ought to tell you these examinations I want to take come late in March. That'll give us six weeks. I'm promised the place if I can get the certificate, and I've got some former questions from the examining board thinking we could find out from these where I stand and what there is to do."

Selina roused herself. She didn't want to teach Miss McRanney! "I've had so little experience,Miss Emma, I ought to tell you I'm not at all sure I'm competent."

"Neither was I," said Miss Emma good-humoredly if unexpectedly. "I graduated through our high school, myself, the second class put through after it was established. And looking back in the light of what I've found out since, I'll say there don't seem to be anything in the way of real, actual, everyday sense that a body ought to have, that I didn't succeed in failing to have—I and most of my class."

"Why, Emma," from Auntie, "and you had the leading honor, what is it that it's called, the valedictory?"

"That's the surest and most damning evidence against me, Miss Ann Eliza; it takes years to live it down," continued Miss Emma. "I thought about you in church Sunday, Selina, wondering if you'd do, and then went and asked Mrs. Williams about you, knowing you'd taught there. She said you did fairly well with your little class, and toward the end of the year seemed to be doing better, but as you told her you were going South to coach in Latin and Algebra, she judged these were your specialties. Well, they're mine, too, where I'm likeliest to fall down, and that decided me."

Do our assumptions, then, like our sins, live on to confront us? "But there was no coaching to do when I got there," hurriedly explained Selina. "I never had a pupil!"

"Well, that don't prevent its being your specialtyeven so. I'm the one to risk it. And I'll have to say what convinced me there's something to you, is that you stood Mrs. Williams and her condescension all those months you were in her house and didn't murder her. I have to swallow a good deal of such patronage anyhow, because I'm poor, or because I work, or both, and I'm guiltless of violence only because I can't hope to commit assault and battery on people's persons and not pay the penalty. But it never would do to tempt me too far with that woman. But to get back to the point, are you going to undertake me?"

Try as Selina would, she didn't seem to know how to get out of it. She endeavored to throw some cordiality into her manner. "We'll begin whenever you say, Miss Emma. Have you those questions with you, you spoke about? We might go over them and see what there is to do."

Auntie got up to leave them. "Thank you for remembering your missionary dues, Emma. You're an amazing person to me. If I was forty instead of forty-eight," longingly, "I'd certainly follow your example."

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHTAbout half-past eight Culpepper Buxton arrived at the Wistar house. He was good-humored and unruffled. Selina had turned him down the evening before for the first time in history. The pretty and lovable little minx! She was waking then! Juliette, who was clever with her dark eyes and her flashing smiles, or Amanthus herself, could not have done it any better.As he came up, Selina was at the door saying good night to a stout, rather pleasant-voiced person.He waited until this guest had gone, then went in with Selina."Who's your friend?" inquired Culpepper.Selina diagramed the lady and her business briefly, so briefly that Culpepper might have taken it as cue to drop a dangerous subject. "She has to take an examination and wants me to coach her for it."But Culpepper, in his unruffled good humor, failed to know his cue. "That's good. Just the sort of thing you've been wanting. No?"For Selina, having started to push chairs and footstools back into place, here ceased abruptly and swung about on him furiously. "It's not good. Iloathe everything she stands for. I hate shabbiness. I hate poverty, I don't like to be near either of them, they always seem to be reaching out fingers to drag me down to them. You're altogether and entirely wrong. I don't want to teach Miss McRanney."Hoity-toity! As Culpepper's stepmother used to say to his early and childish bursts of temper. Shewasa little minx all at once! He didn't know that he'd put up with it."You'd better not teach her then, you won't do it halfway right," from Culpepper coolly."You're very priggish," from Selina, in return, and hot as he was cool. "You speak, I suppose, from the heights of masculine superiority?""I'll run on up to ole Miss' door, if I may," from Culpepper. "I've a message for her in my home letter to-day from my mother, and I want to get back to the rooms. We've a crowd on for to-night by nine."She heard him run up the stairs, tap at her aunt's door, and at the answer, enter. Whereupon she herself sped up the steps, too, and past that door and in at her own, which she closed softly, if passionately. When he came down again, to call a cool good-bye as he went out, he should not find her waiting there!"Selina ... fell on her knees."Within her room this child, Selina, young and crude, her tragedies pitiful in their tininess but tragedies to her none the less who did not know them for tiny, fell on her knees beside her big and tolerated poster-bed, and sobbed into her marseilles spread, and passionately arraigned that which she called God. First, because Culpepper had hurt her feelings and next, though she would not have admitted either, because she did not want to teach Miss Emma McRanney. For while Selina said her formulas in prayer, night and morning, dutifully and onher knees, it was only in moments of hurt and passionate outcry against the hurt that she really approached her God. Though she, dear child, did not know this.Self-examined, even here now upon her knees, she would have decided and honestly so far as she was concerned in the opinion, that she was a religious person. She had been brought up so to be. On her little book-rack on her table, stood her Bible, her Thomas à Kempis, "The Lives of the Saints" (in miniature, a rather daring acquisition which pleased her, savoring of Rome as it did), "The History of the Church and Its Liturgy," and a few other volumes. She even felt that she was rather better informed in religious matters than her friends, and in some ways, more catholic in her interests. She talked predestination and free-will with Maud; St. Francis of Assisi, St. Paul and conversion with Juliette, who longed for a light from Heaven; conscience and duty with Adele, and even life after death; and she and Maud found themselves in conversation on virgin birth with a converted Armenian lady missionary staying at Maud's house, though with a startled consciousness, in the light of the lady's contribution to the subject, that they evidently did not know either what they or she were talking about.Selina, honest child, looked on matters such as these as being religious. It did not dawn on her that it was only when the world went amiss for her thatshe prayed. Only at times, such as now, after the door was pushed to and the bolt passionately shot, and she fell on her knees to that Something brooding somehow and somewhere above its created creatures, only when she held out her arms to it and cried to it through sobs, and even though that cry be but appeal against her own discomfiture, that she prayed, that she ever had prayed, ever had sought a God through need."I want admiration for what I am, I want applause for what I do, I want my part to be favored and enviable according to my choosing of what is favored and enviable," may be said to be the unformulated gist of this unwitting child's poor little human prayer.As indeed, for the pitiful part of that, it is the prayer of millions of us, every day. But prayer for all its paucity, prayer for all that.And meanwhile in Auntie's room, a room of ponderous mahogany akin to Selina's, with a great deal of red and an equally cheerful predominance of green in carpet, curtains and lambrequin, she and Culpepper were having a real heart-to-heart confidence."I didn't suppose she'd tiff with me. What's got in her all at once, ole Miss?"Ole Miss patted the hand that was holding hers. They were mighty fond of each other, these two, to use their own vernacular about it. But she didn'treply. Yet there was that in her manner which implied she could have done so if she would."What's the use us two beating about the bush with each other, ole sport?" from Culpepper, who meant she should. "You know just as well as my mother, or Cousin Robert, and I've made a clean breast to 'em both, what's the state I'm in as to Selina. The trouble's the other way round. When she was about ten or eleven, up there at home in the summers, I used to catch and kiss her to tease her. I don't believe she'd read a bit more in it if I caught her and did it now."Ole Miss spoke. "There never can be but one first for a girl, Culpepper. There never was but the one, first and last, for me. I'd like you to know that it was your father. The truth with Selina is, she's waking. She's cross because she's coming to be conscious. It's a trying time and we're human, and we've all got tempers. I think it will break my old worthless heart if it's Emmeline's Tuttle Jones, and not John Buxton's Culpepper who's responsible for it."A pause. Then a breath long and deep and gloriously big and gloriously confident from Culpepper."And that's it! You've put heart in me altogether, ole sport! You've pointed me the road and shown me the gait. Gimme one before I go, like a real lady!"Ole Miss roused to her own defence. "Stop rightnow, Culpepper. No, I don't want to be mauled and teased, stop smacking that kiss into my ear—well, put it on my cheek if that's what you meant to do. No, I won't discuss the subject further either now or any other time. I haven't another word to say concerning it, and if that's what you're waiting for, you may as well go long."

About half-past eight Culpepper Buxton arrived at the Wistar house. He was good-humored and unruffled. Selina had turned him down the evening before for the first time in history. The pretty and lovable little minx! She was waking then! Juliette, who was clever with her dark eyes and her flashing smiles, or Amanthus herself, could not have done it any better.

As he came up, Selina was at the door saying good night to a stout, rather pleasant-voiced person.

He waited until this guest had gone, then went in with Selina.

"Who's your friend?" inquired Culpepper.

Selina diagramed the lady and her business briefly, so briefly that Culpepper might have taken it as cue to drop a dangerous subject. "She has to take an examination and wants me to coach her for it."

But Culpepper, in his unruffled good humor, failed to know his cue. "That's good. Just the sort of thing you've been wanting. No?"

For Selina, having started to push chairs and footstools back into place, here ceased abruptly and swung about on him furiously. "It's not good. Iloathe everything she stands for. I hate shabbiness. I hate poverty, I don't like to be near either of them, they always seem to be reaching out fingers to drag me down to them. You're altogether and entirely wrong. I don't want to teach Miss McRanney."

Hoity-toity! As Culpepper's stepmother used to say to his early and childish bursts of temper. Shewasa little minx all at once! He didn't know that he'd put up with it.

"You'd better not teach her then, you won't do it halfway right," from Culpepper coolly.

"You're very priggish," from Selina, in return, and hot as he was cool. "You speak, I suppose, from the heights of masculine superiority?"

"I'll run on up to ole Miss' door, if I may," from Culpepper. "I've a message for her in my home letter to-day from my mother, and I want to get back to the rooms. We've a crowd on for to-night by nine."

She heard him run up the stairs, tap at her aunt's door, and at the answer, enter. Whereupon she herself sped up the steps, too, and past that door and in at her own, which she closed softly, if passionately. When he came down again, to call a cool good-bye as he went out, he should not find her waiting there!

"Selina ... fell on her knees."

"Selina ... fell on her knees."

"Selina ... fell on her knees."

Within her room this child, Selina, young and crude, her tragedies pitiful in their tininess but tragedies to her none the less who did not know them for tiny, fell on her knees beside her big and tolerated poster-bed, and sobbed into her marseilles spread, and passionately arraigned that which she called God. First, because Culpepper had hurt her feelings and next, though she would not have admitted either, because she did not want to teach Miss Emma McRanney. For while Selina said her formulas in prayer, night and morning, dutifully and onher knees, it was only in moments of hurt and passionate outcry against the hurt that she really approached her God. Though she, dear child, did not know this.

Self-examined, even here now upon her knees, she would have decided and honestly so far as she was concerned in the opinion, that she was a religious person. She had been brought up so to be. On her little book-rack on her table, stood her Bible, her Thomas à Kempis, "The Lives of the Saints" (in miniature, a rather daring acquisition which pleased her, savoring of Rome as it did), "The History of the Church and Its Liturgy," and a few other volumes. She even felt that she was rather better informed in religious matters than her friends, and in some ways, more catholic in her interests. She talked predestination and free-will with Maud; St. Francis of Assisi, St. Paul and conversion with Juliette, who longed for a light from Heaven; conscience and duty with Adele, and even life after death; and she and Maud found themselves in conversation on virgin birth with a converted Armenian lady missionary staying at Maud's house, though with a startled consciousness, in the light of the lady's contribution to the subject, that they evidently did not know either what they or she were talking about.

Selina, honest child, looked on matters such as these as being religious. It did not dawn on her that it was only when the world went amiss for her thatshe prayed. Only at times, such as now, after the door was pushed to and the bolt passionately shot, and she fell on her knees to that Something brooding somehow and somewhere above its created creatures, only when she held out her arms to it and cried to it through sobs, and even though that cry be but appeal against her own discomfiture, that she prayed, that she ever had prayed, ever had sought a God through need.

"I want admiration for what I am, I want applause for what I do, I want my part to be favored and enviable according to my choosing of what is favored and enviable," may be said to be the unformulated gist of this unwitting child's poor little human prayer.

As indeed, for the pitiful part of that, it is the prayer of millions of us, every day. But prayer for all its paucity, prayer for all that.

And meanwhile in Auntie's room, a room of ponderous mahogany akin to Selina's, with a great deal of red and an equally cheerful predominance of green in carpet, curtains and lambrequin, she and Culpepper were having a real heart-to-heart confidence.

"I didn't suppose she'd tiff with me. What's got in her all at once, ole Miss?"

Ole Miss patted the hand that was holding hers. They were mighty fond of each other, these two, to use their own vernacular about it. But she didn'treply. Yet there was that in her manner which implied she could have done so if she would.

"What's the use us two beating about the bush with each other, ole sport?" from Culpepper, who meant she should. "You know just as well as my mother, or Cousin Robert, and I've made a clean breast to 'em both, what's the state I'm in as to Selina. The trouble's the other way round. When she was about ten or eleven, up there at home in the summers, I used to catch and kiss her to tease her. I don't believe she'd read a bit more in it if I caught her and did it now."

Ole Miss spoke. "There never can be but one first for a girl, Culpepper. There never was but the one, first and last, for me. I'd like you to know that it was your father. The truth with Selina is, she's waking. She's cross because she's coming to be conscious. It's a trying time and we're human, and we've all got tempers. I think it will break my old worthless heart if it's Emmeline's Tuttle Jones, and not John Buxton's Culpepper who's responsible for it."

A pause. Then a breath long and deep and gloriously big and gloriously confident from Culpepper.

"And that's it! You've put heart in me altogether, ole sport! You've pointed me the road and shown me the gait. Gimme one before I go, like a real lady!"

Ole Miss roused to her own defence. "Stop rightnow, Culpepper. No, I don't want to be mauled and teased, stop smacking that kiss into my ear—well, put it on my cheek if that's what you meant to do. No, I won't discuss the subject further either now or any other time. I haven't another word to say concerning it, and if that's what you're waiting for, you may as well go long."

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINEMiss McRanney proved worth while enough, and rather good fun if Selina would have allowed this. She arrived on the appointed evening with a satchel of schoolbooks and an avowed poor opinion of examinations as tests of teachers. She followed Selina to the dining-room where they were to work, and where Auntie was lingering to say howdy, and as she emptied the satchel of the textbooks, emptied her mind of this opinion."Drat such a test, it's all wrong. What life asks teachers to put into their pupils, or get out of them, as you prefer it, is character. To take a wild flight into the fanciful, and I'm not strong there, one might call it the universal language recognized everywhere and anywhere, whether in a Choctaw or a Charlemagne. Right now I couldn't pass the examination that gave me that valedictory at eighteen, no, Miss Ann Eliza, and don't look so distressed about it, not if Mazeppa's ride in duplicate for me was the consequence of failing. Whereas any character I've got of my own to help a child to his, I've found since then.""Any characteryou'vegot, Emma?" from Auntie indignantly. "And starting out again at forty?" The wild daring of this act, as she saw it, seemed to fascinate Auntie."Well," said Miss Emma, "he must needs go whom the devil doth drive, my devil having been necessity. I've never had a man to rest back on, or I probably would have done so. However we're keeping Selina waiting. The digressions of middle age are mighty tiresome, aren't they, Selina? Well, don't forget they are when you get there. Since I've got to pass this examination I suppose we'd better get to work, especially in your specialties, algebra and Latin, that are my pitfalls."The next lesson came on a Monday evening and Miss Emma had been at church the day before. "There's many a thing to amuse a body, Selina," she said good-humoredly as she took off her wraps. "I earn my way and occupy my small place in the army of producers. The rest of the women in that congregation of ours live sweetly and unconcernedly upon the general store that other people produce. And yet, if their unfailing and admirably ordered patronage of me could overwhelm, I'd long ago have been washed away in the flood."Auntie's voice expostulating, came in from the next room where she was reading the paper laid down by Papa. "Why Emma——""Here, keep out of this, Miss Aunt Eliza. I'm talking to the next generation. I want to point outa few things to it that may make the way easier for its journeying. Selina, if you're going to teach, come on along with me and take this examination and get your certificate. You've got something to show then, something to go on so long as the public demands certificates."Selina had been thinking about this herself, and wishing she'd done it sooner. If the suggestion had come from anyone but Miss Emma she'd have taken it. As it was——"What pitiful fools we are!" from Miss Emma at the next lesson. "Far from respecting my job when I first started out teaching, and getting everything out of it there was in it for me and everybody else, I lost my first years at it being ashamed of it. Nowadays I set type well, the job seeks me, and I don't mind saying so. I'll have to feel this same capacity in myself for the new job if I get it. It's a good thing to feel, capacity in yourself for your work, and respect for yourself in it."The doorbell rang. Of course! The wonder to Selina had been that it hadn't rung before on these lesson evenings. The fear that it would ring had been one among many reasons she was so averse to the undertaking. Papa, however, had his instructions in this event to close the folding doors and leave them to their work in the dining-room undisturbed. But Papa now forgot the folding doors. He opened the front door and after a moment's delayin the hall for the removal of hat and coat, ushered the caller in.It was Mr. Tuttle Jones. Again, of course! Who could Selina less have wanted it to be?And here at the dining-table, all too visible to the front room, sat Miss Emma McRanney, plain, shabby and busy. Her textbooks, open over the table, were shabby as herself, and unlovely. Her hands showed manual work. Selina was ashamed of Miss McRanney, ashamed of teaching Miss McRanney, ashamed of being found thus teaching her by Tuttle Jones. Alas for you, Mamma, once again! You with your strained anxiety, your every effort bent toward that front in life which must be kept up! Your one ewe lamb would have been the happier for the truer values held by Auntie!Mr. Jones came smilingly back through the parlor to the dining-room, his hand outstretched to—not Selina at all, but Miss McRanney! Indeed, and indeed, you never can tell!"Well, Tuttle, and how's your mother?" from this lady. "Tuttle's mother and I are old friends from grade and high school days, Selina. Admirable and democratic meeting-ground for the classes with the masses," dryly. "How'd you say your mother is, Tuttle?""Quite well. Miss Emma, and grumbling only yesterday that you'd not been around for a month to put her in a better humor with the world. What's wrong with my telling her you'll come for dinnerSunday?" He was shaking hands with Selina now. "But I'm in the way here?"Selina was overswept with a passion of loathing for herself, and a need for abasement and self-punishment."Miss Emma came to me to get some coaching and's finding I'm a very poor teacher. Oh, but she is, and she's too considerate and kind to say so. For fifteen minutes now she's been showing me how to do a page in algebra I, the teacher, couldn't showher.""Sit down, Tuttle," from Miss Emma, cheerfully, "and see what's wrong. I'll be jiggered if I've got it either. Figures used to be your strong suit when you were a boy."Selina meant for herself to go the whole way now. Being ashamed, she was very much ashamed. "I've been following every clue and chance for teaching I could hear of since I came home in November," she told Tuttle, "and nobody wanted me. I never quite understood until Miss Emma pointed out that I wasn't qualified as a teacher. I'm going to try for a certificate along with her in March."Miss Emma nodded approval. "Now she's talking, Tuttle. Get busy and applaud her. This child's been going through that circle of purgatory Dante forgot to set down, finding herself a woman that's got to make her way, and taking her cue from the rest of the woman world, ashamed of the fact."Selina dropped her head right down on the page of the open textbook before her on the table. The sob was coming and she could not stop it. Bye and bye when the pretty head with its masses of flaxen hair lifted, they all laughed together. For Miss Emma McRanney was chafing one of Selina's hands and Tuttle Jones the other one.*******Culpepper's visits these days were to Auntie. He got in the way of running in and up to her room for a brief while in the evenings, and out again."She won't have a thing to do with me, ole Miss, and there's nothing for it but for me to take my medicine! 'Oh, yes, she's quite well, thank you!' when I do stop and speak to her 'and very busy.' She's not only getting Miss McRanney ready as far as she knows how, but trying to get herself ready for these examinations in March. That's about what she says to me, coolly and loftily, and goes on about her own affairs.""I don't like it at all," from Auntie, stoutly, "And here's Emmeline's Tuttle around every lesson night looking like a model out of a store window, helping them with their algebra, both Emma and Selina." Auntie was innocent of guile. "It's his specialty, too, it seems," she added lamentingly."Why don't he stay where he's put?" grumbled Culpepper. "He's a dude, a dandy dude, you can tell it by his fashion, can't you, ole Miss? What's he got to do with our nice, humble, worthy ways,and with our Selina and her problems? I ask you that!"There came a morning late in March when Miss Emma McRanney at nine-thirty, in her 'plain but perfectly genteel' best wool dress, stood waiting at the drugstore over which she lived, instead of being at the Institute mounted on a stool, and wearing a blue calico apron with sleeves, setting type.Nor had she waited above two minutes when a rather breathless young person came hurrying in. A moderately tall, slim, pretty girl, with a good deal of flaxen hair, in obviously her soberest wool dress, and quietest head-gear."On time, am I, Miss Emma? After lying awake half the night saying over lists of dates and rules and the rest of it, I overslept this morning and Mamma wouldn't wake me.""Plenty of time, Selina. At leastyoudon't have to worry about your particular specialties, algebra and Latin——""Now, Miss Emma, you said you wouldn't——""Whereas between you and me, Selina, I'm weakest if anything in the one that's Tuttle's specialty too——"They boarded the street car, the stout, plain lady in her best wool dress, and the slim, pretty girl in her plainest dress. When they alighted before a tall, broad, ugly brick building that bore above its central doorway the words, "Board of Education,"a clock in a neighboring steeple said five minutes of ten."And the examinations are at ten. We're just in good time, Selina," said Miss Emma McRanney."They boarded the street car."One week from that day Selina Wistar arriving at her own gate at dusk from one direction, she had walked home from the office of the Board of Education in truth, to avoid getting there any sooner than she had to, met Miss Emma McRanney arriving from the other direction.If one did not fear conveying the impression that Selina was fast lapsing into an eighteenth century heroine so far as weeping goes, it could be mentioned there was that about her face, despite the dusk, which showed she had been crying. Just a preparatory cry, perhaps, of a scalding tear or two, that could be permitted as she hurried along in the dusk, and would not be noticed—an abeyant tear as it were, pending the unrestrained flow that would come when seclusion and her own room were reached."Well, Selina," from Miss Emma, cheerfully, "it's all over for me. I've just been by the school office to get my report. I'm a type-setter who knows her job and is doomed to stick at it. What—what? Don't tell me you've gone and failed, too?""Oh, Miss Emma——""Now, Selina, don't tell me a further thing, don't tell me you fell down in your own specialties——""Miss Emma——""Well, well, now that's exactly what I was afraid I'd do and that I did, but I'd said from the start they weremyweaknesses."Selina was crying bitterly."My child," from Miss Emma, "it isn't worthit. You've gained enough in other things to make up for the lost certificate. And as for me, I've something that will comfort you, that I've known for two days. It made my middle-aged blood so hot I didn't know if I'd take the place if I could get it. It's almost as despicable a thing to be a woman, as I discovered it was to be an orphan, Selina, and very seldom more remunerative to the individual. At the last meeting of the board out at the Institute, they agreed, to a man, in giving this place to a woman, that it wasn't worth as much, and reduced the salary to exactly what I'm getting now. They did the same thing when they gave me my present job as type-setter. No, I won't come in, thank you. I've got to get on home. One thing I'm as adamant about. I can't feel those blind babies would have missed that Latin and algebra in me, and I've been hungry to teach 'em ever since I've been there. Good night! I'm coming around some evening soon, with Tuttle. We've a date, so it's not good-bye."Whereupon Selina fled into the house and up to her room, and although, this time, it was an absolutelyfreshmarseilles spread, put on cleanthatmorning, flung herself upon it and cried and cried and cried bitterly.Mamma came in, worried and indignant. "Why did Emma McRanney expect you to know more than she did and instructher? It was a good deal for her to ask anyway. And I'm sure you've just said you failed, too. Why should all your worry be for her?"Auntie came in. "I'm sure Emma knows you did your best, Selina. And think what you've gained? A real friend in a real woman like Emma?"That night alone in her room, Selina took her pen and her paper. The note she wrote was to Culpepper whom she had ignored for six long weeks, and it said:Dear Culpepper:I want to tell you that I've been hateful and I am sorry. I did try, however, with my pupil after the first, and try my best. Evidently my best is an inadequate thing, and unflattering to me, for she has failed. And, deciding to try for a certificate, myself, I have failed, too.Selina.

Miss McRanney proved worth while enough, and rather good fun if Selina would have allowed this. She arrived on the appointed evening with a satchel of schoolbooks and an avowed poor opinion of examinations as tests of teachers. She followed Selina to the dining-room where they were to work, and where Auntie was lingering to say howdy, and as she emptied the satchel of the textbooks, emptied her mind of this opinion.

"Drat such a test, it's all wrong. What life asks teachers to put into their pupils, or get out of them, as you prefer it, is character. To take a wild flight into the fanciful, and I'm not strong there, one might call it the universal language recognized everywhere and anywhere, whether in a Choctaw or a Charlemagne. Right now I couldn't pass the examination that gave me that valedictory at eighteen, no, Miss Ann Eliza, and don't look so distressed about it, not if Mazeppa's ride in duplicate for me was the consequence of failing. Whereas any character I've got of my own to help a child to his, I've found since then."

"Any characteryou'vegot, Emma?" from Auntie indignantly. "And starting out again at forty?" The wild daring of this act, as she saw it, seemed to fascinate Auntie.

"Well," said Miss Emma, "he must needs go whom the devil doth drive, my devil having been necessity. I've never had a man to rest back on, or I probably would have done so. However we're keeping Selina waiting. The digressions of middle age are mighty tiresome, aren't they, Selina? Well, don't forget they are when you get there. Since I've got to pass this examination I suppose we'd better get to work, especially in your specialties, algebra and Latin, that are my pitfalls."

The next lesson came on a Monday evening and Miss Emma had been at church the day before. "There's many a thing to amuse a body, Selina," she said good-humoredly as she took off her wraps. "I earn my way and occupy my small place in the army of producers. The rest of the women in that congregation of ours live sweetly and unconcernedly upon the general store that other people produce. And yet, if their unfailing and admirably ordered patronage of me could overwhelm, I'd long ago have been washed away in the flood."

Auntie's voice expostulating, came in from the next room where she was reading the paper laid down by Papa. "Why Emma——"

"Here, keep out of this, Miss Aunt Eliza. I'm talking to the next generation. I want to point outa few things to it that may make the way easier for its journeying. Selina, if you're going to teach, come on along with me and take this examination and get your certificate. You've got something to show then, something to go on so long as the public demands certificates."

Selina had been thinking about this herself, and wishing she'd done it sooner. If the suggestion had come from anyone but Miss Emma she'd have taken it. As it was——

"What pitiful fools we are!" from Miss Emma at the next lesson. "Far from respecting my job when I first started out teaching, and getting everything out of it there was in it for me and everybody else, I lost my first years at it being ashamed of it. Nowadays I set type well, the job seeks me, and I don't mind saying so. I'll have to feel this same capacity in myself for the new job if I get it. It's a good thing to feel, capacity in yourself for your work, and respect for yourself in it."

The doorbell rang. Of course! The wonder to Selina had been that it hadn't rung before on these lesson evenings. The fear that it would ring had been one among many reasons she was so averse to the undertaking. Papa, however, had his instructions in this event to close the folding doors and leave them to their work in the dining-room undisturbed. But Papa now forgot the folding doors. He opened the front door and after a moment's delayin the hall for the removal of hat and coat, ushered the caller in.

It was Mr. Tuttle Jones. Again, of course! Who could Selina less have wanted it to be?

And here at the dining-table, all too visible to the front room, sat Miss Emma McRanney, plain, shabby and busy. Her textbooks, open over the table, were shabby as herself, and unlovely. Her hands showed manual work. Selina was ashamed of Miss McRanney, ashamed of teaching Miss McRanney, ashamed of being found thus teaching her by Tuttle Jones. Alas for you, Mamma, once again! You with your strained anxiety, your every effort bent toward that front in life which must be kept up! Your one ewe lamb would have been the happier for the truer values held by Auntie!

Mr. Jones came smilingly back through the parlor to the dining-room, his hand outstretched to—not Selina at all, but Miss McRanney! Indeed, and indeed, you never can tell!

"Well, Tuttle, and how's your mother?" from this lady. "Tuttle's mother and I are old friends from grade and high school days, Selina. Admirable and democratic meeting-ground for the classes with the masses," dryly. "How'd you say your mother is, Tuttle?"

"Quite well. Miss Emma, and grumbling only yesterday that you'd not been around for a month to put her in a better humor with the world. What's wrong with my telling her you'll come for dinnerSunday?" He was shaking hands with Selina now. "But I'm in the way here?"

Selina was overswept with a passion of loathing for herself, and a need for abasement and self-punishment.

"Miss Emma came to me to get some coaching and's finding I'm a very poor teacher. Oh, but she is, and she's too considerate and kind to say so. For fifteen minutes now she's been showing me how to do a page in algebra I, the teacher, couldn't showher."

"Sit down, Tuttle," from Miss Emma, cheerfully, "and see what's wrong. I'll be jiggered if I've got it either. Figures used to be your strong suit when you were a boy."

Selina meant for herself to go the whole way now. Being ashamed, she was very much ashamed. "I've been following every clue and chance for teaching I could hear of since I came home in November," she told Tuttle, "and nobody wanted me. I never quite understood until Miss Emma pointed out that I wasn't qualified as a teacher. I'm going to try for a certificate along with her in March."

Miss Emma nodded approval. "Now she's talking, Tuttle. Get busy and applaud her. This child's been going through that circle of purgatory Dante forgot to set down, finding herself a woman that's got to make her way, and taking her cue from the rest of the woman world, ashamed of the fact."

Selina dropped her head right down on the page of the open textbook before her on the table. The sob was coming and she could not stop it. Bye and bye when the pretty head with its masses of flaxen hair lifted, they all laughed together. For Miss Emma McRanney was chafing one of Selina's hands and Tuttle Jones the other one.

Culpepper's visits these days were to Auntie. He got in the way of running in and up to her room for a brief while in the evenings, and out again.

"She won't have a thing to do with me, ole Miss, and there's nothing for it but for me to take my medicine! 'Oh, yes, she's quite well, thank you!' when I do stop and speak to her 'and very busy.' She's not only getting Miss McRanney ready as far as she knows how, but trying to get herself ready for these examinations in March. That's about what she says to me, coolly and loftily, and goes on about her own affairs."

"I don't like it at all," from Auntie, stoutly, "And here's Emmeline's Tuttle around every lesson night looking like a model out of a store window, helping them with their algebra, both Emma and Selina." Auntie was innocent of guile. "It's his specialty, too, it seems," she added lamentingly.

"Why don't he stay where he's put?" grumbled Culpepper. "He's a dude, a dandy dude, you can tell it by his fashion, can't you, ole Miss? What's he got to do with our nice, humble, worthy ways,and with our Selina and her problems? I ask you that!"

There came a morning late in March when Miss Emma McRanney at nine-thirty, in her 'plain but perfectly genteel' best wool dress, stood waiting at the drugstore over which she lived, instead of being at the Institute mounted on a stool, and wearing a blue calico apron with sleeves, setting type.

Nor had she waited above two minutes when a rather breathless young person came hurrying in. A moderately tall, slim, pretty girl, with a good deal of flaxen hair, in obviously her soberest wool dress, and quietest head-gear.

"On time, am I, Miss Emma? After lying awake half the night saying over lists of dates and rules and the rest of it, I overslept this morning and Mamma wouldn't wake me."

"Plenty of time, Selina. At leastyoudon't have to worry about your particular specialties, algebra and Latin——"

"Now, Miss Emma, you said you wouldn't——"

"Whereas between you and me, Selina, I'm weakest if anything in the one that's Tuttle's specialty too——"

They boarded the street car, the stout, plain lady in her best wool dress, and the slim, pretty girl in her plainest dress. When they alighted before a tall, broad, ugly brick building that bore above its central doorway the words, "Board of Education,"a clock in a neighboring steeple said five minutes of ten.

"And the examinations are at ten. We're just in good time, Selina," said Miss Emma McRanney.

"They boarded the street car."

"They boarded the street car."

"They boarded the street car."

One week from that day Selina Wistar arriving at her own gate at dusk from one direction, she had walked home from the office of the Board of Education in truth, to avoid getting there any sooner than she had to, met Miss Emma McRanney arriving from the other direction.

If one did not fear conveying the impression that Selina was fast lapsing into an eighteenth century heroine so far as weeping goes, it could be mentioned there was that about her face, despite the dusk, which showed she had been crying. Just a preparatory cry, perhaps, of a scalding tear or two, that could be permitted as she hurried along in the dusk, and would not be noticed—an abeyant tear as it were, pending the unrestrained flow that would come when seclusion and her own room were reached.

"Well, Selina," from Miss Emma, cheerfully, "it's all over for me. I've just been by the school office to get my report. I'm a type-setter who knows her job and is doomed to stick at it. What—what? Don't tell me you've gone and failed, too?"

"Oh, Miss Emma——"

"Now, Selina, don't tell me a further thing, don't tell me you fell down in your own specialties——"

"Miss Emma——"

"Well, well, now that's exactly what I was afraid I'd do and that I did, but I'd said from the start they weremyweaknesses."

Selina was crying bitterly.

"My child," from Miss Emma, "it isn't worthit. You've gained enough in other things to make up for the lost certificate. And as for me, I've something that will comfort you, that I've known for two days. It made my middle-aged blood so hot I didn't know if I'd take the place if I could get it. It's almost as despicable a thing to be a woman, as I discovered it was to be an orphan, Selina, and very seldom more remunerative to the individual. At the last meeting of the board out at the Institute, they agreed, to a man, in giving this place to a woman, that it wasn't worth as much, and reduced the salary to exactly what I'm getting now. They did the same thing when they gave me my present job as type-setter. No, I won't come in, thank you. I've got to get on home. One thing I'm as adamant about. I can't feel those blind babies would have missed that Latin and algebra in me, and I've been hungry to teach 'em ever since I've been there. Good night! I'm coming around some evening soon, with Tuttle. We've a date, so it's not good-bye."

Whereupon Selina fled into the house and up to her room, and although, this time, it was an absolutelyfreshmarseilles spread, put on cleanthatmorning, flung herself upon it and cried and cried and cried bitterly.

Mamma came in, worried and indignant. "Why did Emma McRanney expect you to know more than she did and instructher? It was a good deal for her to ask anyway. And I'm sure you've just said you failed, too. Why should all your worry be for her?"

Auntie came in. "I'm sure Emma knows you did your best, Selina. And think what you've gained? A real friend in a real woman like Emma?"

That night alone in her room, Selina took her pen and her paper. The note she wrote was to Culpepper whom she had ignored for six long weeks, and it said:

Dear Culpepper:

I want to tell you that I've been hateful and I am sorry. I did try, however, with my pupil after the first, and try my best. Evidently my best is an inadequate thing, and unflattering to me, for she has failed. And, deciding to try for a certificate, myself, I have failed, too.

Selina.

CHAPTER THIRTYThe next day, about noon, Culpepper Buxton rang the Wistar doorbell. Aunt Viney opened the door, still adjusting the apron she had tied on as she came."No, not Miss Ann Eliza this time, Aunt Viney. Is Miss Selina here?"Viney, cautious soul, true to her race in this, never was known to commit herself or her white household."I'll go up an' see, Mr. Culpepper.""Tell her it's only for a moment, I've run 'round between classes."Plump brown Viney, not without panting, mounted the stairs and went on back to Selina's room. "Yes'm, I knew you's here, an' I knew you's goin' to see him. But 'tain't my way, an' you know 'tain't, to keep my white folks too ready on tap. Get up f'om that sew-in'-machine, an' turn roun' an' lemme untie thet ap'on you got on. Think you's sewin' foh yo'se'f, don't you? Think it's a petticoat you's goin' to learn to make, don' you? An' firs' time you lay it down an' go off an' leave it, yo' aunt or yo' ma'll take it up foh you an' finish it.""Aunt Viney, you do understand, don't you? And you're the only one here that does! Tell 'em Iwantto do it, I want to make mistakes, and I want to rip 'em out and do it over again. Tell 'em so for me, won't you, Aunt Viney?""Go on down to thet thar youn' man. He ca'ies his haid high, but 'tain't no proof we don't ca'y our'n higher. He'n Miss Maria, his ma, ain't got it all; we're folks our own se'f."But for all this by way of support while she smoothed her hair, Selina went downstairs slowly and constrainedly, conscious in the sense she had been conscious when coming home through the snowstorm with Tuttle Jones.She had known Culpepperwouldcome from the moment she dropped her note to him in the letterbox at the corner last night. And now that he had come she was afraid to go down and meet him. Afraid of what? She couldn't have said; instinct didn't take her that far; it only sent her down the steps hesitatingly and constrainedly.Culpepper the undemonstrative, the coolly unflattering in his attitude always, swung about at the sound of her footsteps and met her at the parlor door.She held out a hand, a soft and pretty hand, its mate going up at the same time to push back some imaginary troublesome lock, a characteristic gesture with her when she was embarrassed.But Culpepper having taken the soft hand proffered, put it over into his left one, and——("Oh, Culpepper, no, I'm not ten now!")—with the frowning and horrific air of a fearsome captor, undoubtedly an ogre captor intent and not to be deterred, went creepingly after its mate and cunningly caught it and brought it down and put it, with even more diablerie of horrific cunning alongside the other upon his big left palm, and—("Culpepper, don't—don't do it, it frightens me still!")—like as when the compassionless keeper of the ogre dungeon into which the victim is thrust, lowers the overhead stone that fits into its place—lowered his big right hand upon these two soft ones——And why not? So he used to catch her and tease her when she was ten, playing the thing through in realistic pantomime until she, throwing herself on him, clung to him perforce! But she was not that little girl! Nor did she feel as a little girl feels any longer! She tried to take her hands away.As well try any other feat in strength which is impossible. And now Culpepper bending his head a little was trying to make her look up, those bold eyes in teasing wait to catch her gaze when she did.Not for worlds could Selina have looked up. Her heart beat wildly, and the blood pulsed in her throat and pounded at her ears. And as Culpepper holding the hands captive, went on bending to surprise her gaze, her lashes swept lower and yet lower upon her cheeks.As a picture of shy maidenliness, Mamma andAuntie, the thing as you fancy it in perfection, behold your handiwork!As a piteous young creature, ignorantly innocent, or innocently ignorant, as you prefer to put it, Mamma and Auntie, the choice in terms is yours, a piteous young creature suddenly overswept with conscious sex that nor you nor any creature has seen fit to explain to her, behold your handiwork! Groping by her young self, filled with terror and horror of self, of life, even of the God who made her as she was, you have left your child to battle as she may with things hideous to her distorted imaginings, rather than know them as attributes natural, decent, and sanctioned of God!Culpepper bent yet lower to find her eyes through the down sweep of those lashes. The warmth from his young, gloriously alive face, so close to hers, the lift and fall of his breathing, reached her consciousness."I had your note, Selina. I wonder, writing me that, if you knew how sweet you were being to me?"And here she got her hands away because in truth his heart was touched by her piteous terror, and he let her go. She found a chair and pointed one to him."You didn't come round any more," she said hurriedly.He looked across at her oddly, those blue eyes of his within their accentuating black lashes, even humorously baffled in their expression. Seeing thatthis speech from her was honest and not arch, it was disarming to a lover by its very nature. And yet allowing that it was the child in her that was honest, was he not to gather that the maid in her was disturbed?And again allowing that it was the child in her that spoke, was it not the maiden in her whose fingers even now were plaiting her dress nervously into folds, her eyes upon these fingers and her color coming and going? Peradventure, Mamma and Auntie, she does you proud, this proper and becoming picture of fluttered and timid maidenhood. You, Mamma, who have been girl, maiden, wife and mother, and have no woman's word for your woman-child! You, Auntie, who discussed the situation frankly enough with Culpepper, the man, but as with a flaming sword of vigilance, have stood guard lest even a breath of the truth reach the ignorance of Selina, the woman.Culpepper watching her as she sat there, lovely and drooping and fair-haired, with her clear young profile partly averted, spoke, and watched anew to note the effect upon her of what he said."I concluded I'd keep away, Selina. I wasn't in the least satisfied with what you were giving me. I'm an outspoken brute. If there's no show that my share's going to be any more, I'll go on keeping away."She shrank as though something had struck her. And in truth something had. Comprehensionof what he meant, so far as knowledge went with her, the lightning flash of it stunned while it revealed.Yet even as the poor child reeled pale with the shock, she rallied to her womanhood as she had had womanhood impressed on her. Courageously rallied! And bravely dissembled! A thing well-nigh synonymous with womanhood as taught to her!Which is to say the child restored herself with a long, deep breath, laughed with a disarming little throw back to the head, swept her hands across the plaits she had so busily gathered there in the breadths of her dress, as though she swept away with these all but an everyday interpretation of Culpepper's word, and spoke frankly, frankness being a most excellent dissembling weapon."It's good to have you back, Culpepper." Her voice, traitorous at first, gained in composure. As said before it was a nice voice, and under conditions, full of cadences. When she was ten, Culpepper used to kiss her in her pretty neck to tickle her, because he liked these cadences when she laughed.Meanwhile with the aid of that dissembling weapon, frankness, she was going on. "Don't stay away ever again. And, Oh, there's so much to ask you, and so much to tell you about!"He looked across at her and her pretty dissembling and laughed. "You little goose! You haven't known me all this while to think you can put me off if I'm really ready?"Her gaze at this was hurried, beseeching, pleading. It seemed to beg for time, respite, mercy!He laughed again, and she hurried on. "As I said, there's so, so much to talk about——""As for instance——?"One saw her hurriedly and desperately searching her mind. "Why, er—of course—Judy!"The tone even implied reproach that he could have thought it anything but Judy."All right, my lady," his name for her of old. "I accept the cue. Judy it's to be, is it? You're sparring for time, I'm to understand? The idea's planted now alongside any foolishness which Tuttle may have been putting there and I'm to let you get used to it awhile? And what's the trouble with Judy, now? Still sore with her father, or something fresh?""We're not supposed to know what she's doing," with a rush of evident relief at his docility, "but we do. She's being coached for her college examinations by some college chap Algy found and arranged with. It's mostly done through Algy, too, with an occasional meeting at the circulating library to outline more work. She'll have to go to Cincinnati for the examinations when they come, in June, which her father won't let her do, so we can't see how any of it's going to help her?""Go on," from Culpepper. "Talk along, amuse yourself. But one of these days when my time comes, my lady——"Selina's breath came piteously in its flutterings. And for all her rallyings to that womanhood, her heart had never ceased its cruel clamberings, and her blood its beatings in her ears and its pulsings in her throat. And on all that vast sea of terror fast returning on her again, terror not of him, that was secondary, but of that within her innocent self she could no longer deny as being there, on all this rising sea of fear and terror, she could see but the one absurd little spar of inconsequence to cling to still—Judy."We feel so sort of dishonorable toward her father and mother, Maud and Adele and I do, Culpepper. But we're not supposed to know she's doing this. And of all people, little Judy!""Certainly, by all means, little Judy."She rose with a pretty dignity which seemed to say she didn't like this tone from him.He rose with her. She had to look up to him when they stood thus, which gives the man the advantage."It's lunch time, Culpepper, though we'll be glad to have you stay?"No doubt he had really meant to be merciful and bide his time when he said he would. Instead, as she finished her little speech with its implied reproof, he laughed and with a mighty sweep of his arms, gathered this suddenly white-cheeked Selina up and kissed her, kissed her roughly, kissed her gloriously, kissed her exultingly. And set her down.She stayed white-cheeked and looked at him. She spoke so quietly it was a bit discomforting. "That was outrageous of you. And cruel. I'll listen to you if ever I make up my mind now I want to listen and not before. Right now I hate you! Yes, I'm sure that's it, hate you! Not so much because you're Culpepper—"and here it became evident she was going to cry, one hates to have to tell it on her so soon again—"but because of something in you that made you think you could!" And the storm of tears now upon her, she turned and fled upstairs.Late that afternoon when Selina went into her mother's room, she found Auntie talking about her paragon and favorite Culpepper. "He's his father right over again, Lavinia. Women like to be coerced and decided for. And anything that once belonged to Culpepper, he'd be fierce to the death caring for.""I don't agree with you about what women like, Auntie," from Selina, to this startled lady who didn't know she was around. "Why should a person like to be coerced because she's a woman? And why should she want to be decided for, for the same reason?"Auntie looked not only startled but alarmed. "Why, Selina!"Selina took a calmer tone. "Maybe we're beginning to feel differently about these things, Auntie," curiously, as if wondering about it herself. "Maybewomen are different from what you and the ones you knew were?""Lavinia," from Auntie, "do you hear your child?"Selina overswept by the fury of swift and sudden rage, stamped her foot and—terrible as it is to have to set it down again—burst into tears."But I'm not a child! That's the trouble! If anybody'd only understand and—help me!"

The next day, about noon, Culpepper Buxton rang the Wistar doorbell. Aunt Viney opened the door, still adjusting the apron she had tied on as she came.

"No, not Miss Ann Eliza this time, Aunt Viney. Is Miss Selina here?"

Viney, cautious soul, true to her race in this, never was known to commit herself or her white household.

"I'll go up an' see, Mr. Culpepper."

"Tell her it's only for a moment, I've run 'round between classes."

Plump brown Viney, not without panting, mounted the stairs and went on back to Selina's room. "Yes'm, I knew you's here, an' I knew you's goin' to see him. But 'tain't my way, an' you know 'tain't, to keep my white folks too ready on tap. Get up f'om that sew-in'-machine, an' turn roun' an' lemme untie thet ap'on you got on. Think you's sewin' foh yo'se'f, don't you? Think it's a petticoat you's goin' to learn to make, don' you? An' firs' time you lay it down an' go off an' leave it, yo' aunt or yo' ma'll take it up foh you an' finish it."

"Aunt Viney, you do understand, don't you? And you're the only one here that does! Tell 'em Iwantto do it, I want to make mistakes, and I want to rip 'em out and do it over again. Tell 'em so for me, won't you, Aunt Viney?"

"Go on down to thet thar youn' man. He ca'ies his haid high, but 'tain't no proof we don't ca'y our'n higher. He'n Miss Maria, his ma, ain't got it all; we're folks our own se'f."

But for all this by way of support while she smoothed her hair, Selina went downstairs slowly and constrainedly, conscious in the sense she had been conscious when coming home through the snowstorm with Tuttle Jones.

She had known Culpepperwouldcome from the moment she dropped her note to him in the letterbox at the corner last night. And now that he had come she was afraid to go down and meet him. Afraid of what? She couldn't have said; instinct didn't take her that far; it only sent her down the steps hesitatingly and constrainedly.

Culpepper the undemonstrative, the coolly unflattering in his attitude always, swung about at the sound of her footsteps and met her at the parlor door.

She held out a hand, a soft and pretty hand, its mate going up at the same time to push back some imaginary troublesome lock, a characteristic gesture with her when she was embarrassed.

But Culpepper having taken the soft hand proffered, put it over into his left one, and——

("Oh, Culpepper, no, I'm not ten now!")

—with the frowning and horrific air of a fearsome captor, undoubtedly an ogre captor intent and not to be deterred, went creepingly after its mate and cunningly caught it and brought it down and put it, with even more diablerie of horrific cunning alongside the other upon his big left palm, and—

("Culpepper, don't—don't do it, it frightens me still!")

—like as when the compassionless keeper of the ogre dungeon into which the victim is thrust, lowers the overhead stone that fits into its place—lowered his big right hand upon these two soft ones——

And why not? So he used to catch her and tease her when she was ten, playing the thing through in realistic pantomime until she, throwing herself on him, clung to him perforce! But she was not that little girl! Nor did she feel as a little girl feels any longer! She tried to take her hands away.

As well try any other feat in strength which is impossible. And now Culpepper bending his head a little was trying to make her look up, those bold eyes in teasing wait to catch her gaze when she did.

Not for worlds could Selina have looked up. Her heart beat wildly, and the blood pulsed in her throat and pounded at her ears. And as Culpepper holding the hands captive, went on bending to surprise her gaze, her lashes swept lower and yet lower upon her cheeks.

As a picture of shy maidenliness, Mamma andAuntie, the thing as you fancy it in perfection, behold your handiwork!

As a piteous young creature, ignorantly innocent, or innocently ignorant, as you prefer to put it, Mamma and Auntie, the choice in terms is yours, a piteous young creature suddenly overswept with conscious sex that nor you nor any creature has seen fit to explain to her, behold your handiwork! Groping by her young self, filled with terror and horror of self, of life, even of the God who made her as she was, you have left your child to battle as she may with things hideous to her distorted imaginings, rather than know them as attributes natural, decent, and sanctioned of God!

Culpepper bent yet lower to find her eyes through the down sweep of those lashes. The warmth from his young, gloriously alive face, so close to hers, the lift and fall of his breathing, reached her consciousness.

"I had your note, Selina. I wonder, writing me that, if you knew how sweet you were being to me?"

And here she got her hands away because in truth his heart was touched by her piteous terror, and he let her go. She found a chair and pointed one to him.

"You didn't come round any more," she said hurriedly.

He looked across at her oddly, those blue eyes of his within their accentuating black lashes, even humorously baffled in their expression. Seeing thatthis speech from her was honest and not arch, it was disarming to a lover by its very nature. And yet allowing that it was the child in her that was honest, was he not to gather that the maid in her was disturbed?

And again allowing that it was the child in her that spoke, was it not the maiden in her whose fingers even now were plaiting her dress nervously into folds, her eyes upon these fingers and her color coming and going? Peradventure, Mamma and Auntie, she does you proud, this proper and becoming picture of fluttered and timid maidenhood. You, Mamma, who have been girl, maiden, wife and mother, and have no woman's word for your woman-child! You, Auntie, who discussed the situation frankly enough with Culpepper, the man, but as with a flaming sword of vigilance, have stood guard lest even a breath of the truth reach the ignorance of Selina, the woman.

Culpepper watching her as she sat there, lovely and drooping and fair-haired, with her clear young profile partly averted, spoke, and watched anew to note the effect upon her of what he said.

"I concluded I'd keep away, Selina. I wasn't in the least satisfied with what you were giving me. I'm an outspoken brute. If there's no show that my share's going to be any more, I'll go on keeping away."

She shrank as though something had struck her. And in truth something had. Comprehensionof what he meant, so far as knowledge went with her, the lightning flash of it stunned while it revealed.

Yet even as the poor child reeled pale with the shock, she rallied to her womanhood as she had had womanhood impressed on her. Courageously rallied! And bravely dissembled! A thing well-nigh synonymous with womanhood as taught to her!

Which is to say the child restored herself with a long, deep breath, laughed with a disarming little throw back to the head, swept her hands across the plaits she had so busily gathered there in the breadths of her dress, as though she swept away with these all but an everyday interpretation of Culpepper's word, and spoke frankly, frankness being a most excellent dissembling weapon.

"It's good to have you back, Culpepper." Her voice, traitorous at first, gained in composure. As said before it was a nice voice, and under conditions, full of cadences. When she was ten, Culpepper used to kiss her in her pretty neck to tickle her, because he liked these cadences when she laughed.

Meanwhile with the aid of that dissembling weapon, frankness, she was going on. "Don't stay away ever again. And, Oh, there's so much to ask you, and so much to tell you about!"

He looked across at her and her pretty dissembling and laughed. "You little goose! You haven't known me all this while to think you can put me off if I'm really ready?"

Her gaze at this was hurried, beseeching, pleading. It seemed to beg for time, respite, mercy!

He laughed again, and she hurried on. "As I said, there's so, so much to talk about——"

"As for instance——?"

One saw her hurriedly and desperately searching her mind. "Why, er—of course—Judy!"

The tone even implied reproach that he could have thought it anything but Judy.

"All right, my lady," his name for her of old. "I accept the cue. Judy it's to be, is it? You're sparring for time, I'm to understand? The idea's planted now alongside any foolishness which Tuttle may have been putting there and I'm to let you get used to it awhile? And what's the trouble with Judy, now? Still sore with her father, or something fresh?"

"We're not supposed to know what she's doing," with a rush of evident relief at his docility, "but we do. She's being coached for her college examinations by some college chap Algy found and arranged with. It's mostly done through Algy, too, with an occasional meeting at the circulating library to outline more work. She'll have to go to Cincinnati for the examinations when they come, in June, which her father won't let her do, so we can't see how any of it's going to help her?"

"Go on," from Culpepper. "Talk along, amuse yourself. But one of these days when my time comes, my lady——"

Selina's breath came piteously in its flutterings. And for all her rallyings to that womanhood, her heart had never ceased its cruel clamberings, and her blood its beatings in her ears and its pulsings in her throat. And on all that vast sea of terror fast returning on her again, terror not of him, that was secondary, but of that within her innocent self she could no longer deny as being there, on all this rising sea of fear and terror, she could see but the one absurd little spar of inconsequence to cling to still—Judy.

"We feel so sort of dishonorable toward her father and mother, Maud and Adele and I do, Culpepper. But we're not supposed to know she's doing this. And of all people, little Judy!"

"Certainly, by all means, little Judy."

She rose with a pretty dignity which seemed to say she didn't like this tone from him.

He rose with her. She had to look up to him when they stood thus, which gives the man the advantage.

"It's lunch time, Culpepper, though we'll be glad to have you stay?"

No doubt he had really meant to be merciful and bide his time when he said he would. Instead, as she finished her little speech with its implied reproof, he laughed and with a mighty sweep of his arms, gathered this suddenly white-cheeked Selina up and kissed her, kissed her roughly, kissed her gloriously, kissed her exultingly. And set her down.

She stayed white-cheeked and looked at him. She spoke so quietly it was a bit discomforting. "That was outrageous of you. And cruel. I'll listen to you if ever I make up my mind now I want to listen and not before. Right now I hate you! Yes, I'm sure that's it, hate you! Not so much because you're Culpepper—"and here it became evident she was going to cry, one hates to have to tell it on her so soon again—"but because of something in you that made you think you could!" And the storm of tears now upon her, she turned and fled upstairs.

Late that afternoon when Selina went into her mother's room, she found Auntie talking about her paragon and favorite Culpepper. "He's his father right over again, Lavinia. Women like to be coerced and decided for. And anything that once belonged to Culpepper, he'd be fierce to the death caring for."

"I don't agree with you about what women like, Auntie," from Selina, to this startled lady who didn't know she was around. "Why should a person like to be coerced because she's a woman? And why should she want to be decided for, for the same reason?"

Auntie looked not only startled but alarmed. "Why, Selina!"

Selina took a calmer tone. "Maybe we're beginning to feel differently about these things, Auntie," curiously, as if wondering about it herself. "Maybewomen are different from what you and the ones you knew were?"

"Lavinia," from Auntie, "do you hear your child?"

Selina overswept by the fury of swift and sudden rage, stamped her foot and—terrible as it is to have to set it down again—burst into tears.

"But I'm not a child! That's the trouble! If anybody'd only understand and—help me!"

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