in Selina's thoughts. The minds of these five friends had to be
disabused of their rosy misinformation about her earnings, and the
sooner the better. Selina, who in general had a gay little way in
talking to these friends, endeavored to take that way now.
"I've some interesting data about the market value of education with
some other things," she said briskly. "I'm thinking I'd get rich
sooner, Culpepper, if I abandoned pupils and decided to cook. I'll have
to ask you to divide by four"--did Selina choke a little here?--"that
Fortunatus salary I thought I was getting for teaching William and the
others."
"Selina! Divide by four? What do you mean? Oh, I do wish," plaintively,
"you all would ever say what it is you mean, plain out," from Amanthus.
"Selina!" from Adele, "Oh, I'm sorry!"
"Let me help you choose a better vocation if that's the case,"
indignantly from Maud. "Don't waste yourself on it."
"How did you make such a mistake, Selina? Or was it your mistake?" from
Juliette.
"Mrs. Williams said I ought to have known what she meant, I should have
investigated--" Selina thus was taking up the tale of it once more when
she stopped.
"Yes?" from Culpepper. "We're waiting?"
But with a brisk air of not hearing him, Selina changed the subject.
Her father whom she had forgotten was sitting in the back parlor with
her mother and her aunt, had lowered his paper and was listening, too.
By all the precedents and traditions of her up-bringing, it was hers to
change the subject.
Her audience all were acquainted with the personnel of her little class
of boys by now, for when Selina was interested in a thing she talked
about it. They were familiar, too, with Auntie's grievance about the
cranial peculiarity of William. The thing now was to turn the matter
off with what Maudie would call sprightly nonchalance.
"William's head certainly is growing smaller, you must know," said
Selina with gayety. "Isn't it some sort of reflection on me? As his
teacher? I would have thought it would be the other way."
Culpepper from across the circle was looking at her with those boldly
blue eyes of his, beneath half-raised lids. Papa's paper was lowered to
his knee in the next room. Something was wrong, this brave gayety was
assumed and they showed that they knew it was.
"Bluffed," said Culpepper still with that keen and appraising gaze upon
her, "she's going to quit."
Papa's paper floated unnoticed from his knee to the floor. Was he
listening for what was to come?
"I'm not," said Selina indignantly, stung by these attitudes as of
watchers noting her on trial, "I've just begun."
"Still, it seems to me, Mrs. Williams was right," from little Judy here
in the front room. "You ought to have investigated; you should have
known for yourself. Somehow girls and women never seem to know for
themselves. I wonder why?"
Mrs. Wistar's voice murmuring defensively came in from the next room.
"I hardly follow you, Mr. Wistar! I'm sure it was harder on me than on
Selina to have her so disappointed. No girl was ever more shielded than
she has been from all possible disappointments, and such things, up to
now, nor spared where it was possible to spare her!"
The murmuring voice in reply came from Auntie. "My father's mother with
her eight children followed her husband, she by wagon, he on horseback,
over the old wilderness road to settle here where this town is now. She
learned to use a gun and an axe as well as she used a spinning wheel,
because she had to. She bore him seven more children after they were
here. Nobody spared women or children then. Maybe it's been our mistake
to spare her too much, Lavinia."
CHAPTER SIX
There are Olympians in each group of us, and Mrs. Gwinne Tuttle not
only was of the Olympians in Selina's community, but was held by some
to be _the_ Olympian. Such is the magic of pre-eminence the name Tuttle
sounded chaste and euphonious to the ear.
Selina's aunt and this lady who had gone to school together and were
old friends, met down street. If the weakness of Mrs. Tuttle, who
was an august but kindly soul, lay in a palpable enjoyment in the
overdressing of her large person, her virtues lay in a well-intentioned
heart. Though the details of the meeting between these two ladies were
not all given to Selina, what happened at the underwear counter of the
drygoods store where they met, was this:
"Selina is teaching, Emmeline, teaching in a private way," Auntie
told Mrs. Tuttle. "It does not pay, but it is an opening wedge," an
explanation she made everybody.
"You mean to say, Ann Eliza Wistar, that Robert's child is old enough
for that! Her name, Selina, is for your mother, I remember. And a
mighty capable and resolute woman she is named for. That stock in our
mothers one generation removed from pioneer blood and bone, was fine
stock, Ann Eliza. How is Lavinia taking the child's doing it?"
"Well, she feels it's a pity, and so do I, and so, I think, does
Robert. Selina is pretty, Emmeline."
"H'm, I see. I remember now she is. I used to see her once a year at
least at the dancing school balls. You send her to me, Ann Eliza,
whenever an invitation comes to her from me this winter. No, better,
now I come to think about it, you tell her I want her at my house
to-morrow night. I'm having a musicale. I'll look out for her.
Somewhere before nine o'clock."
Selina reached home that day in excellent spirits anyway. She had
been teaching her class of four for two months now, and William had
been embarrassingly slow starting at reading in his first reader. He
seemed to feel he had enough of reading when he finished his primer.
This morning Mrs. Williams had come to her in the sewing-room, with
reassuring news.
"We find William has begun to read at last, Selina. Day before
yesterday he couldn't, and last night he seized his book, when we
urged him, and deliberately read his father a page about a baby robin,
without a mistake. We think it's wonderful how it's come about all at
once."
Selina thought so, too, but was none the less relieved for that. Not
that she was not conscientious, for with the best will in the world
she was applying the printed page to her four pupils and her pupils
to the page, the moment of flux unfortunately being unpredictable but
exceedingly reassuring when it came. Evidently there is more in the
phrase "born teacher" than she had been aware of, and she grew a bit
heady with the relief of this news.
And here when she reached home was the invitation from Mrs. Tuttle
awaiting her! Honors were crowding her! She and Mamma and Auntie talked
it over eagerly at the lunch table.
"There's no ease like that from going about to the best places," said
Mamma. "I can't be too glad this has come just when it has. It defines
Selina's position. I don't suppose," musingly, "Amelia Williams ever
was asked to the Tuttle home in her life. The McIntoshes never were
anybody. Not that I'd have you mention to her, Selina, that you're
going to this musicale."
"Emmeline's even more given to dress now than when she was a girl,"
said Auntie. "She had trimming in steel and jet all over the bosom of
her dress this morning, and big as she is, it looked too much."
Just here, as Aunt Viney brought in the plum preserves for dessert,
Culpepper walked in with a note from his mother, inclosed in his weekly
letter from home.
"It says 'Ann Eliza' on the outside, ole miss, so I'll have to reckon
it's for you."
Auntie took her note, then broke forth with the more immediate news
happily: "Selina's going to a grown-up party at one of my old friend's
to-morrow night."
Culpepper was bantering but practical. He got his pleasure out of these
dear ladies, too. "Tomorrow night? How's she going to get there?"
True! They all three had forgotten! "To be sure, Selina!" said her
mother, "it is your father's whist night."
"I can't see why she wants to go. I never see much in these things
myself," from Culpepper, "but if you do, Selina, I'll come around and
take you, wherever it is, and get you later and bring you home."
After he was gone Mamma and Auntie sang his praises. "It was both
nice and thoughtful in him to remember about your father and his
neighborhood whist club," said Mamma.
"I hope he's not inconveniencing himself to do it," from Auntie.
It would seem that all those honors right now crowding Selina were gone
to her head. Resenting quite so much solicitude for Culpepper under the
circumstances, she all but tossed that head.
"He wouldn't put himself out, let me assure you Mamma, and you, Auntie,
too, if he didn't want to."
During the afternoon Cousin Anna Tomlinson, who lived a block away,
came around, having heard the news through Aunt Viney, who had stopped
to chat with the servants on her way to the grocery.
"I always meant to give Selina gold beads," she said as she came in,
as if the enormity of the present crisis exonerated her from doing so
now. "What has she to wear, Lavinia? Why certainly she can't go in her
graduating dress. She's worn it on every occasion since she's had it.
It's been dabby for some time."
Cousin Anna was rich, the money belonging to her and not to Cousin
Willoughby Tomlinson, her husband. Her house impeccably swept and
garnished, year after year, was brought up to date though nobody
ever went there, Cousin Willoughby entertaining his friends at that
newly established thing, the club. And Cousin Anna, who had finery in
quantity though she never went anywhere, was fussily dressy, but in
last year's clothes. Just as she could not bear to use her house, so
time had to take the edge of value off her clothes before she wore
them. She had a straight and unswerving backbone; her coiffure as she
styled it, was elaborate; and she settled her watch chain and her rings
constantly.
"And she is every bit as old as I am," Mamma never failed to say.
Cousin Willoughby Tomlinson's mother had been a Wistar, and it was
commonly told among the older set, that he had tried for Emmeline
Knight, she that was now Mrs. Gwinne Tuttle, before he came round to
Cousin Anna.
This person gazed from Mamma to Auntie. "Certainly Selina can't be
allowed to go to a Tuttle entertainment dabby," she said sharply.
"You've never had a real dressmaker dress in your life, have you,
Selina? Emmeline Tuttle is a little too inclined to look on her
invitations as distributed favors. You're going to this musicale in a
Vincent dress of mine, if you can wear it, and judging by the eye, I
think you can. I'll go right home and send it round."
Madame Vincent was the last cry in the community among what Mamma and
Cousin Anna and Auntie called mantua-makers.
Oh, why should the spirit of mortal be proud? Juliette Caldwell,
little vivid, affectionate body, and Adele Carter, impersonation of
consideration for others, coming over as Cousin Anna left, Selina
snubbed them.
They were such slaving and believing followers of Maud! And she, Selina
herself? Well, she was a follower, too, but with reservations. Maud
recently had made sweeping assertions, saying that the group of them
as social entities were sadly limited, and she followed up the charge
by proposing they each commit a passage of poetry to heart each day,
saying she had read, and this really was at base of the whole matter,
that it would strengthen the mind, add to the vocabulary, and furnish
food for quotation and ready repartee. At the time they all had agreed
but Amanthus, who said she did not feel any need for vocabulary or
repartee, and in truth as they could see, she did not need them in the
least as assets in her business of life.
Juliette and Adele were come over now about this matter. They were full
of enthusiasm.
"We were to begin with our committed passages to-day, you remember,"
explained Juliette.
"We both have ours," added Adele.
"I'm really pleased with my way of selecting," from Juliette. "I opened
our volume of Scott and took the lines my eyes fell on:"
"Stern was her look and wild her air,
Back from her shoulders streamed her hair."
"I chose mine from a little volume of selections called 'Pearls of
Wisdom,'" said Adele:
"Man's love is of man's life a thing apart,
'Tis woman's whole existence."
Selina was at both impatient and intolerant. "I was fearfully angry
at Culpepper one day when he said that girls play at being educated
and boys are educated. Sometimes I think Maud is responsible for our
seeming to play at it. Don't you see, Judy dear, if there's anything
really in this idea of Maud's you must choose your quotation? You want
lines that are apt and quotable if you're going to do it at all? These
of yours are relevant to nothing."
"You can't say that of mine," from Adele, pacific enough in general,
but disposed to resent this manner toward Juliette, and from Selina of
all persons, usually so full of concern and appreciation.
This undreamed of Selina answered promptly. "I certainly can't applaud
your choice. Our sex should be the last to admit such an epigram
exists."
* * * * *
Cousin Anna did not send the dress around until the next morning, a
note to Mrs. Wistar which accompanied it, explaining the delay:
"Emmeline Tuttle is a little too pleased with being Emmeline Tuttle. I
am sending a dress this moment home from Vincent for Selina to wear."
On reaching home from the morning's teaching, Selina came hurrying
up to her mother's room to see it. Unboxed and laid on the bed, it
was an impressive affair, and the color rushed to her cheeks, and her
hands sought each other rapturously. Satin puffs in a high-light green
obtruded through slashes in a myrtle-green satin waist and sleeves.
From the throat arose something akin to a Medici collar, and the
skirt flowed away in plenitude. A beaded headdress for the hair of a
seemingly fish-net nature completed the whole.
There was no question Mrs. Wistar and Auntie were dubious. They looked
their worry.
"Is it Mary, Queen of Scots, in a steel engraving, it makes me think
of," from Auntie in an anxiously low voice to Mamma, "or is it Amy
Robsart in our pictorial volume of Scott's heroines?"
"Madame Vincent is always so ahead and so extreme in her styles,"
fretted Mamma, "and yet," still more fretted, "Anna may be depended on
never to forgive us if she isn't allowed to wear it."
[Illustration: "Before the mirror trying on the dress from Cousin
Anna."]
They looked at Selina with her eager color and prettily disordered hair
and shining eyes, already slipped out of her everyday dress of sober
plaids, dear loving child, and before the mirror, trying on the dress
from Cousin Anna.
"Mull and lace and a sash is the proper thing for her at her age, I
don't care if her dress is dabby. And it's a poor rule to be beholden
to anybody," held Auntie.
"We can't get her dress washed and ironed now," from Mrs. Wistar, "and
she took her sash down town to be cleaned and has not gotten it home.
We'll have to give in this time and let her wear this dress of Anna's."
"Come feel the satin of it, Mamma," exulted Selina, "put your cheek
against its sheen, Auntie. Or can one feel a sheen?" she laughed
happily. "Maud says let the love of dress get in your blood and it will
poison your life at its spring, and you even might come to marry for
what a man could give you! She meant it for Juliette who cried because
her mother wouldn't let her have high heels to make her taller. But
I'm not sure I see Maud's logic. When we marry, we take from the man
anyhow, don't we? Why shouldn't one care then, in the ratio of what one
takes? Don't look so shocked, Auntie, I'm only thinking it out."
"Sometimes, Selina," said Auntie, dismayed, "you talk like you weren't
the girl we brought you up to be! The dress fits well enough, that's
all I can say for it."
"It looks a little like a fancy costume," admitted Selina doubtfully,
"but anyhow it's wonderful and I love it. I think, Auntie dear,"
reassuringly, "it isn't that Maud and the rest of us are undependable.
It's that we want something, and we don't know what we want. When
we're with people who're grandly mental, we think it's that, or
religious, it's that, or when it's someone who's a social personage,
then it seems as if it's that. Does it sound weak-minded Auntie,
veering so?"
This evening of the musicale Culpepper came for Selina on the moment,
which he did not always do, and he and she in her gorgeousness, went
off gayly together, Mamma and Auntie seeing them to the door.
"She's really a child at heart, Lavinia," worried Auntie, after
they were gone, "a child, I sometimes fear, that has had so little
experience in life that it's pitiful. And yet this afternoon she spoke
shockingly. I wouldn't have her too helpless and inexperienced, but
neither would I have her lose her illusions. There's mighty little left
a woman when she parts with these."
"If I only felt more comfortable in my mind about that dress," from
Mrs. Wistar. "Sometimes I could wish I were a person of more courage
and finality; I didn't want to let her wear it."
"No, I wouldn't want her to feel we had failed her about it," agreed
Auntie. "I wouldn't want her ever to feel we'd failed her anywhere, but
sometimes I'm afraid she's going to."
CHAPTER SEVEN
The night was mild. When Culpepper and Selina reached the car-line on a
nearby street, the car with its two jogging little mules was in sight.
"There comes the car, and here comes the moon," said Culpepper. "Shall
we ride or walk?"
They walked.
Now Selina and her girl friends knew a sufficient number of boys,
always had known a plentiful number in fact, Tommy and Bliss and Brent
and the rest, as she termed them. Culpepper, however, was not of these:
he was older, he was from away and he was studying law; many reasons in
fact combined to make it gratifying to have it Culpepper.
He with three other law students had rooms including a common
sitting-room over a confectionery, where ordinarily young men away from
home in the city would have been in boarding houses. From information
dropped by Culpepper, they smoked pipes and played chess and read books
by writers known as Darwin and Spencer and Buckle. That they were bold
and buccaneeringly adventurous figures thus may be seen.
Added to all this, Culpepper did not care for girls, Selina being the
only one he went with, and further, he had been so used to a big family
connection and an overflowing house and habitual hubbub, Cousin Maria
Buxton, his stepmother, being related to everybody in her part of the
state, that his avowed dislike to gatherings and affairs was genuine.
"You men don't like to do a thing, and you say so and don't do it,"
wondered Selina; "Papa gave up night church long ago, and Mamma who
loves to go, had to accommodate herself to it."
Culpepper defended his sex. "We're honest. You're not, women as a
class, I mean. My stepmother is, but then she's independent."
"Independent?"
"Has her own means and manages her own affairs. It makes the rest of
you propitiatory," bluntly.
"Propitiatory? What does?"
"Taking money as it's doled to you, or doing without."
They had reached the Tuttle house now in its broad yard. Carriages were
arriving, delivering their occupants at the curb and driving away.
Culpepper steered Selina in at the gate, up the flagging, and with her
mounted the steps.
"I'm glad it's you and not me," was his cheering remark.
Selina herself was not feeling so glad about it all at once. Why had
she not wondered earlier if any persons she knew would be here?
As the door opened to admit guests just ahead of them and the light
fell on the lady entering and on her evening wrap bordered with
swansdown, that elegance of the hour, Selina became conscious of
Mamma's knitted throw on her head and Auntie's striped scarf about her
shoulders.
"You--you'll be for me on time?" she reminded Culpepper, "Mamma thought
half-past eleven at the latest?"
"Can you fancy I won't?" he returned, handing her in at the door, which
was a nice way of putting it and a good deal from him.
Evidently it is one thing to be within the gay world and another to be
of this world, and Selina in her striped scarf made her way hurriedly
up the stairs. And a dressing-room filled with ladies, who know each
other and who do not know you, presents parallels with Polar regions
for chill and solitudes. Glances fell on her but they passed her over,
or traveled elsewhere or beyond.
Moods have a protean way of changing from roseate hues to grayness.
Even the sustaining glory of Cousin Anna's dress seemed threatened,
for as the maid removed the striped scarf, it appeared according
to the cheval glass, that the radiance of spirit which earlier had
appropriated the gown to its wearer, had flickered and expired, leaving
the one Cousin Anna's, and the other, Selina Wistar, frightened and ill
at ease and unforgivably young.
She moved with the company out into the hall and down the stairs. The
walls were white and gold, paneled, and the stair covering was crimson;
there were niches on the landing and again down the further flight of
the stairs, from which looked busts of, so far as Selina knew, male
Tuttles in white marble. It was august and costly and subduing, and
though she had yet to live to be told it, Victorian and lamentable.
The parlors as seen through the arched entrances as she came
reluctantly down the steps, were spacious, with crimson carpets of a
piece with that in the halls, pier glasses, crimson curtains and gilt
cornices, marble mantels outvying the niched busts for whiteness, prism
chandeliers and gilt chairs in rows for the approaching musicale.
Mrs. Tuttle was stationed in the first parlor and by custom or
arrangement or understanding everything fell away from her as it were,
or so it seemed to Selina as she made her way in, the guests as they
were presented retreating into the background of the far parlor.
A young man of such distinguished and easy appearance as to suggest
new standards for judgment of Tommy and Bliss and Brent and the rest,
handed the guests on to the person of the hostess. He proved to be Mr.
Tuttle Jones, a nephew of the lady's deceased husband. Selina having in
time thus reached Mrs. Tuttle, raised her eyes.
In the full enjoyment of her large person's sartorial splendor stood
this lady, satin puffs in a high-light salmon, obtruding through
slashes in a crimson satin waist and sleeves, from the open throat of
which arose something akin to a Medici collar, the skirt flowing away
in plenitude and a beaded headdress of a seemingly fish-net texture,
completing the whole.
And in the pier glass just behind Mrs. Tuttle, and repeated again and
again and yet and yet again from a confronting pier glass at the far
end of the adjoining parlor, appeared a half dozen, a dozen, a hundred,
was it a thousand reflected Selinas in myrtle and high-light greens,
puffs, slashes, and netted headdress, vanishing into perspective? And
multitudes upon multitudes grouped about the back parlor, or so it
seemed to Selina, looking on.
So, it was the person of that young niece of Ann Eliza Wistar's that
Mrs. Tuttle was gazing on? This lady never was known not to speak her
mind.
"If Vincent made that dress for you, Selina, she's a fool."
The mirrors repeated the accusation, but they repeated the salmon and
crimson person of Mrs. Tuttle, too. She was not one to spare herself at
all.
"And when I allowed her to make its original, or its replica as the
case may be, for me, I was another."
Selina found speech small and arriving from far. "Cousin Anna Tomlinson
sent the dress around so that I could come."
[Illustration: "Mr. Tuttle Jones ... sat with her through a pianoforte
number."]
"Well, as for Anna Pope, by the grace of God, Tomlinson, there's never
been any doubt in anybody's mind, she's a fool. As for Vincent, it's
sheer perfidy! Go over there, in the next room, this one is cleared
for the piano and the performers. Find a chair, get a place, I'll send
someone to you, but for the land's sake, go and don't come back near
me."
Selina hurriedly sought a gilded chair in an unobtrusive position,
which as the evening went on proved to be an island solitude in an
immediate waste of vacant chairs. She had not even a program to bury
herself in. True, Mr. Tuttle Jones, the nephew, came and sat with her
through a pianoforte number, but at its close he left, to come again in
time with a second polite but perfunctory young man who also in time
departed.