had reached that point where it reiteratingly bade 'Good-bye to hope,
good-bye, good-bye,' and she was bitterly agreeing, when a gloved hand
reached out and touched an empty gilt chair a few places beyond, while
the young lady owner of the hand and of the brown eyes above it, smiled
and in quiet gesture invited her to take it. What the kindly eyes had
been seeing, though Selina could not know this, was a young guest
awkwardly alone and betraying it in a color coming and going painfully
and a chin piteously inclined to quiver.
Selina went, seventeen is not so very far along the way, and the sob
so long threatening in the throat within the Vincent setting, arose
undisguisedly.
The owner of the smiling eyes, whose own shoulders emerged from a
charming and correct gown, by sharing her program afforded a momentary
sheltering for recovery.
At the close of the song came an intermission, during which servants
came about with ices.
Selina's companion chatted. "I should say we both were a little strange
here. I am 'Hontas Boswell, Pocahontas Boswell, from Eadston. My aunt
and I are down spending a few days at the hotel, and her old friend,
Mrs. Tuttle, was good enough to ask us here to-night. Shall you and I
agree to stay together?"
CHAPTER EIGHT
Selina and Miss Pocahontas had supper together at a little table in a
bay window with Mr. Tuttle Jones as a somewhat peripatetic third, since
his duties as aid to his aunt kept him constantly leaving them.
In the beautiful time Selina now found herself having with this new
friend, she told her about Mamma and Papa and Auntie, and even some
of the rest of it, about the friends of her youth, for instance, and
William Jr., whom she taught, and about Culpepper who brought her. For
after all, at seventeen, is not one's little world one's world, that is
to be talked about? And were not the warm brown eyes of Miss Boswell
amazingly tender and encouraging as she smiled back upon this ardent
young face?
Mr. Jones with a murmuring sigh of further apology came and sank into
his place once more with them at the bay-window table. He was a quick
and alert young man, with a nice smile and when he had time, a nice
manner. Was he perhaps dapper? His small moustache was immaculate, and
his tie and boutonnière irreproachable.
It would seem he was taking note of Selina as a possible entity for the
first time. "My aunt asked me to apologize to you about something I
don't seem to understand. She says she can't come herself----
"--without making herself ridiculous," said this hitherto seemingly
harmless young Miss Wistar with unlocked for and apparently astute
bitterness. Miss Boswell looked surprised. Mr. Jones looked at Selina.
He looked again. He might look away, as indeed he did, to concern
himself with the final course for their table, but Selina was an entity
now.
At half-past eleven she came downstairs amid the departing guests,
Mamma's throw upon her head, Auntie's scarf about her shoulders, still
in the comforting care of Miss Pocahontas Boswell and her aunt, Miss
Boswell. Miss Pocahontas was all kindness to the end. "And may we not
take you home? Our carriage is double?" she asked as they reached the
hall.
"Culpepper is to come for me," Selina explained. "He would not know
what to do."
"My niece tells me it is Maria Buxton's stepson, from up our way, you
speak of," said Miss Boswell, the aunt; "I remember him as a very
blunt, outspoken little son of a blunt father and outspoken stepmother.
If he is to come for you we had surely better leave you for him."
But come for her is what Culpepper failed to do. The various groups
departed, the crowd in the hallway thinned, a silver-chimed clock
somewhere struck the quarter, and the street-cars would stop at twelve.
The servants in the hall gathering up this and that, looked at Selina
interrogatively, then departed, too.
It was here that Mrs. Tuttle came out into the hall and found her. This
lady seemed engrossed in the closing of the house by the servants now,
and to have forgotten the matter of Cousin Anna's dress and Vincent's
perfidy.
"Culpepper who? Maria Buxton's boy?" This in answer to Selina's
explanation. "Ann Eliza didn't tell me he was living here? Is he
personable? A hostess always needs young men. Wait, Reuben," this to
the gray-haired negro man in livery moving around in the background,
"you know I always want to satisfy myself the window fastenings _are_
secure," Then to Selina, "You say he said he _would_ be here? What on
earth are we going to do about it, say _dear_ child?"
The lights were out now but for one or two, and everyone had
disappeared but Mrs. Tuttle and Selina and Reuben. Seeing a reflected
figure in a pier glass opposite her, and recognizing that disheveled
and distraught figure to be her own, certain words heard from Juliette
that afternoon, and which Selina had held to be inapt and wanting in
relevancy, beat themselves to measure on her brain:
"Wild was her look and stern her air,
Back from her shoulders streamed her hair"
[Illustration: "Selina hurried out and joined him."]
And when at length, incredible, unpardonable, unforgivable length,
Culpepper did come and Selina hurried out and joined him, what had he
to say?
"Of course you can't, I won't ask you to forgive me, Selina. There
was a boxing match on, but I would not go to that. Then I remembered
an expert chess game at--er--a place, a Hungarian player against home
talent, but I knew I would get drawn into the moves and--well. So I
went back to the rooms and the boys were all there, and we got to
jawing about this new thing by a man named George, called Single Tax,
and I got into the talk and forgot."
Selina stopped by Adele's house on her way to her teaching the next
morning. She was anxiously sweet and sorry, the natural Selina now.
"I was short about those quotations yesterday, Adele," she
acknowledged, "and I want to say to you, and I mean to say to Judy,
that I've every reason since I saw you both and was so rude, to think
they are, well, the one apt and the other true. Men it seems have so
many interests, they forget to come for us when they promise!" And she
told Adele all about it.
"But I made that Mr. Jones acknowledge me," she commented. "I don't
believe I could have stood all the rest if I couldn't feel I did
that. I'm beginning to believe that we only grow through a sort of
self-assertion, Adele. And I owe it to my self-respect, too, to say I
think Auntie's old friend, Mrs. Tuttle, was very rude."
She came home from her morning's work perturbed, and joined Mamma and
Auntie at the lunch table, a worried frown puckering her brow.
"It's the last straw. This time yesterday I was so elated on every
count. What's that saying of Papa's whist club when they're counting
up the score? Honors are easy, isn't it? Mrs. Williams and I were so
relieved when she found William could read. To-day she tells me she
believes he did it deliberately to stop their talk. He took a page
about a baby robin that he's heard the others read so often he knows it
by heart."
CHAPTER NINE
"Girls play at being educated and boys are educated," Culpepper had
said. Selina was to ask herself again if this was so.
She and her mother went at once to call on Miss Boswell and Miss
Pocahontas Boswell at their hotel. And so glowing was the further
description given by Selina to her four friends of the charms of Miss
Boswell the younger, that she had to go again to take them. Following
this the five were invited by Miss Pocahontas to spend an afternoon
with her, and she had what Maud called a little collation for them in
her hotel sitting-room.
Mamma and Auntie had the offer of Cousin Anna Tomlinson's carriage and
coachman for this same afternoon, and in order that the young people
might be free, they took Miss Boswell the elder for a drive to the
cemetery, they being of a mind, and the community with them, that no
more seemly spot for innocent recreation and enjoyment might be.
The afternoon and its collation were so delightful, and Miss 'Hontas
in a semi-formal afternoon gown was so winning, the guests went home
in a state of uplift, with the exception of Amanthus who seemed
non-committal. But, as Maud said, charming people are so often
resentful of other people being charming.
Selina spoke at home about this attitude from Amanthus. "She seemed
ungenerous over our admiration for Miss Pocahontas, Mamma. Right in
the middle of the afternoon she wanted to come home. Lovely as she is,
she's hard to stand when she acts this way."
"I've never encouraged you to find fault with your friends, Selina,"
reproved her mother. "No doubt Amanthus had her grounds."
"I haven't a doubt she had," from Auntie. "I've watched Amanthus
before. If a thing's true, Lavinia, why shouldn't Selina say it? She'll
get along the better for recognizing it. Refusing to admit a fact
doesn't make it less so."
"I've always found Amanthus sweetly feminine," said Mamma concisely.
"And there isn't a man won't agree with you," from Auntie. "She's
exactly to the pattern of what they look for in women. I found that out
before ever Amanthus was born."
"Ann Eliza, I'm astonished at your tone!"
"The tone goes with the rankle that's been in me a good many years,
Lavinia."
Selina and her group met with Maud this same evening to talk the
afternoon over as was their habit after an occasion. The Addisons were
prosperous and their parlors boasted velvet carpets, mirrors over the
mantels, lace curtains stiff with pattern and the seemly rest of what
handsome parlors at that day should boast.
Again Amanthus took exception to the enthusiasm over Miss Boswell.
Perhaps there was something in the name of the lady that was suggestive
of the especial line of attack. "I don't see anything so good-looking
about her," she declared. "She's too dark; she looks like an Indian
squab."
Amanthus was given to occasional lapses in her words, and while as a
rule the others were tolerant with her, this as concerning Miss Boswell
was too much.
"Meaning squaw, we are to presume?" said Maud--generous-spirited,
whole-souled Maud, scornful of such assets as mere red-brown hair and
splendid skin, the emphasis with her being laid on loftier attainments!
"I can't keep you from presuming," returned Amanthus with dignity,
_her_ daffodil yellow head held high, "I said squab."
"But it doesn't mean anything used so," pointed out conscientious Adele.
"Not a thing," corroborated little Juliette.
"You can't prove that it doesn't to me," returned Amanthus, which after
all was true. It also was characteristic of Amanthus. It was best to
change the subject. Perhaps it was unfortunate that it returned to Miss
Boswell.
"It seems to Mamma and to me," said Selina, "that I ought to do
something in the way of entertaining for Miss Pocahontas. It's more
of an occasion to have it in the evening, of course, but it can't be
dancing in our little house, nor music, because we can't depend on our
piano any longer."
"You wouldn't want the ordinary thing for her anyway," said Maud
promptly and decidedly. "Selina," one saw the sweep as it were of
Maudie's unbridled fancy as it mounted, one braced oneself against the
oncoming rush of her enthusiasm, "I have the idea!" Did she have it,
or was she merely pursuing it unaware of what it would be until she
overtook it? "Unless you actually want it, let me ask Mamma if I may
give it myself? I should love to. What I say," she had it now, and
brought it forth with the pride of ownership, "is a conversazione!"
"But I do want it," Selina hastened to declare, "though," dubiously, "I
hadn't thought of attempting anything like that."
Amanthus spoke here and almost crossly. "Mamma says the accustomed
thing is nearly always the proper thing. She told me to remember that.
I can't see why you're always hunting the unusual thing? I don't know
what a conversazione is."
"A conversazione," said Maud loftily, "is a meeting for conversation,
preferably on belle-lettres or kindred topics. It's not unlike the
French salons."
"I'll speak to Mamma," from Selina still more dubiously, "and if she
agrees I'll go and see Miss Pocahontas. If I do decide on it, will you
meet with me and help me plan it?"
"Meet here," said Maud, "and in the mean season I'll look up the
subject further."
When Selina went home with her proposal, Mrs. Wistar was more concerned
with the obligation than the nature of the entertaining. "Have what you
please, Selina, so it's reasonably simple in its cost and we can afford
it. I'm glad to have you do it for Miss Boswell."
Auntie demurred. "I like the idea of a party, too," she said, "but why
not just a party? What does Selina, or what do the others know about
a---- what is it you're proposing to have, Selina? A conversazione?
It sounds to me like borrowed finery in another guise such as we let
her wear to the musicale. Let's don't do it again, Lavinia. I don't
fancy mental furbelows that are not her own any more than dressmaker
furbelows. Let Selina give a plain party."
"Why should you want to discourage the child, Ann Eliza? If she and the
others want to have a conversational evening. I can see no reasonable
grounds for objection."
Accordingly the group met with Maud the next evening and Selina
reported. "Mamma approves, but Miss Pocahontas looked a little startled
when I said conversazione. Or maybe I imagined she did, for immediately
she smiled charmingly and said, 'How very lovely!' Maudie, do you
really think we'd better undertake it?"
Having originated an idea, Maud never was known to relinquish it. "Just
as you please," largely, "as I said before if you don't want it, let me
give it."
Selina surrendered. "You got our literary club at school into that
debate with the boys from the high school," she reminded Maud uneasily
however, "and what we thought at the time was applause from them, we
found out afterward was laughter."
They all moved uneasily at the recollection, all but Amanthus and she
had not been in it.
"It was the subject Maud insisted on, we can see that now," said
Juliette bitterly, "'Resolved that the works of Alexander Pope are
atheistical in their tendency.' We ought to have known they were
laughing at us when they accepted it."
"If we're here to help you, Selina," said Maud loftily, "we'd better
get about it. There's more than enough of our sex for the evening as it
is. I've been reading up and there's very little said about women as
guests at either salons or conversaziones. The important thing seems to
have been the men."
Amanthus showed more interest at this, but she seemed determined to be
trying. "I won't come if you have Tommy Bacon."
Juliette was responsible for this. At the Friday evening dancing club
she had burst forth to a group of them, impetuously, "What do you
suppose Tommy Bacon here has just said to me? That Maud and Selina and
Adele and I are the only girls he knows whose hand he can't hold when
he wants to."
In the pause which had followed Amanthus had grown very red. They
could not blame her now. Though Tommy measured suddenly against the
requirements of a conversazione did seem very young, still his absence
would leave them short.
Maud was rising to the demands of the moment again so visibly that her
companions as visibly looked uneasy. But her suggestion this time was
practical. On the previous Saturday afternoon she and Selina and Adele,
out for a walk in the Indian summer briskness had met Culpepper Buxton
and his three roommates out for a tramp also. The two groups had joined
forces and gone sauntering out the sycamore bordered road that led
up-climbing and down-rolling to the old monastery in its secluded and
wooded grounds where Louis Phillipe in his exile for a time had stayed.
It not only proved a pleasant occasion, the background of the French
king lending color and romance to the setting, but it added three
masculine acquaintances to the lists of the ladies--Mr. Cannon, easy
and talkative, Mr. Welling, provocative and in spectacles, Mr. Tate,
tall and studious. Older than their own set, decidedly these three
young men were acquisitions.
"You must ask these friends of Culpepper, Selina," proposed Maud. "And
do you believe if we coax Culpepper, he'll get Algernon Charles Biggs
to come? At a conversazione, after it is understood by Miss Boswell who
he is, he will seem to be a card?"
[Illustration: "The two groups had ... gone sauntering out the sycamore
bordered road."]
Algy Biggs was a near if collateral kinsman of a very real and great
poet on the other side of the English-speaking world, a thing he never
was allowed to forget, and which in company rendered him next to mute.
Yet he was amazingly big and athletic and good-looking, great in the
local militia, in the summer regattas on the river, as a stroke oar on
the barge picnic parties, carrying the baskets and luggage, building
the fires, fetching water.
"A regular Herculaneum, or whoever it was performed labors and cleaned
stables," Amanthus had said of him.
"He won't come if he knows what we want him for," affirmed Selina,
decidedly. "I'll try."
Adele here pointed out the flaw in the arrangements, it being her gift
from Heaven always to do that.
"But the ones you're naming are nearer our ages. There ought to be
somebody more suitable for Miss Boswell."
"Your Cousin Marcus, Selina." said Maud.
Selina felt ashamed of the haste with which she said no for surely it
is an unworthy thing to be overly sensitive about your kin, and nobody
is any better off as to family than the total average in desirability
of its members. Still there was no use running the family in on Miss
Boswell if she did not have to.
Aunt Juanita, married to Uncle Bruce, was Mamma's sister, and Cousin
Marcus was their son. Aunt Juanita wrote letters to the newspapers on
every sort of subject that engrossed her from Schopenhauer to Susan
B. Anthony, and made impassioned addresses to women wherever she ran
into them, at parties, picnics, church societies, anywhere, like as not
having forgotten to take down one curl-paper in dressing her iron-gray
hair. The subjects for the addresses varied.
A forerunner, a feminine John Baptist to her day and place and sex, as
Selina was one day to come to see her, then Aunt Juanita Bruce, tall,
angular, unmended and ungroomed, stood alone in her community, unique
in type but none the less absorbed and none the more abashed for that.
As for Uncle Bruce, Mamma called him in as he came by of mornings,
with his big bushy-haired head and untidy beard and his mummified
and scholarly little trotting body, and brushed him off and tidied
him up and retied his old black string cravat, and started him on
again. Whereat if he had a book, it being his way to proceed along the
streets with his nose and his spectacled eyes within the covers of some
abstruse volume, he was as like as not to proceed indefinitely at his
little dog-trot speed in whatsoever line started on, the levee and the
river, it was said, on more than one occasion bringing him up. Uncle
Bruce was a lawyer and Selina was told that he was an authority, but
there was small comfort to her young and innocent soul in that in the
face of his more salient characteristics.
Cousin Marcus, their son, did editorial paragraphs on the newspapers
and was clever, but then you never knew what he might be besides,
being all of Aunt Juanita and Uncle Bruce and himself together. If
he was asked to come at eight he would stroll round at ten, and if
one wanted to close the house at twelve, Marcus would produce his
cigarettes--he was the only person in town to use them and was looked
on askant therefore--and monologue with brilliancy till one. He was a
law unto himself and over-rode your laws. Now Selina yearned secretly
and passionately, and she feared almost unworthily, to be considered
correct and proper, and this, moreover, was an occasion for that
charmingly correct person, Miss Pocahontas Boswell. Auntie remembered
now, too, just who the Boswells were. She was sure that as a girl she
had spent a night at their even then old brick home at Eadston in
its setting of quaint garden. Selina was uneasy as it was, over this
conversazione business of Maud's, and if the truth be told, always
winced at her relatives, the Bruces.
"No," she said, and firmly for once in the face of Maud, "I don't think
I want Marcus."
"Then who---?" began Maud, and stopped. The same thought had occurred
at this point, was recurring to each of them, to four of them that is,
Amanthus not knowing the person in question this time.
A new assistant rector at Selina's church had achieved a notable
popularity, and of late these friends of hers, with the exception of
Amanthus, had been accompanying her to services whenever they could
be spared from their own. Perhaps they all blushed a bit now under
detection.
"Why not the Reverend Mr. Thomas Wingham if he'll come?" avowed Maud
stoutly despite the general abashment. "It's entirely for Miss Boswell
we're considering him?"
As yet Selina was the only one who had met the gentlemen, he having
called upon her household in the performance of his parochial duties.
Driven thus into a corner by Maud, there was no reason why he should
not be invited. "I'll ask Mamma," she conceded.
This person approved, and accordingly the invitation to him went the
next day in Mamma's lady-like and running hand, upon her visiting card.
It was hard to reconcile her being Aunt Juanita's sister, though to be
sure they did have different mothers.
To Meet
Miss Pocahontas Boswell
Conversation
Please Reply Friday Evening
The Reverend Mr. Wingham, young and good-looking gentleman that he was,
promptly replying that it would be his pleasure to meet Miss Boswell
on Friday evening, the affair assumed aspects entirely new, and in a
different sense, significant.
Mamma planned the details. The back parlor, so-called, in the Wistar
home, really was the dining-room.
"On the evening of your little affair, Selina," she explained, "thanks
to the screen which we'll set about the table beforehand, your aunt
and I, at the agreed-upon moment, will slip in with coffee, chocolate,
sandwiches, and plates of cake. There'll remain only the removing of
the screen by your father, to disclose us in our places, I behind the
chocolate pitcher, your aunt behind the coffee urn, and the adjournment
of your guests to the back parlor. I'm always thankful when an occasion
like this comes up, that the Wistar coffee urn isn't plate but silver."
After preparations for the affair thus were well under way, Juliette,
dependable if she was such a little creature, rounded up Maud and
Selina at the Wistars one afternoon. "It's conversazione, of course,
but what're we going to talk about?"
True! One saw Maud rising to the new demands of the situation. "If we'd
only thought about it sooner," she mourned. "On our walk with Culpepper
and his friends the other day, Mr. Welling that I was with, the square
one with spectacles, told me they were deep in a book round at their
rooms that they were having daily rows over, Adam Smith's 'Wealth of
Nations.' My uncle has it on his shelves. We might have gotten up on
that and showed them."
Amanthus happened in here and they explained the trouble.
"Why not talk in pairs and not trouble about a subject?" she asked
hopefully. "Wouldn't it be a conversazione just the same?"
They ignored this whereas they might have said patently tolerant things
to her. Amanthus was Amanthus and they must accept her as she was,
which meant be magnanimous with her rather than lofty or pitying.
"I'll go round to the school to-morrow," said Maud, "and ask permission
to look over the old minutes of our Sappho Literary Club. By looking up
our program, I'll happen on some subject of general interest that we're
all up on. As soon as you're home from your teaching, Selina, come over
and we'll decide."
"Don't count me in on this conversazione," said Amanthus, "I'll come
but I won't talk."
True, as she had said once before, lovely creature that she was,
sunny-haired, violet of eyes, coral-lipped, she had no need for
conversation, no, nor yet wit, nor repartee, in her business of life.