a piano she'd bought by installments that was the joy and pride of her
life. They were seized a week after she married him three years ago to
settle debts he had contracted before he knew her."
Mr. Cannon came into the conversation. Nor was he in the least the
jollying, bandying person the younger ladies were familiar with.
"Which is proof of where he on his part puts us, too," murmured Maud.
"You women, Mrs. Harrison, so seldom take the protection offered you
in the ante-nuptial or marriage settlement provisions. We've just
been remarking on it among ourselves, the rich women seldom, the
working-woman never."
Mrs. Harrison played with the spoon in her saucer, as if considering
before answering. She had been holding her cup now for some time.
"Put it down," said Mr. Welling from his stand near the fender,
persuasively; "you haven't tasted it."
"No more have you yours," retorted his hostess, "nor Selina, nor Maud,
nor Culpepper nor Juliette--I don't like tea myself, and I don't
believe one of the rest of you do."
There was relaxation at this, and general confession, and a setting
down of cups.
"Tea as a function is more popular than tea as a beverage," from Mr.
Welling, gallantly.
Mrs. Harrison reached for her tatting which lay near her book. "You
say, Mr. Cannon, you wonder women so seldom take advantage of the
marriage settlement provisions?" Her eyes glancing from one to the
other of the young girls grouped about her fireside and then returning
to Mr. Cannon seemed to say, "Here are cases in possible point to be.
Consider them."
What she said, however, was, "How many young girls, even in the class
you know, are likely to have heard of an ante-nuptial provision? Or as
things go in our American life, would conceive any need of protection
in her own case? American women usually marry for affection, which
implies faith. Though the real truth is, we're not apt to think about
marriage in any sense such as this at all, having been trained neither
to the knowledge nor the thinking. I take it, Mr. Cannon," smiling,
"that you will make it your business to instruct the young lady of your
choice in these points beforehand?"
Mr. Cannon laughed, but he got red, too.
Was Mrs. Harrison too honest thus to be sowing insubordination in
the camps of the possible future and not acknowledge it? She put her
tatting down.
"I am not attacking the institution of marriage in the least, Maudie
and Juliette, Selina, Adele and my Amanthus. I am not attacking it at
all; I am repudiating woman's helplessness within the institution.
Adele knows more of what I am talking about, I see it in her eyes.
Adele is a browser among books."
"Mills on 'The Subjection of Woman,'" murmured Mr. Cannon still red.
"This my defence. I lent it to her."
Hetty appeared again, this time ushering Bliss and Mr. Tuttle Jones.
"Oh," from Amanthus, "_if_ you knew how glad I am to see you both.
They've been talking and talking, and are still talking, and I haven't
been able to make out one thing of what they think they're talking
about."
Bliss ruddy-haired and pretty boy, hurried to her side, his face alight
at the welcome. Bliss was twenty-one now, and his father had given
him a wee interest in a box factory, and he was up and gone from home
by half-past six in the mornings, and was tremendously proud and in
earnest and interested, and very much in love with Amanthus.
Mr. Jones, his neat person and neat features and small moustache
immaculate, finished his greetings without a shade of hurry, then made
his way to Selina. Maud had wandered away now, and he took the place
she had vacated. Whereupon the color began to rise in Selina's cheek,
warm and permeating, and rich. For the eyes of Mr. Jones were sweeping
over her face, her brow, her hair, even to the pale burnished knot at
the nape of her neck, and sweeping back again over the whole. There
were other masculine eyes that might have been doing the same that had
declined their prerogative.
"I knew the style was yours when I asked you to try it" murmured Tuttle.
The color flamed higher.
"Mamma and I had cards to-day from your sister, Mrs. Sampson, for her
next afternoon. It was nice of her to think of us," from Selina.
Selina and her mother did not know Mrs. Sampson.
"Promise me to accept and go," from Tuttle, earnestly. "A real promise
I want. Exactly. Now I have it. I want you to know my people better,
and my people to know you."
What could the color do at a speech such as this, but wave almost
painfully, higher and even higher?
"Oh, I must tell you, by the way, your aunt, Mrs. Bruce came in the
bank to-day to see me. She fancies she owes me some sort of thanks
about her husband, which, of course, she doesn't at all. That off her
mind, she asked me if I could give her any reasonable idea of how many
women in town had a vault box, or if I could tell her how to find out
how many have bank-books. What do you suppose?"
Selina had a nice voice, clear and sweet and when she was happy and
merry, full of cadences. It rang silvery in its notes now. "I don't
suppose. Nobody does when it's Aunt Juanita. Mamma says she's been
hunting information of various kinds about women for fifteen years."
It was such a wonderfully pleasing thing to hear that silvery laugh,
Tuttle Jones set about awakening it again.
* * * * *
About the time cloaks were being sought, Culpepper came strolling to
hunt Selina.
"I'll walk back with you," he said easily.
We're all pitiable and ignoble, which is to say, human creatures.
If Selina had admitted the slightest feeling of chagrin earlier in
the evening, that feeling found satisfaction now. Moreover, she was
looking that very best of hers again, which means she was sparkling
and coloring and laughing, a thing calculated to increase one's
satisfaction. She gave Culpepper a share of this sparkle and this color
as she replied:
"Mr. Jones is going to take me home, thank you, Culpepper. He says it's
quite dark and snowing fast."
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
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 care of 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 present not 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 himself with pertinence and even pertinacity, to a pretty
girl unknown in his world, an even _quite_ pretty 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 of her 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.
[Illustration: "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-SEVEN
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. 'Hungry as a Pope nigger,' the saying
used to be in slave times, or was it a Groghan nigger? Yes, I believe
it was a Groghan."
[Illustration: "'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 a personal
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 her pudding 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 black sheep 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 I can, 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.