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"

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."