Mamma cried right along through the summer about it, and as the time began to approach, Auntie stopped eating and grew pale. Culpepper had gone home in June without knowing anything about the plan just then afoot, and here at this point, late in August, an invitation came down from Cousin Maria Buxton for Auntie and Selina to visit her.

"There's too much to do and to plan getting Selina ready," decided Mamma, "and there'd be the extra expense of it to consider. I don't see how it can be arranged, do you, Ann Eliza?"

"I'll write and say so," said Auntie.

"And I think, Selina," from her mother, "it would be only polite for you to slip a note in your aunt's letter thanking your Cousin Maria for asking you."

Selina got her pen and paper and sat down to write her note, then paused and fell to dreaming. She saw Cousin Maria's farm, three thousand acres she believed it was, orderly, productive and prosperous. In her mind's eye it lay in zones, as it were, the outer boundary being the old stone wall along the encircling limestone pike; the tilled fields came next, of hemp, tobacco, corn and what not; the middle zone between these tilled fields and the houseyard was the wide-spreading, park-like woodland pastures; and heart of it all, reached through the big stone-pillared iron gate, was the house in its houseyard, with the garden behind. She loved this house of her Cousin Maria's, set in lilac and syringa shrubberies, a one-storied white brick, wide and ample and flanked by wings, with big gallery porches front and back, and beneath a high basement containing kitchen, laundry, storerooms and the farm offices. In recall Selina saw Cousin Maria now, too, comely like Auntie, surveying her capably and appraisingly as she welcomed her, had she and Auntie gone. And she saw Culpepper, too, as it were at Cousin Maria's side as they welcomed her, regarding her quizzically.

Cousin Maria and the farm and Culpepper, seemed to stand visualized thus in her mind, symbol for some suddenly defined thing. Was it the best of the old things? The worth while of the established things?

Then she thought swiftly of the vista opening to her of the unknown, with Miss Pocahontas and her outstretched hand awaiting, and her heart leaped!

She began her letter and after thanking her Cousin Maria for the invitation, went on to state her plans.

I want you to know, Cousin Maria, and Culpepper as well, that I'm going away about the end of September to Florida to teach, with Miss Diana Talbot who says she knows you, and with Miss Pocahontas Boswell. It's not only to try to help myself and so make it easier for them here at home, but because I want to go so badly I can't pretend this feature of it doesn't come first. I say this because Culpepper would see through me and say it for me if I didn't. Papa knows this part of it and sympathizes, and I'm a little afraid Mamma and Auntie suspect it and don't, as Mamma, for one, cries so about it most of the time, it makes it hard, but I can't feel it possible for me to be unselfish enough now to give it up.

Culpepper came down a week before it was necessary for his return to the law school, to see about this thing of Selina going away as he put it to Auntie bluntly. He walked in one evening big and sunburned and bold and blatant with health and stored energy and conviction.

It was the first week in September and hot and he found the household, Mamma, Auntie and Selina sitting out on the stone steps in the starlight, Papa inside reading his paper, the aroma of his cigar floating out.

"What does it all mean?" Culpepper without preamble demanded of the older ladies—"this thing Selina wrote about of going away to teach? Keep still, Selina, we know your side of it."

"And mine, I hope, Culpepper," came out through the open doorway from Papa reading under the gas-jet in the hall. "Kindly accept the fact that I am aiding and abetting her. She came to her father this time first."

Mamma, coming in on this tearfully, was most emphatic: "I blame Marcus, blame him entirely. He's Juanita's own child for stirring up trouble or trying to, for other people. He defended himself to my face by saying I had kept Selina so overyoung for her years she's almost ridiculous, and that he's trying to help her to find what I've deprived her of, her right to be a reasoning and thinking human creature." Mamma produced her pocket handkerchief.

"Juanita herself came around with him," said Auntie aggrievedly. "She'd better have stayed at home and mended her clothes. Her skirt was without a braid and frayed, and two buttons were gone from the front of her waist. Instead she told us that if we of the older generation didn't face the demands of the present younger one, it simply means they'll cut us out of their working plans and repudiate us. Don't ask me what she meant. You've heard Juanita. And she said the time was at hand and was ripe and she was warning us. What time she didn't specify. That she hadn't been prophesying to her sex all these years not to know the signs now they were here. She talked like an altogether determined and fanatical person, and with no more sense to it than just what I say, but then Juanita's talk is always more or less that way."

"Marcus, of course! I might have guessed he was in it," said Culpepper with small patience. But then these two never had struck it off anyway, neither ever willing to concede a thing to the other, Maud always said. "It's a fool proposition, I beg your pardon, Cousin Robert, since you say you're in it, but I'm with Cousin Lavinia and ole Miss here, every time. If Selina's got to teach, she'd better teach for less here at home where we all can look after her."

He spoke to Selina presently, suggesting they take a walk about the block. He began to question her almost as soon as they were started, the dry sycamore leaves on the pavement crackling under their feet. This Selina by his side was scant eighteen now.

"It's true then, what you wrote in your letter? That it's you who want to go? You're thinner than you were and you're pale. Stop here under the gas post and let me look at you. What's it all about?"

He seemed almost to be making an issue of her wanting to go. She colored in the dark with a feeling of vague uneasiness that she was about to disappoint and hurt him by what she must say. And yet when she once was started, she amazed herself by the actual passion with which she spoke.

"It's like rosy beckoning fingers, Culpepper, and sweet odors I've longed for, and food and drink I'm desperate for. It's not Florida or Kalamazoo or Keokuk nor any other definite spot, Culpepper. I've thought about it and I know. It's the unknown. It must sound to you that I'm talking wildly and foolishly, but I won't allow it's either of those and I won't allow I'm to blame."

He dropped her arm from his at this, and walked back to her gate beside her with no further word.

"Good night," then he said. And yet he had asked her for her point of view upon it! She had always thought Culpepper fair!

Later in September Cousin Maria Buxton came down for a week's visit and shopping, and brought Selina a dress to add to her outfit for the warm climate. Cousin Maria was solid and handsome, as said before; her hair, still black, was parted and banded down to her ears about her strong and healthily florid face and her black eyes surveyed the world capably. The morning after her arrival she came into Mamma's room from her own room adjoining, which really was Auntie's, with the garment in question just taken from her trunk, hanging over her arm.

"It's a dress made last spring for one of Alice's girls. She's never had it on. They have so many they outgrow them before they get around to them."

Alice was one of Cousin Maria's two daughters by her first husband. She had married a prominent stock-farmer in her part of the state and was rich. The other had married a tobacco farmer and was rich likewise.

"Lavinia," pleaded Auntie, remindingly.

"I had said Selina never should wear finery again not her own," explained Mamma.

"Well, isn't it her own?" returned Cousin Maria emphatically, "and haven't you and Ann Eliza been playing mothers to my Culpepper? Come now, Lavinia, I shall be downright put out. Ann Eliza, you may as well give in."

As for Selina herself, standing by, the good ladies, as was their custom, never for a moment thought of allowing her a voice in the discussion at all!

It was a dear dress that she, used to being obedient, here was bidden to try on, just as Cousin Anna Tomlinson happening by, came upstairs. There was not much to it, though in that perhaps lay its appeal. Scant and slip-like, with a show of her pretty throat, and a show, too, of her slim nice ankles, it consisted of hand needlework on a texture of limp mull.

"Like our India muslins when we were young," Auntie was obliged to allow to Cousin Maria with satisfaction.

"Made by the sisters here in the convent on Madeleine Street," said Cousin Maria.

"I always meant to give Selina gold beads," said Cousin Anna.

"Why don't you give 'em then?" from Cousin Maria. "Selina, you look dear. With ankle-strap slippers and your finger in your mouth the way you had to be spanked out of, you'd seem about seven again. That's right, look pleased."

It was Mrs. Gwinne Tuttle, however, of all unpremeditated persons!—who gave Selina beads. She came trundling in just here to pay a visit to Auntie and her lifelong friend, Cousin Maria, leaving her carriage at the curb. Hearing voices upstairs, she came mounting up.

"As if Ann Eliza and Maria and I hadn't slept three in a bed in order to stay together, many a Friday night in our young days," she reminded Mamma. "I'd better add, we all were thinner then. Selina, that dress is something more like what it should be than the ones Anna here and Madame Vincent put on you and me. So you are going South, they tell me, with Pocahontas and my old friend, Marcia Boswell? I wish Pocahontas would make up her mind whom she's going to marry and do it. Huger with all his tobacco money, wants her, I hear, Maria, and young Mason, the jockey club's biggest man, is after her. Marcus Bruce is on her string, too, they tell me. She's too charming a person to grow restless and faddish, imagining she wants occupation and not a husband! That dress, Selina, with its round neck, needs beads."

There came a murmur from Cousin Anna.

"Well, who's keeping you from giving gold ones, Anna?" inquired Mrs. Tuttle. "I'm going to send Selina some beads on my own account. I owe her on a score she and I know about. I was tried that night of the musicale, Selina; two of my best soloists had failed me, and I can't seem to stand a person being apologetic and deprecatory anyhow. Why didn't you rise to it and tell me what you thought of me? My beads, Anna, are going to be coral, the coral of Selina's cheeks right now. The ingenue style of the dress and of Selina, call for coral."

"When a girl is young," said Cousin Maria, "I say have her look young."

"She does, Maria," returned Mrs. Tuttle. "Selina looks altogether young. She's pretty, too, and it's not going to hurt her to know it. It'll do her good instead, and give her spirit. I'm going down street and choose my corals now."

After Mrs. Tuttle and Cousin Anna both were gone, Cousin Maria broke forth: "I hope Diana Talbot isn't going to make a fiasco of her legacy with this school venture."

"We haven't heard anything about a legacy," said Mamma. "We liked Miss Diana very much when she called twice. She seemed very cheerful and certain about the school, and has offered Selina thirty-five dollars a month and her board and washing. She herself and the Episcopal minister at the place, so she said, are to teach the advanced classes."

"Diana is as cheerfully volatile and heady as the rest of the Talbots," claimed Cousin Maria. "They are in the county next to ours and I've known 'em always. Old Tom Talbot, the grandfather, built the first brandy distillery in the state in order to distill brandy from beets. Why, with corn everywhere and fortunes, too, to be made in sour-mash whisky, only a Talbot could say. He failed, of course, and later set out vineyards for claret on land that held fortunes in Burley tobacco. He had traveled and read too much to be practical, old Tom Talbot had."

"Why, of course," chimed in Auntie, "I remember the stories of him. He thought once he'd succeeded in making silk thread for weaving from milk-weed."

"It's in the blood," said Cousin Maria. "Bulkley Talbot, Tom's son, and Diana's father, had his craze planting yucca to make rope fiber with all his wife's inherited acres crying to God and nature for hemp. Diana's been kept down until now by her brothers who both married level-headed women who have kept them steady in harness themselves. In turn they've frowned down Diana until this last year when she came into a legacy of some several thousand dollars from an aunt. Immediately she disbanded the little school she had taught for half her life in her home town, and last fall went South. She said our winters were beginning to give her rheumatism and she was going down to sit on the equator or some of its tributaries and think things over. They tell me she has leased this hotel for two years, and I know she has had her school furniture shipped. I don't mean to discourage you, Selina. Diana is one of my old friends. In one sense you'll be as safe with her as with your mother here, or with Ann Eliza or myself. And I must say, too, I agree with Emmeline Tuttle that it looks freakish in Pocahontas to drag her aunt down there this early in the season that she may go to teaching when she doesn't have to. Young women didn't indulge in restlessness in my day."