"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?"

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

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.

It almost would seem that Auntie agreed with Amanthus. "Selina's quite pretty enough, Lavinia, to do without this foolishness," she insisted. "It isn't on account of any brains she's got, or any she'll come to have, for example, that Culpepper comes round here. Selina's pretty and sweet and she looks up to him. So far as he and any other men she's likely to meet go, what on earth more do they want in her? I'm an old maid but I know."