The night was mild. When Culpepper and Selina reached the car-line on a nearby street, the car with its two jogging little mules was in sight. "There comes the car, and here comes the moon," said Culpepper. "Shall we ride or walk?"

They walked.

Now Selina and her girl friends knew a sufficient number of boys, always had known a plentiful number in fact, Tommy and Bliss and Brent and the rest, as she termed them. Culpepper, however, was not of these: he was older, he was from away and he was studying law; many reasons in fact combined to make it gratifying to have it Culpepper.

He with three other law students had rooms including a common sitting-room over a confectionery, where ordinarily young men away from home in the city would have been in boarding houses. From information dropped by Culpepper, they smoked pipes and played chess and read books by writers known as Darwin and Spencer and Buckle. That they were bold and buccaneeringly adventurous figures thus may be seen.

Added to all this, Culpepper did not care for girls, Selina being the only one he went with, and further, he had been so used to a big family connection and an overflowing house and habitual hubbub, Cousin Maria Buxton, his stepmother, being related to everybody in her part of the state, that his avowed dislike to gatherings and affairs was genuine.

"You men don't like to do a thing, and you say so and don't do it," wondered Selina; "Papa gave up night church long ago, and Mamma who loves to go, had to accommodate herself to it."

Culpepper defended his sex. "We're honest. You're not, women as a class, I mean. My stepmother is, but then she's independent."

"Independent?"

"Has her own means and manages her own affairs. It makes the rest of you propitiatory," bluntly.

"Propitiatory? What does?"

"Taking money as it's doled to you, or doing without."

They had reached the Tuttle house now in its broad yard. Carriages were arriving, delivering their occupants at the curb and driving away. Culpepper steered Selina in at the gate, up the flagging, and with her mounted the steps.

"I'm glad it's you and not me," was his cheering remark.

Selina herself was not feeling so glad about it all at once. Why had she not wondered earlier if any persons she knew would be here?

As the door opened to admit guests just ahead of them and the light fell on the lady entering and on her evening wrap bordered with swansdown, that elegance of the hour, Selina became conscious of Mamma's knitted throw on her head and Auntie's striped scarf about her shoulders.

"You—you'll be for me on time?" she reminded Culpepper, "Mamma thought half-past eleven at the latest?"

"Can you fancy I won't?" he returned, handing her in at the door, which was a nice way of putting it and a good deal from him.

Evidently it is one thing to be within the gay world and another to be of this world, and Selina in her striped scarf made her way hurriedly up the stairs. And a dressing-room filled with ladies, who know each other and who do not know you, presents parallels with Polar regions for chill and solitudes. Glances fell on her but they passed her over, or traveled elsewhere or beyond.

Moods have a protean way of changing from roseate hues to grayness. Even the sustaining glory of Cousin Anna's dress seemed threatened, for as the maid removed the striped scarf, it appeared according to the cheval glass, that the radiance of spirit which earlier had appropriated the gown to its wearer, had flickered and expired, leaving the one Cousin Anna's, and the other, Selina Wistar, frightened and ill at ease and unforgivably young.

She moved with the company out into the hall and down the stairs. The walls were white and gold, paneled, and the stair covering was crimson; there were niches on the landing and again down the further flight of the stairs, from which looked busts of, so far as Selina knew, male Tuttles in white marble. It was august and costly and subduing, and though she had yet to live to be told it, Victorian and lamentable.

The parlors as seen through the arched entrances as she came reluctantly down the steps, were spacious, with crimson carpets of a piece with that in the halls, pier glasses, crimson curtains and gilt cornices, marble mantels outvying the niched busts for whiteness, prism chandeliers and gilt chairs in rows for the approaching musicale.

Mrs. Tuttle was stationed in the first parlor and by custom or arrangement or understanding everything fell away from her as it were, or so it seemed to Selina as she made her way in, the guests as they were presented retreating into the background of the far parlor.

A young man of such distinguished and easy appearance as to suggest new standards for judgment of Tommy and Bliss and Brent and the rest, handed the guests on to the person of the hostess. He proved to be Mr. Tuttle Jones, a nephew of the lady's deceased husband. Selina having in time thus reached Mrs. Tuttle, raised her eyes.

In the full enjoyment of her large person's sartorial splendor stood this lady, satin puffs in a high-light salmon, obtruding through slashes in a crimson satin waist and sleeves, from the open throat of which arose something akin to a Medici collar, the skirt flowing away in plenitude and a beaded headdress of a seemingly fish-net texture, completing the whole.

And in the pier glass just behind Mrs. Tuttle, and repeated again and again and yet and yet again from a confronting pier glass at the far end of the adjoining parlor, appeared a half dozen, a dozen, a hundred, was it a thousand reflected Selinas in myrtle and high-light greens, puffs, slashes, and netted headdress, vanishing into perspective? And multitudes upon multitudes grouped about the back parlor, or so it seemed to Selina, looking on.

So, it was the person of that young niece of Ann Eliza Wistar's that Mrs. Tuttle was gazing on? This lady never was known not to speak her mind.

"If Vincent made that dress for you, Selina, she's a fool."

The mirrors repeated the accusation, but they repeated the salmon and crimson person of Mrs. Tuttle, too. She was not one to spare herself at all.

"And when I allowed her to make its original, or its replica as the case may be, for me, I was another."

Selina found speech small and arriving from far. "Cousin Anna Tomlinson sent the dress around so that I could come."

"Well, as for Anna Pope, by the grace of God, Tomlinson, there's never been any doubt in anybody's mind, she's a fool. As for Vincent, it's sheer perfidy! Go over there, in the next room, this one is cleared for the piano and the performers. Find a chair, get a place, I'll send someone to you, but for the land's sake, go and don't come back near me."

Selina hurriedly sought a gilded chair in an unobtrusive position, which as the evening went on proved to be an island solitude in an immediate waste of vacant chairs. She had not even a program to bury herself in. True, Mr. Tuttle Jones, the nephew, came and sat with her through a pianoforte number, but at its close he left, to come again in time with a second polite but perfunctory young man who also in time departed.

Then it happened. Selina never will forget it, never. A vocal number 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?"