There are Olympians in each group of us, and Mrs. Gwinne Tuttle not only was of the Olympians in Selina's community, but was held by some to be the Olympian. Such is the magic of pre-eminence the name Tuttle sounded chaste and euphonious to the ear.

Selina's aunt and this lady who had gone to school together and were old friends, met down street. If the weakness of Mrs. Tuttle, who was an august but kindly soul, lay in a palpable enjoyment in the overdressing of her large person, her virtues lay in a well-intentioned heart. Though the details of the meeting between these two ladies were not all given to Selina, what happened at the underwear counter of the drygoods store where they met, was this:

"Selina is teaching, Emmeline, teaching in a private way," Auntie told Mrs. Tuttle. "It does not pay, but it is an opening wedge," an explanation she made everybody.

"You mean to say, Ann Eliza Wistar, that Robert's child is old enough for that! Her name, Selina, is for your mother, I remember. And a mighty capable and resolute woman she is named for. That stock in our mothers one generation removed from pioneer blood and bone, was fine stock, Ann Eliza. How is Lavinia taking the child's doing it?"

"Well, she feels it's a pity, and so do I, and so, I think, does Robert. Selina is pretty, Emmeline."

"H'm, I see. I remember now she is. I used to see her once a year at least at the dancing school balls. You send her to me, Ann Eliza, whenever an invitation comes to her from me this winter. No, better, now I come to think about it, you tell her I want her at my house to-morrow night. I'm having a musicale. I'll look out for her. Somewhere before nine o'clock."

Selina reached home that day in excellent spirits anyway. She had been teaching her class of four for two months now, and William had been embarrassingly slow starting at reading in his first reader. He seemed to feel he had enough of reading when he finished his primer. This morning Mrs. Williams had come to her in the sewing-room, with reassuring news.

"We find William has begun to read at last, Selina. Day before yesterday he couldn't, and last night he seized his book, when we urged him, and deliberately read his father a page about a baby robin, without a mistake. We think it's wonderful how it's come about all at once."

Selina thought so, too, but was none the less relieved for that. Not that she was not conscientious, for with the best will in the world she was applying the printed page to her four pupils and her pupils to the page, the moment of flux unfortunately being unpredictable but exceedingly reassuring when it came. Evidently there is more in the phrase "born teacher" than she had been aware of, and she grew a bit heady with the relief of this news.

And here when she reached home was the invitation from Mrs. Tuttle awaiting her! Honors were crowding her! She and Mamma and Auntie talked it over eagerly at the lunch table.

"There's no ease like that from going about to the best places," said Mamma. "I can't be too glad this has come just when it has. It defines Selina's position. I don't suppose," musingly, "Amelia Williams ever was asked to the Tuttle home in her life. The McIntoshes never were anybody. Not that I'd have you mention to her, Selina, that you're going to this musicale."

"Emmeline's even more given to dress now than when she was a girl," said Auntie. "She had trimming in steel and jet all over the bosom of her dress this morning, and big as she is, it looked too much."

Just here, as Aunt Viney brought in the plum preserves for dessert, Culpepper walked in with a note from his mother, inclosed in his weekly letter from home.

"It says 'Ann Eliza' on the outside, ole miss, so I'll have to reckon it's for you."

Auntie took her note, then broke forth with the more immediate news happily: "Selina's going to a grown-up party at one of my old friend's to-morrow night."

Culpepper was bantering but practical. He got his pleasure out of these dear ladies, too. "Tomorrow night? How's she going to get there?"

True! They all three had forgotten! "To be sure, Selina!" said her mother, "it is your father's whist night."

"I can't see why she wants to go. I never see much in these things myself," from Culpepper, "but if you do, Selina, I'll come around and take you, wherever it is, and get you later and bring you home."

After he was gone Mamma and Auntie sang his praises. "It was both nice and thoughtful in him to remember about your father and his neighborhood whist club," said Mamma.

"I hope he's not inconveniencing himself to do it," from Auntie.

It would seem that all those honors right now crowding Selina were gone to her head. Resenting quite so much solicitude for Culpepper under the circumstances, she all but tossed that head.

"He wouldn't put himself out, let me assure you Mamma, and you, Auntie, too, if he didn't want to."

During the afternoon Cousin Anna Tomlinson, who lived a block away, came around, having heard the news through Aunt Viney, who had stopped to chat with the servants on her way to the grocery.

"I always meant to give Selina gold beads," she said as she came in, as if the enormity of the present crisis exonerated her from doing so now. "What has she to wear, Lavinia? Why certainly she can't go in her graduating dress. She's worn it on every occasion since she's had it. It's been dabby for some time."

Cousin Anna was rich, the money belonging to her and not to Cousin Willoughby Tomlinson, her husband. Her house impeccably swept and garnished, year after year, was brought up to date though nobody ever went there, Cousin Willoughby entertaining his friends at that newly established thing, the club. And Cousin Anna, who had finery in quantity though she never went anywhere, was fussily dressy, but in last year's clothes. Just as she could not bear to use her house, so time had to take the edge of value off her clothes before she wore them. She had a straight and unswerving backbone; her coiffure as she styled it, was elaborate; and she settled her watch chain and her rings constantly.

"And she is every bit as old as I am," Mamma never failed to say.

Cousin Willoughby Tomlinson's mother had been a Wistar, and it was commonly told among the older set, that he had tried for Emmeline Knight, she that was now Mrs. Gwinne Tuttle, before he came round to Cousin Anna.

This person gazed from Mamma to Auntie. "Certainly Selina can't be allowed to go to a Tuttle entertainment dabby," she said sharply. "You've never had a real dressmaker dress in your life, have you, Selina? Emmeline Tuttle is a little too inclined to look on her invitations as distributed favors. You're going to this musicale in a Vincent dress of mine, if you can wear it, and judging by the eye, I think you can. I'll go right home and send it round."

Madame Vincent was the last cry in the community among what Mamma and Cousin Anna and Auntie called mantua-makers.

Oh, why should the spirit of mortal be proud? Juliette Caldwell, little vivid, affectionate body, and Adele Carter, impersonation of consideration for others, coming over as Cousin Anna left, Selina snubbed them.

They were such slaving and believing followers of Maud! And she, Selina herself? Well, she was a follower, too, but with reservations. Maud recently had made sweeping assertions, saying that the group of them as social entities were sadly limited, and she followed up the charge by proposing they each commit a passage of poetry to heart each day, saying she had read, and this really was at base of the whole matter, that it would strengthen the mind, add to the vocabulary, and furnish food for quotation and ready repartee. At the time they all had agreed but Amanthus, who said she did not feel any need for vocabulary or repartee, and in truth as they could see, she did not need them in the least as assets in her business of life.

Juliette and Adele were come over now about this matter. They were full of enthusiasm.

"We were to begin with our committed passages to-day, you remember," explained Juliette.

"We both have ours," added Adele.

"I'm really pleased with my way of selecting," from Juliette. "I opened our volume of Scott and took the lines my eyes fell on:"

"Stern was her look and wild her air,
Back from her shoulders streamed her hair."

"I chose mine from a little volume of selections called 'Pearls of Wisdom,'" said Adele:

"Man's love is of man's life a thing apart,
'Tis woman's whole existence."

Selina was at both impatient and intolerant. "I was fearfully angry at Culpepper one day when he said that girls play at being educated and boys are educated. Sometimes I think Maud is responsible for our seeming to play at it. Don't you see, Judy dear, if there's anything really in this idea of Maud's you must choose your quotation? You want lines that are apt and quotable if you're going to do it at all? These of yours are relevant to nothing."

"You can't say that of mine," from Adele, pacific enough in general, but disposed to resent this manner toward Juliette, and from Selina of all persons, usually so full of concern and appreciation.

This undreamed of Selina answered promptly. "I certainly can't applaud your choice. Our sex should be the last to admit such an epigram exists."

Cousin Anna did not send the dress around until the next morning, a note to Mrs. Wistar which accompanied it, explaining the delay:

"Emmeline Tuttle is a little too pleased with being Emmeline Tuttle. I am sending a dress this moment home from Vincent for Selina to wear."

On reaching home from the morning's teaching, Selina came hurrying up to her mother's room to see it. Unboxed and laid on the bed, it was an impressive affair, and the color rushed to her cheeks, and her hands sought each other rapturously. Satin puffs in a high-light green obtruded through slashes in a myrtle-green satin waist and sleeves. From the throat arose something akin to a Medici collar, and the skirt flowed away in plenitude. A beaded headdress for the hair of a seemingly fish-net nature completed the whole.

There was no question Mrs. Wistar and Auntie were dubious. They looked their worry.

"Is it Mary, Queen of Scots, in a steel engraving, it makes me think of," from Auntie in an anxiously low voice to Mamma, "or is it Amy Robsart in our pictorial volume of Scott's heroines?"

"Madame Vincent is always so ahead and so extreme in her styles," fretted Mamma, "and yet," still more fretted, "Anna may be depended on never to forgive us if she isn't allowed to wear it."

They looked at Selina with her eager color and prettily disordered hair and shining eyes, already slipped out of her everyday dress of sober plaids, dear loving child, and before the mirror, trying on the dress from Cousin Anna.

"Mull and lace and a sash is the proper thing for her at her age, I don't care if her dress is dabby. And it's a poor rule to be beholden to anybody," held Auntie.

"We can't get her dress washed and ironed now," from Mrs. Wistar, "and she took her sash down town to be cleaned and has not gotten it home. We'll have to give in this time and let her wear this dress of Anna's."

"Come feel the satin of it, Mamma," exulted Selina, "put your cheek against its sheen, Auntie. Or can one feel a sheen?" she laughed happily. "Maud says let the love of dress get in your blood and it will poison your life at its spring, and you even might come to marry for what a man could give you! She meant it for Juliette who cried because her mother wouldn't let her have high heels to make her taller. But I'm not sure I see Maud's logic. When we marry, we take from the man anyhow, don't we? Why shouldn't one care then, in the ratio of what one takes? Don't look so shocked, Auntie, I'm only thinking it out."

"Sometimes, Selina," said Auntie, dismayed, "you talk like you weren't the girl we brought you up to be! The dress fits well enough, that's all I can say for it."

"It looks a little like a fancy costume," admitted Selina doubtfully, "but anyhow it's wonderful and I love it. I think, Auntie dear," reassuringly, "it isn't that Maud and the rest of us are undependable. It's that we want something, and we don't know what we want. When we're with people who're grandly mental, we think it's that, or religious, it's that, or when it's someone who's a social personage, then it seems as if it's that. Does it sound weak-minded Auntie, veering so?"

This evening of the musicale Culpepper came for Selina on the moment, which he did not always do, and he and she in her gorgeousness, went off gayly together, Mamma and Auntie seeing them to the door.

"She's really a child at heart, Lavinia," worried Auntie, after they were gone, "a child, I sometimes fear, that has had so little experience in life that it's pitiful. And yet this afternoon she spoke shockingly. I wouldn't have her too helpless and inexperienced, but neither would I have her lose her illusions. There's mighty little left a woman when she parts with these."

"If I only felt more comfortable in my mind about that dress," from Mrs. Wistar. "Sometimes I could wish I were a person of more courage and finality; I didn't want to let her wear it."

"No, I wouldn't want her to feel we had failed her about it," agreed Auntie. "I wouldn't want her ever to feel we'd failed her anywhere, but sometimes I'm afraid she's going to."