The last day of April Selina went to Eadston with her Aunt Juanita and her Uncle Bruce, to the wedding of Pocahontas and Marcus. In deference to the occasion the two came by for her on their way to the station in Uncle Taliaferro's hack, drawn by the two bony white horses.

"I'd like to be going," said Mamma, kissing Selina at the doorstep, "but to send a present and let you go—is all that could be thought of."

"Auntie," from Selina to this person in the doorway, "tell Culpepper I'll see Cousin Maria at the wedding, and give her the latest news about him."

She joined the two in their hack and from the start Uncle Bruce seemed outdone.

"I ought to be in Washington this very day. The case of the State against the Federal Banking Tax argued there this morning—" He kept up a furious little clicking with his tongue.

"Aurelius," from Aunt Juanita, "Marcus told you to have your hair cut and your beard trimmed. You haven't done it."

"Let him have his own hair cut! What's he got to do with mine? Have I ever in any way sought to impose my personal ideas and conclusions on him? Have I ever told him to get his hair cut?" Uncle Bruce glared.

"Well, it's all one to me," from Aunt Juanita indifferently. "I had it on my mind and now it's off and that's an end to it so far as I'm concerned."

There was to be worse from Uncle Bruce. The spring freshets were upon the land, and creeks and rivers were up. The wedding at Eadston was to be at six o'clock at the Boswell home. The train bearing the Bruces and Selina was late, held up by a wash-out, one hour, two hours, three hours! When they did reach Eadston and hurried out the station to the carriage waiting for them, there was one hour to spare. And of this ten minutes at least were consumed driving through the sleepy town and across the covered bridge beneath which the swollen river swept sullenly.

And another five minutes must have been consumed disembarking at the Boswell carriage block, their luggage being with them. Uncle Bruce had his umbrella somewhere, too, he insisted, and that found, a tin spectacle-case, much prized, was missing! You couldn't hurry Uncle Bruce! As well give in and turn about on the sidewalk while he plunged around in the recesses of the carriage hunting his property, and enjoy the dignified and fine old house in its wedding consciousness, its purple beeches in tender young leaf, its early magnolias in bloom. And to the side, beyond the borders of the box, and the gravel paths, one caught a gleam of the garden, and beyond it, as one knew, came the terraces overhanging the surging river now at its flood tide.

And at last they could go in, Uncle Bruce being ready! The servants awaiting them at the door, remembered Selina, a soft-voiced elderly one in spectacles taking charge of her and a second one of Aunt Juanita and Uncle Bruce.

And on the way upstairs, with scarce half an hour to the good now, the door of Pocahontas' room opened, and she calling a greeting to the older guests, stopped Selina, and kissed her through the half inch of space.

Selina found that she had her old room, familiar from the visit of a year ago, while Aunt Juanita and Uncle Bruce were in the room next to her. Lights, warm water, English tub, met with first at her former visit, towels, her dress-box thus quickly unstrapped, everything was ready and at hand!

She dressed swiftly. The green organdie was a joy and she wanted time at that stage of the toilet to get into it properly.

If Uncle Bruce had seemed like an irascible old lion peeved, earlier in the day, right now he was worse. In the next room just here he roared.

"Selina!" It was Aunt Juanita calling irascibly herself.

Selina struggling into her green dress, hurried in. Aunt Juanita was on a low chair changing her shoes with her bonnet still on. The effect, considering she'd taken off her dress, was startling. Uncle Bruce in his underwear, which ran around in stripes, sat on the bed and glared from out of the jungle of his hair and beard.

"You'll have to see if Marcus is anywhere in the house, Selina," from Aunt Juanita. "I can't do a thing with your Uncle Bruce."

"You've been a model and praiseworthy wife, Juanita, and I respect you for it," from Uncle Bruce. "You've never tried to do things with me. Damn my son's impertinence, does he think he can begin to do it now after all these years? I go to my telescope to get out my clothes and I take out a suit I do not recognize. And you tell me he's put it there in place of my own. That I'm to wear it. I'll be damned, he can be damned, we'll all be damned before I do. Have I ever interfered with him? Haven't I watched him going about in long hair and a waterproof cape he looked a durned fool in, and held my tongue? I've done my part by this wedding, too. I sent the lady my grandmother's pearls because you and he told me to, and wrote her a letter in addition. And I took him down to my vault box and gave him a bunch of securities, and when I found it was the wrong bunch, double in value, told him to keep it anyhow. I go to this wedding in the clothes I came in, since my others are missing, or I stay here as I am."

Selina had been desperately hooking her dress.

"Go find Marcus if he's here," said Aunt Juanita, who having buttoned her boots, now bethought her to untie and remove her bonnet.

Selina went and found Miss Boswell, serene and distinguished in her wedding array of silvery gray satin, and with her aid and that of the servants, Marcus was found, having arrived from the hotel with his bevy of newspaper friends, and betaken himself to the room given over to him.

When Selina returned with him, Uncle Bruce still in his striped underwear, had moved a big armchair under the gas and gotten out some documents from somewhere, and lit an evil-looking and smelling cigar, and dismissed the matter. Aunt Juanita had combed her hair and now was washing her face!

"Wear what you please, sir," said Marcus promptly. "Your dress clothes were sleek with age and misuse, but it was damned impertinent of me to interfere. I beg your pardon, sir, it was none of my business."

"The principle we as a family have always gone on," said Uncle Bruce. And getting up, he began to draw on the pepper and salt trousers he'd come to Eadston in. "You've got on a tie with flowing ends with evening dress, yourself, Marcus!" suddenly he paused to say. Uncle Bruce saw more than one thought for! "You've put it on to be in keeping with your bid for eccentricity. I only remark on it to let you know I hold my tongue as a matter of principle about other people's affairs, and not because I don't see 'em."

"Selina," said Aunt Juanita, "I've never had on this dress before, that the dressmaker saw fit to make me. Can you suggest what's wrong with it?"

"You've put it on with the buttons behind, when they ought to be before, Aunt Juanita. If you'll take it off I'll help you."

It was a gracious house for a wedding, the rooms so ample and the halls so generous. There were guests not only from Eadston but from the neighboring towns and counties, including Cousin Maria and her two daughters. And like Pocahontas herself, coming down the stairs in cloudy, trailing white on the arm of Marcus, everything was punctiliously correct and yet seemingly simple. After the ceremony Selina found herself at the bride's table between red-faced Mr. Mason, the rich young horseman she had met last spring, and Mr. Spragg from her own town, a colleague of Marcus', the city editor in fact of his paper. Beyond the bridal table, with its charming decorations, stretched small tables over the house and out on the porches.

"The bride is a wonderful woman," said Mr. Mason doughtily to Mr. Spragg on the other side of Selina. "What's she getting?"

They seemed to overlook the fact that she, Selina, the cousin of the groom, sat between them.

Mr. Spragg replied: "Exactly whatever he's planned to make of himself. He's gifted and smart as the next, and allows nothing to stand between him and his end. A brilliant editorial paragrapher, thus far, whom we're losing."

After supper Pocahontas within the cloud of her back-flung veil, found a moment to draw Selina within the shelter of an embowered window.

"Oh, my dear, my dear! And we were cheated of our promised long talk by that delay of your train! You've the sweetest eyes, Selina, I must tell you, looking at me, as now, all intent, impelling the truth from me whether I want to give it or no. But I do, and only that wash-out prevented much conversation. So listen to me sweetly and intently now. It means for me, Selina, all the difference of a life and intelligence satisfied, not hungry, that I waited and found myself, found what I was and what I wanted before I married. Selina, dearest little friend, I want you to have a compensating life, an experience rich and full in contact and opportunity. I tried to play Providence and arrange to some of these ends for you and see what I did in getting you down there to a school that was no school? Does Providence always resent the limited human interference? I wonder? Must the working out all be through the person's own will and character? Kiss me, Selina, while we're hidden away here. There will be no comfort in the general good-bye coming presently."

"I still resent Marcus, I feel I ought to be honest and say so," from Selina hurriedly.

"As if you had to tell me that," laughing. "As beauty is its own excuse for being, for example, Amanthus," laughing again, "you feel that temperament is its own excuse for using the rest of us—well—selfishly?"

"Miss Pocahontas!"

"I thought we dropped the 'Miss' by agreement some while back? And if I choose to be a handmaiden to temperament? If I happen to believe in the claims of temperament, and want my share in its later rewards and glories? Marcus and I understand each other, my dear; not for nothing have we thrashed out every step of the way. And now kiss me again. Our train leaves at midnight for the East, and from there we sail at once for our semi-tropical islands in their bluest of seas."

They were gone, and the guests were departed. Aunt Juanita in her wedding-gown of appalling magenta brocade and passamenterie, and Uncle Bruce in his pepper-and-salt everyday suit, were gone off to their room. There were left Cousin Maria Buxton, who was spending the night and who had on her famous dress of Brussels lace that had done service for ten years and so she claimed, was good to do it for ten more, Selina of the pale, pale hair and paler green dress, Miss Boswell in her silvery gray, and the servants in the background putting out lights and gathering up napery and glass and silver from the scattered tables.

Cousin Maria who had insisted they all sit down for a breathing space and a pow-wow over the evening, was full of gratulation over all points of the affair but the groom. Here she stoutly proclaimed herself pessimistic.

"Juanita's gone and so we can talk. Marcus has followed his own bent ever since the hour she brought him into the world and returned to her own engrossments. He personifies unthwarted, undeterred individuality. The sort of thing they tell me young people are all beginning to clamor for these days. I don't know myself; my own minded me while they were under my roof, right or wrong; it was my way. But to get back to Marcus. Pocahontas is as adaptable as a person often is, but even so——"

Miss Marcia Boswell, very pleasing in her charming gown, looked undisturbed. "In the first place Pocahontas is probably the only person in the world Marcus relies on to put him right. He's a wonderful idea of her good taste and her judgment. As for Pocahontas, she's gone about the world all her life. She was left by herself at school in Switzerland the first time when she was eight years old. She generally has a perfectly intelligent idea of what a situation demands of her. And also of what she on her side demands of it. I wish most young married people understood what they want as well as these two seem to. Pocahontas and Marcus both see a future man of letters in Marcus. They are entirely one in what they're planning on this basis in life."

When Selina went up to her room, she sat and thought about it all. "Unthwarted and undeterred individuality!" This it was then in Marcus which she had called selfishness! Was it selfishness, nevertheless, under another name? Or was it the courage of a pronounced character? And were young people these days beginning to clamor for it? And was it better or worse for them who secured it?

Selina sat and thought. She wanted, Oh, she wanted to find—truth.

Selina and her aunt and uncle went home the next day. She watched the flying scene from the car window: the swirling, turbulent creek whose rocky bed the track followed; the towering walls of limestone cliffs mounting from the foaming, brawling water, their ledges white with dogwood and rosy with red-bud and green like Selina's own pretty dress, with the pale verdure of April.

Selina was nearing nineteen now. She watched this flying glory of freshet and cliffs and April flowering, but her thoughts were with Pocahontas whom she loved, and Marcus whom despite all she so resented. If anyone had told her that day would come when the personal equation as the factor, would have faded, and to recall this trip to Eadston for the wedding would be to see tumbling waters, wild gray cliffs and tender tints of April, she would have refuted it with young scorn.

She turned from the car window and spoke to her aunt. This person's bonnet was over one ear, and her breastpin was unfastened and dangling, but she looked at peace since the thing requiring all this recent sacrifice of a trip to Eadston of her was over.

"Miss Boswell says Pocahontas stands ready to complement—that's the word she used to you when she was talking about it this morning—whatever Marcus chooses in life. She, not he, it seems. I suppose the justification is that he considers he's got the talent to be exploited and not she."

Aunt Juanita responded but absently. She'd done her part by her son's wedding now, and was through with it, and it distracted her to have her mind drawn any longer from her own affairs.

"Marcus has to go the way he feels driven, naturally. We all have to if we're going to amount to any force at all. Selina," abruptly, "I seem to recall in the prospectus of that school you went South to teach in, and which Lavinia gave me to read, that you went down there to do something or other secretarial?"

Selina changed countenance. It's hard to live down a false position, apparently, but she wasn't going to have these assumptions hanging over her any longer. "I know now that I didn't realize what it was I was undertaking and agreed to it because I wanted so much to go. Why, Aunt Juanita?"

"Mrs. Higginson and I are going to need some help. We're willing to give a hundred dollars each to the advancing of the cause of women, for printing, postage and some clerical assistance. That word secretarial made me think about you. We'll probably need you and one or two more as well, for a morning or so every week, directing envelopes and putting stamps on. I plan to turn my library into working quarters."

"Will I do, Aunt Juanita?" anxiously. "I'd like to try. And I might ask Maud and Juliette. What will we have to do?"

"Get together lists of the women we want to reach and their addresses." Aunt Juanita was perfectly definite. "Direct and stamp circular reports of what women through organization are doing elsewhere, mark articles in the daily newspapers we'll have printed there and mail these like the circulars. There's so much that might be done it's hard to decide on just what not to do. Aurelius," this to Uncle Bruce deep in his newspaper on the seat in front of them, "I want a list of the women in town who pay taxes on property in their own name." Then to Selina, "We'll find more intelligence among these coming from tending to their own affairs. We'll need it, too. There'll likely prove to be too few of them to raise the general level of intelligence of the rest, woman of the helpless, indeterminate kind I mean, your mother for example, and Miss Ann Eliza, who don't know the first thing about their affairs and are content not to know."

Their train pulled into the shed about eight in the evening. Selina was in the care of her aunt and uncle, but nevertheless had a feeling that some more especial escort of her own, say Culpepper, with whom she was good friends again, or if not he, Tuttle Jones, would be there waiting for her.

What she had not thought about was what happened. Tuttle and Culpepper both were there, Tuttle at the gate talking to the gate-keeper, Culpepper a moment late, as usual, hurrying up through the crowd. Oddly enough he merely shook hands around, inquired if there was anything in the way of baggage to look after, said good-bye curtly and left them.

Afterward Aunt Juanita spoke about it. "Now Selina, do be sensible, if, being Lavinia's child, you can. Shutting your eyes to the obvious is only patterning after the ostrich. It was perfectly patent those two absurd young men there at the station were taking each other's measure."