About half-past eight Culpepper Buxton arrived at the Wistar house. He was good-humored and unruffled. Selina had turned him down the evening before for the first time in history. The pretty and lovable little minx! She was waking then! Juliette, who was clever with her dark eyes and her flashing smiles, or Amanthus herself, could not have done it any better.

As he came up, Selina was at the door saying good night to a stout, rather pleasant-voiced person.

He waited until this guest had gone, then went in with Selina.

"Who's your friend?" inquired Culpepper.

Selina diagramed the lady and her business briefly, so briefly that Culpepper might have taken it as cue to drop a dangerous subject. "She has to take an examination and wants me to coach her for it."

But Culpepper, in his unruffled good humor, failed to know his cue. "That's good. Just the sort of thing you've been wanting. No?"

For Selina, having started to push chairs and footstools back into place, here ceased abruptly and swung about on him furiously. "It's not good. I loathe everything she stands for. I hate shabbiness. I hate poverty, I don't like to be near either of them, they always seem to be reaching out fingers to drag me down to them. You're altogether and entirely wrong. I don't want to teach Miss McRanney."

Hoity-toity! As Culpepper's stepmother used to say to his early and childish bursts of temper. She was a little minx all at once! He didn't know that he'd put up with it.

"You'd better not teach her then, you won't do it halfway right," from Culpepper coolly.

"You're very priggish," from Selina, in return, and hot as he was cool. "You speak, I suppose, from the heights of masculine superiority?"

"I'll run on up to ole Miss' door, if I may," from Culpepper. "I've a message for her in my home letter to-day from my mother, and I want to get back to the rooms. We've a crowd on for to-night by nine."

She heard him run up the stairs, tap at her aunt's door, and at the answer, enter. Whereupon she herself sped up the steps, too, and past that door and in at her own, which she closed softly, if passionately. When he came down again, to call a cool good-bye as he went out, he should not find her waiting there!

Within her room this child, Selina, young and crude, her tragedies pitiful in their tininess but tragedies to her none the less who did not know them for tiny, fell on her knees beside her big and tolerated poster-bed, and sobbed into her marseilles spread, and passionately arraigned that which she called God. First, because Culpepper had hurt her feelings and next, though she would not have admitted either, because she did not want to teach Miss Emma McRanney. For while Selina said her formulas in prayer, night and morning, dutifully and on her knees, it was only in moments of hurt and passionate outcry against the hurt that she really approached her God. Though she, dear child, did not know this.

Self-examined, even here now upon her knees, she would have decided and honestly so far as she was concerned in the opinion, that she was a religious person. She had been brought up so to be. On her little book-rack on her table, stood her Bible, her Thomas À Kempis, "The Lives of the Saints" (in miniature, a rather daring acquisition which pleased her, savoring of Rome as it did), "The History of the Church and Its Liturgy," and a few other volumes. She even felt that she was rather better informed in religious matters than her friends, and in some ways, more catholic in her interests. She talked predestination and free-will with Maud; St. Francis of Assisi, St. Paul and conversion with Juliette, who longed for a light from Heaven; conscience and duty with Adele, and even life after death; and she and Maud found themselves in conversation on virgin birth with a converted Armenian lady missionary staying at Maud's house, though with a startled consciousness, in the light of the lady's contribution to the subject, that they evidently did not know either what they or she were talking about.

Selina, honest child, looked on matters such as these as being religious. It did not dawn on her that it was only when the world went amiss for her that she prayed. Only at times, such as now, after the door was pushed to and the bolt passionately shot, and she fell on her knees to that Something brooding somehow and somewhere above its created creatures, only when she held out her arms to it and cried to it through sobs, and even though that cry be but appeal against her own discomfiture, that she prayed, that she ever had prayed, ever had sought a God through need.

"I want admiration for what I am, I want applause for what I do, I want my part to be favored and enviable according to my choosing of what is favored and enviable," may be said to be the unformulated gist of this unwitting child's poor little human prayer.

As indeed, for the pitiful part of that, it is the prayer of millions of us, every day. But prayer for all its paucity, prayer for all that.

And meanwhile in Auntie's room, a room of ponderous mahogany akin to Selina's, with a great deal of red and an equally cheerful predominance of green in carpet, curtains and lambrequin, she and Culpepper were having a real heart-to-heart confidence.

"I didn't suppose she'd tiff with me. What's got in her all at once, ole Miss?"

Ole Miss patted the hand that was holding hers. They were mighty fond of each other, these two, to use their own vernacular about it. But she didn't reply. Yet there was that in her manner which implied she could have done so if she would.

"What's the use us two beating about the bush with each other, ole sport?" from Culpepper, who meant she should. "You know just as well as my mother, or Cousin Robert, and I've made a clean breast to 'em both, what's the state I'm in as to Selina. The trouble's the other way round. When she was about ten or eleven, up there at home in the summers, I used to catch and kiss her to tease her. I don't believe she'd read a bit more in it if I caught her and did it now."

Ole Miss spoke. "There never can be but one first for a girl, Culpepper. There never was but the one, first and last, for me. I'd like you to know that it was your father. The truth with Selina is, she's waking. She's cross because she's coming to be conscious. It's a trying time and we're human, and we've all got tempers. I think it will break my old worthless heart if it's Emmeline's Tuttle Jones, and not John Buxton's Culpepper who's responsible for it."

A pause. Then a breath long and deep and gloriously big and gloriously confident from Culpepper.

"And that's it! You've put heart in me altogether, ole sport! You've pointed me the road and shown me the gait. Gimme one before I go, like a real lady!"

Ole Miss roused to her own defence. "Stop right now, Culpepper. No, I don't want to be mauled and teased, stop smacking that kiss into my ear—well, put it on my cheek if that's what you meant to do. No, I won't discuss the subject further either now or any other time. I haven't another word to say concerning it, and if that's what you're waiting for, you may as well go long."