Miss McRanney proved worth while enough, and rather good fun if Selina would have allowed this. She arrived on the appointed evening with a satchel of schoolbooks and an avowed poor opinion of examinations as tests of teachers. She followed Selina to the dining-room where they were to work, and where Auntie was lingering to say howdy, and as she emptied the satchel of the textbooks, emptied her mind of this opinion.

"Drat such a test, it's all wrong. What life asks teachers to put into their pupils, or get out of them, as you prefer it, is character. To take a wild flight into the fanciful, and I'm not strong there, one might call it the universal language recognized everywhere and anywhere, whether in a Choctaw or a Charlemagne. Right now I couldn't pass the examination that gave me that valedictory at eighteen, no, Miss Ann Eliza, and don't look so distressed about it, not if Mazeppa's ride in duplicate for me was the consequence of failing. Whereas any character I've got of my own to help a child to his, I've found since then."

"Any character you've got, Emma?" from Auntie indignantly. "And starting out again at forty?" The wild daring of this act, as she saw it, seemed to fascinate Auntie.

"Well," said Miss Emma, "he must needs go whom the devil doth drive, my devil having been necessity. I've never had a man to rest back on, or I probably would have done so. However we're keeping Selina waiting. The digressions of middle age are mighty tiresome, aren't they, Selina? Well, don't forget they are when you get there. Since I've got to pass this examination I suppose we'd better get to work, especially in your specialties, algebra and Latin, that are my pitfalls."

The next lesson came on a Monday evening and Miss Emma had been at church the day before. "There's many a thing to amuse a body, Selina," she said good-humoredly as she took off her wraps. "I earn my way and occupy my small place in the army of producers. The rest of the women in that congregation of ours live sweetly and unconcernedly upon the general store that other people produce. And yet, if their unfailing and admirably ordered patronage of me could overwhelm, I'd long ago have been washed away in the flood."

Auntie's voice expostulating, came in from the next room where she was reading the paper laid down by Papa. "Why Emma——"

"Here, keep out of this, Miss Aunt Eliza. I'm talking to the next generation. I want to point out a few things to it that may make the way easier for its journeying. Selina, if you're going to teach, come on along with me and take this examination and get your certificate. You've got something to show then, something to go on so long as the public demands certificates."

Selina had been thinking about this herself, and wishing she'd done it sooner. If the suggestion had come from anyone but Miss Emma she'd have taken it. As it was——

"What pitiful fools we are!" from Miss Emma at the next lesson. "Far from respecting my job when I first started out teaching, and getting everything out of it there was in it for me and everybody else, I lost my first years at it being ashamed of it. Nowadays I set type well, the job seeks me, and I don't mind saying so. I'll have to feel this same capacity in myself for the new job if I get it. It's a good thing to feel, capacity in yourself for your work, and respect for yourself in it."

The doorbell rang. Of course! The wonder to Selina had been that it hadn't rung before on these lesson evenings. The fear that it would ring had been one among many reasons she was so averse to the undertaking. Papa, however, had his instructions in this event to close the folding doors and leave them to their work in the dining-room undisturbed. But Papa now forgot the folding doors. He opened the front door and after a moment's delay in the hall for the removal of hat and coat, ushered the caller in.

It was Mr. Tuttle Jones. Again, of course! Who could Selina less have wanted it to be?

And here at the dining-table, all too visible to the front room, sat Miss Emma McRanney, plain, shabby and busy. Her textbooks, open over the table, were shabby as herself, and unlovely. Her hands showed manual work. Selina was ashamed of Miss McRanney, ashamed of teaching Miss McRanney, ashamed of being found thus teaching her by Tuttle Jones. Alas for you, Mamma, once again! You with your strained anxiety, your every effort bent toward that front in life which must be kept up! Your one ewe lamb would have been the happier for the truer values held by Auntie!

Mr. Jones came smilingly back through the parlor to the dining-room, his hand outstretched to—not Selina at all, but Miss McRanney! Indeed, and indeed, you never can tell!

"Well, Tuttle, and how's your mother?" from this lady. "Tuttle's mother and I are old friends from grade and high school days, Selina. Admirable and democratic meeting-ground for the classes with the masses," dryly. "How'd you say your mother is, Tuttle?"

"Quite well. Miss Emma, and grumbling only yesterday that you'd not been around for a month to put her in a better humor with the world. What's wrong with my telling her you'll come for dinner Sunday?" He was shaking hands with Selina now. "But I'm in the way here?"

Selina was overswept with a passion of loathing for herself, and a need for abasement and self-punishment.

"Miss Emma came to me to get some coaching and's finding I'm a very poor teacher. Oh, but she is, and she's too considerate and kind to say so. For fifteen minutes now she's been showing me how to do a page in algebra I, the teacher, couldn't show her."

"Sit down, Tuttle," from Miss Emma, cheerfully, "and see what's wrong. I'll be jiggered if I've got it either. Figures used to be your strong suit when you were a boy."

Selina meant for herself to go the whole way now. Being ashamed, she was very much ashamed. "I've been following every clue and chance for teaching I could hear of since I came home in November," she told Tuttle, "and nobody wanted me. I never quite understood until Miss Emma pointed out that I wasn't qualified as a teacher. I'm going to try for a certificate along with her in March."

Miss Emma nodded approval. "Now she's talking, Tuttle. Get busy and applaud her. This child's been going through that circle of purgatory Dante forgot to set down, finding herself a woman that's got to make her way, and taking her cue from the rest of the woman world, ashamed of the fact."

Selina dropped her head right down on the page of the open textbook before her on the table. The sob was coming and she could not stop it. Bye and bye when the pretty head with its masses of flaxen hair lifted, they all laughed together. For Miss Emma McRanney was chafing one of Selina's hands and Tuttle Jones the other one.

Culpepper's visits these days were to Auntie. He got in the way of running in and up to her room for a brief while in the evenings, and out again.

"She won't have a thing to do with me, ole Miss, and there's nothing for it but for me to take my medicine! 'Oh, yes, she's quite well, thank you!' when I do stop and speak to her 'and very busy.' She's not only getting Miss McRanney ready as far as she knows how, but trying to get herself ready for these examinations in March. That's about what she says to me, coolly and loftily, and goes on about her own affairs."

"I don't like it at all," from Auntie, stoutly, "And here's Emmeline's Tuttle around every lesson night looking like a model out of a store window, helping them with their algebra, both Emma and Selina." Auntie was innocent of guile. "It's his specialty, too, it seems," she added lamentingly.

"Why don't he stay where he's put?" grumbled Culpepper. "He's a dude, a dandy dude, you can tell it by his fashion, can't you, ole Miss? What's he got to do with our nice, humble, worthy ways, and with our Selina and her problems? I ask you that!"

There came a morning late in March when Miss Emma McRanney at nine-thirty, in her 'plain but perfectly genteel' best wool dress, stood waiting at the drugstore over which she lived, instead of being at the Institute mounted on a stool, and wearing a blue calico apron with sleeves, setting type.

Nor had she waited above two minutes when a rather breathless young person came hurrying in. A moderately tall, slim, pretty girl, with a good deal of flaxen hair, in obviously her soberest wool dress, and quietest head-gear.

"On time, am I, Miss Emma? After lying awake half the night saying over lists of dates and rules and the rest of it, I overslept this morning and Mamma wouldn't wake me."

"Plenty of time, Selina. At least you don't have to worry about your particular specialties, algebra and Latin——"

"Now, Miss Emma, you said you wouldn't——"

"Whereas between you and me, Selina, I'm weakest if anything in the one that's Tuttle's specialty too——"

They boarded the street car, the stout, plain lady in her best wool dress, and the slim, pretty girl in her plainest dress. When they alighted before a tall, broad, ugly brick building that bore above its central doorway the words, "Board of Education," a clock in a neighboring steeple said five minutes of ten.

"And the examinations are at ten. We're just in good time, Selina," said Miss Emma McRanney.

One week from that day Selina Wistar arriving at her own gate at dusk from one direction, she had walked home from the office of the Board of Education in truth, to avoid getting there any sooner than she had to, met Miss Emma McRanney arriving from the other direction.

If one did not fear conveying the impression that Selina was fast lapsing into an eighteenth century heroine so far as weeping goes, it could be mentioned there was that about her face, despite the dusk, which showed she had been crying. Just a preparatory cry, perhaps, of a scalding tear or two, that could be permitted as she hurried along in the dusk, and would not be noticed—an abeyant tear as it were, pending the unrestrained flow that would come when seclusion and her own room were reached.

"Well, Selina," from Miss Emma, cheerfully, "it's all over for me. I've just been by the school office to get my report. I'm a type-setter who knows her job and is doomed to stick at it. What—what? Don't tell me you've gone and failed, too?"

"Oh, Miss Emma——"

"Now, Selina, don't tell me a further thing, don't tell me you fell down in your own specialties——"

"Miss Emma——"

"Well, well, now that's exactly what I was afraid I'd do and that I did, but I'd said from the start they were my weaknesses."

Selina was crying bitterly.

"My child," from Miss Emma, "it isn't worth it. You've gained enough in other things to make up for the lost certificate. And as for me, I've something that will comfort you, that I've known for two days. It made my middle-aged blood so hot I didn't know if I'd take the place if I could get it. It's almost as despicable a thing to be a woman, as I discovered it was to be an orphan, Selina, and very seldom more remunerative to the individual. At the last meeting of the board out at the Institute, they agreed, to a man, in giving this place to a woman, that it wasn't worth as much, and reduced the salary to exactly what I'm getting now. They did the same thing when they gave me my present job as type-setter. No, I won't come in, thank you. I've got to get on home. One thing I'm as adamant about. I can't feel those blind babies would have missed that Latin and algebra in me, and I've been hungry to teach 'em ever since I've been there. Good night! I'm coming around some evening soon, with Tuttle. We've a date, so it's not good-bye."

Whereupon Selina fled into the house and up to her room, and although, this time, it was an absolutely fresh marseilles spread, put on clean that morning, flung herself upon it and cried and cried and cried bitterly.

Mamma came in, worried and indignant. "Why did Emma McRanney expect you to know more than she did and instruct her? It was a good deal for her to ask anyway. And I'm sure you've just said you failed, too. Why should all your worry be for her?"

Auntie came in. "I'm sure Emma knows you did your best, Selina. And think what you've gained? A real friend in a real woman like Emma?"

That night alone in her room, Selina took her pen and her paper. The note she wrote was to Culpepper whom she had ignored for six long weeks, and it said:

Dear Culpepper:

I want to tell you that I've been hateful and I am sorry. I did try, however, with my pupil after the first, and try my best. Evidently my best is an inadequate thing, and unflattering to me, for she has failed. And, deciding to try for a certificate, myself, I have failed, too.

Selina.