It seemed to Selina that at times she failed to get the satisfaction from her mother she could have desired.

"Mamma," she said to this little person the morning after the Harrison tea-party, "I can't be comfortable while I owe that fifty dollars to Cousin Anna Tomlinson."

"I'm glad to hear that," from Auntie in her own room through the open door.

Mrs. Wistar, however, spoke from her place at the window almost peevishly.

"Why must you bring up uncomfortable subjects, Selina? And here it is eleven o'clock in the morning and the house just straightened and I this moment sitting down to my church paper!"

"But Mamma, I've kept hoping you'd say something about it. You haven't and I felt I'd have to ask you."

"I try to spare people, myself," severely. "And just as long as I did not speak you might know it was because there was nothing to say. I must say I think Anna is niggardly to want it back. But one can't help one's blood and she's a Pope. 'Hungry as a Pope nigger,' the saying used to be in slave times, or was it a Groghan nigger? Yes, I believe it was a Groghan."

"You haven't spoken to Papa about it? Then I'm going to, Mamma," Selina spoke with irritation. Her moods were uncertain these days.

She opened the door to her father that evening. It was a raw and shivery day. She helped him off with his coat and followed him back to the stove in the hall where he stood warming his hands at the glowing mica. By some unfortunate chance his glance wandered about, resting on the shabby papering and paint, the old sofa, the carpet worn to a monotone almost guiltless of pattern.

"Pretty hopeless, Selina? Everything past even patching up this time?"

"Papa, why did you take this evening to say it? When I'm here to worry you more? It's hateful to come to you only for one sort of thing. I'm looking about, I'm telling everybody I want almost any sort of teaching, but in the meantime I'm worrying about that money I owe Cousin Anna."

Her father smiled. He was a comfort in his looks, tall, slight and refined. "I returned the loan to Anna the day after you came home."

"Papa!" She forgot her relief in her greater feeling of indignation. The debt was paid and he had not told her! Had not mentioned it to her mother! She resented it, and only the timidity of a life-time where he was concerned kept her from saying so.

He was continuing gazing at the glowing mica rather than at her. "I don't mean the money is not still owing, only that it's always better, or seems so to me, to owe on a business footing and not a personal one. Especially I've never had a fancy for owing one's relations," dryly.

"Papa?" The tone was different now. He was taking her into his counsels where she ought to be. Indignation had given place to understanding of the situation and sympathy.

"Selina?"

"I'm wondering why I haven't come to you about every sort of thing? It's very satisfactory when I do come."

"Thank you, Selina."

"I'm wondering, seriously wondering, why I haven't come all this time?"

"I'm to regard this as an arraignment?" smiling.

"Arraignment, Papa?"

"Of my American fatherhood? That I've allowed my womenkind to usurp my prerogatives? That it's being borne in on you and me, that somehow we've been kept out of our rights in each other?"

Selina hesitated. Then, "Papa, may I ask you something else?"

"It's because you haven't, we're both complaining."

"It's this," her color came and went a little rapidly, but she stood to her colors; "since you did settle this matter with Cousin Anna, don't you think it was only fair to have told Mamma and me?"

"Is indictment added to arraignment, Selina? Culpable as a husband as well as a father?"

"Papa, I didn't say so." She threw herself on him, this fair-haired daughter, and went to crying with her face and tears on his poor innocent shirt-front, and her arm around his neck. It was sweet to have her there, and so new and rare a thing for him to see anything but the veriest surface of her nature, that he was willing to take the toll of her tears from her to receive the rest.

Selina was a creature of many moods these days. She said she wanted work and when it came she acted as badly as possible about it.

This same evening as she and her three elders were finishing dinner, the doorbell rang. Miss Emma McRanney who went to the same church as the Wistars and who set type at the State Institute for the Blind, followed Aunt Viney into the front parlor. Auntie and Papa who were through their meal, went in at once to speak to her, and Mamma, waiting only to finish her bit of pudding, followed.

Selina poured more cream on her own bit of pudding, and dallied. In her present mood, though what that mood was she hardly could have said herself, other than it savored of a captious disposition to be short with everybody and everything, she felt the one thing she couldn't stand was Miss McRanney. It wasn't that she disliked this person herself so much as she disliked the thing that characterized her.

"It's her air of having accepted," Selina told her pudding crossly, with a vicious stab with her spoon into it, "of having accepted and stayed decently cheerful at that!"

Accepted! Given in and taken your allotment, however meager, and settled down to it! It's a thing youth cannot conceive of, cannot forgive. For Selina's part, passionately communing with her pudding, she never would accept. Nothing ever, ever, should make her consent to feel poor or to give in to shabbiness. She might be and was amid both these conditions, but nothing but her own will and submission could make her of them. It was feeling this way about them, loathing them, repudiating them, refusing to admit them, that made them possible.

Her elders as they went in the parlor had shaken hands with the visitor, a thick-set person with large features, whose dress, cloak, and hat, Mamma would have described as "plain but perfectly decent and genteel."

Time was when Selina thought this kindly and cordial attitude of her family toward Miss McRanney came from pity of her because she worked. She knew now that it was because they considered her a fine woman. But, for Selina's part, and again she stabbed the wee remaining morsel of her pudding—if fine character consists in cheerful acceptance of a sordid lot, then she had no patience with it herself. The thing is to repudiate any such lot.

Miss McRanney had a paralytic brother, a black sheep whose by-gone peccadilloes had left the two of them poorer even than they might have been. She lived with this brother in rooms over a drugstore, setting type from nine to five and taking care of him and doing light housekeeping between times. It was a shabby and unrelieved picture. Selina hated it. She hated another thing, too—though this one she would not admit—she hated the thought of herself as a wage-earner when she thought of Miss Emma McRanney as one!

The visitor was speaking in the parlor in a good-humored voice.

"I'm glad of this chance to say howdy," she was saying, "but what I'm here for is to see Selina. No indeed, Mr. Wistar, I don't want you to go, you or Mrs. Wistar, either, and Miss Ann Eliza mustn't go in any event, as I've got my missionary dues in my pocket; I want to pay her. It's only that what I've come to say has to be said to Selina."

But Papa and Mamma retreated, the latter calling to Selina for fear she had not followed the conversation. The last vestige of her pudding being gone, this person arose and went into the next room and shook hands with the guest, after which the three of them, Auntie, Miss McRanney and she herself, took chairs.

"I want to know, Selina, if you'll coach me for an examination. A teacher out at the Institute where I am, is going to quit. I can't do that myself, so the next best thing is to get his place if I can, as it pays better than my own. I understand the finger-reading, both the Roman and the Braille, working in the type I found myself interested, but the position calls for a grade-school teacher's certificate which I have to pass an examination to get."

"Emma!" said Auntie. "And you have the courage? You must have been well along when you went to work and taught yourself how to set type? And to get yourself ready again——"

"That's right, Miss Ann Eliza, I'm forty last month. But what's forty when you come to think about it? It's ten, fifteen years younger than it used to be. My grandmother died when she was forty-eight, and I always think of her as an old person in a frilly cap."

"I'm forty-eight myself. You're quite right about it, for I certainly haven't any disposition yet toward caps. Emma," almost wistfully, "if I had your advantage of those eight years I'd ask you to show me how to fit myself for something. Many's the time I've asked myself if I wasn't capable of something beyond rolling and whipping cambric bands and polishing brasses. I've looked at you more than once in church, and envied you."

Auntie! Darling Auntie! Confessing to Miss Emma McRanney that she envied her! It filled Selina with a greater fury of dislike and distaste for this person. She did want work, and had said so, but she didn't want to teach Miss Emma McRanney!

This lady was speaking again. "After I'm home in the evening, I get supper for my brother and myself. Try it a while, Miss Ann Eliza, before you quite envy me. So I'll have to ask you to give me an hour in the evenings, Selina, say three times a week."

If anything could make the proposition more distasteful it was this.

"I taught in our orphan asylum after I graduated, until I got my present place, Selina, so I'm not on altogether new ground, though no certificate was required there. It's not quite such a crime against your fellow-man to be blind, so I've discovered, as to be an orphan. Anything, even Emma McRanney with no certificate, was good enough for orphans, whereas I have to be guaranteed in this case. You're unfortunate if you're blind, but the state does look after you, but to be an orphan, leaves you convicted of your own guilt, and not a leg to stand on. If you're ever compelled to choose between these things, Selina, don't be foolish enough to be an orphan. They pay teachers so little to instruct them, even I had to leave. I ought to tell you these examinations I want to take come late in March. That'll give us six weeks. I'm promised the place if I can get the certificate, and I've got some former questions from the examining board thinking we could find out from these where I stand and what there is to do."

Selina roused herself. She didn't want to teach Miss McRanney! "I've had so little experience, Miss Emma, I ought to tell you I'm not at all sure I'm competent."

"Neither was I," said Miss Emma good-humoredly if unexpectedly. "I graduated through our high school, myself, the second class put through after it was established. And looking back in the light of what I've found out since, I'll say there don't seem to be anything in the way of real, actual, everyday sense that a body ought to have, that I didn't succeed in failing to have—I and most of my class."

"Why, Emma," from Auntie, "and you had the leading honor, what is it that it's called, the valedictory?"

"That's the surest and most damning evidence against me, Miss Ann Eliza; it takes years to live it down," continued Miss Emma. "I thought about you in church Sunday, Selina, wondering if you'd do, and then went and asked Mrs. Williams about you, knowing you'd taught there. She said you did fairly well with your little class, and toward the end of the year seemed to be doing better, but as you told her you were going South to coach in Latin and Algebra, she judged these were your specialties. Well, they're mine, too, where I'm likeliest to fall down, and that decided me."

Do our assumptions, then, like our sins, live on to confront us? "But there was no coaching to do when I got there," hurriedly explained Selina. "I never had a pupil!"

"Well, that don't prevent its being your specialty even so. I'm the one to risk it. And I'll have to say what convinced me there's something to you, is that you stood Mrs. Williams and her condescension all those months you were in her house and didn't murder her. I have to swallow a good deal of such patronage anyhow, because I'm poor, or because I work, or both, and I'm guiltless of violence only because I can't hope to commit assault and battery on people's persons and not pay the penalty. But it never would do to tempt me too far with that woman. But to get back to the point, are you going to undertake me?"

Try as Selina would, she didn't seem to know how to get out of it. She endeavored to throw some cordiality into her manner. "We'll begin whenever you say, Miss Emma. Have you those questions with you, you spoke about? We might go over them and see what there is to do."

Auntie got up to leave them. "Thank you for remembering your missionary dues, Emma. You're an amazing person to me. If I was forty instead of forty-eight," longingly, "I'd certainly follow your example."