Selina put on hat and jacket the day after Uncle Bruce's guests left, and went over to see Juliette. The Caldwell house was of brick with gables, a bay, a small Gothic porch, pointed windows and clambering, leafless vines. Juliette's father, as said before, was a rising business man, and his own and his pretty wife's people were well to do. There was considerable extravagance and laxity and also waste in the household, and the children up to a certain point, from Juliette, the oldest, down through her two younger sisters and the son just toddling, did pretty much as they pleased.

But of late everyone was worried about Juliette. She was dauncie, as the darkies say, in other words, listless and indifferent and pale. In all the years past this same gay little Juliette had stood with her friends as embodiment of life and vividness and enthusiasm.

Mrs. Caldwell opened the side door to Selina's tap. She had a gingham apron with a bib over her rather elaborate crimson cashmere wrapper. Dark like Juliette, and like her also in being aquiline and vivid, and still a bit frivolous in her tastes, now she looked disheveled and cross and tired. They were an outspoken as well as a bit haphazard household, these prosperous Caldwells.

"No cook since Monday, Selina, and neither nurse for the baby or house-boy to-day. When one of them gets mad, the others always take it up and follow. What we're coming to I'm sure I can't say. The older servants such as my mother's been used to dealing with, are dying off, and the younger ones don't know how to do a thing and won't let you show them."

It was a familiar plaint, and Selina was so accustomed to it, it slid nowadays from the consciousness as housekeepers voiced it, like a too-oft repeated platitude. Cousin Anna had such trouble continually; Mrs. Williams, while Selina taught there, never seemed to have her full quota of servants at any one time and never ceased to say so, and the Addisons and even the Carters were complainers, too. Selina took Mrs. Caldwell's grievance as a matter of course.

"I've been coming over for a good long visit with Judy ever since I got home," she replied, "but if you're busy, you'll need her, and won't want me, Mrs. Caldwell?"

"Juliette? I'm glad you've come hunting her. I'm sure I don't know what we're going to do with her, Selina. She's never been stubborn or ugly in her life before. It's been going on now for sometime, this undercurrent of resentment to her father, and I don't mind speaking out with you, Selina, we look on you quite as one of ourselves, it's come to a break, an open rupture between them. Her father can't see it anyway but that she's been underhand in her defiance, and she won't allow that she cares in the least what he thinks. Of course, I don't know how much she may have told you. Go on up to her room. The little girls are at school, and I'm thankful the baby's asleep. Juliette and I've just finished in the kitchen and she's upstairs starting to straighten the bedrooms."

Selina went through the halls to the front stairway. She didn't fancy the Caldwells' house. Everything was over-elaborate and nothing very well cared for and there seemed a regrettable mixture. She couldn't bear the bisque cupid, for instance, which hung from the costly gilt chandelier. And she and Adele and Maud deplored the portrait of Juliette at three which hung over the mantelpiece. Cunning Judy as she really had been, here forever seated on a rose-bank, her curls in tiers, her cheeks carmine, and a sash of blue bound round her tummy so precisely that her embroidered skirts flew out beneath as though released. And Selina disliked the showy pattern in the velvet carpet on the halls and up the stairs. But she did love Juliette.

She went up the steps. She knew something of the trouble between Juliette and her father, and could guess what had brought about the present rupture. About the time she went South, Juliette had dared be audacious in a way that caused her friends to hold breath, terrified at thought of what the storm would be when discovery by her father came.

Having reached the hallway above, Selina tapped on a door which was ajar at the head of the stairs, the door to Juliette's own room. At the sound, Juliette, in an apron like the one upon her mother, turned, and seeing Selina in the doorway, sat down suddenly on an ottoman at hand and resting her black-tressed little head against the edge of the bureau she was dusting, went into passionate weeping. It was as if the sight of her friend loosed the pent-up flood of her unhappiness.

Quickly enough words equally as passionate made their way through the wild sobbing. "It's the stupidity of Papa's position, his utter lack of reason, that's so maddening, Selina. 'I'll see a daughter of mine going to college!' is the whole of it. And his unfairness, too, stops any attempted answering on my part after he's had his say, with 'That'll do now. I don't care to hear any more on the subject.' And what's his argument, I'd like to know, Selina? He hasn't any. Simply none. Just the senseless, stubborn stand he's got from somewhere. 'I'll see a daughter of mine going to college. Get busy and help your mother with the younger children and the house, and don't let's hear any further nonsense on the subject.'"

Selina sat down aghast. Yielding by disposition herself, and product of a lifelong submission to a loving if sometimes paralyzing authority against which she had lifted a tentative protest only once or twice, she gazed at Juliette dismayed. At pretty Judy, facing her from the ottoman, she herself now on a nearby chair, their young knees almost a-touch, a miniature, flashing, apparently altogether volatile creature, suggestive of the ruby-throated hummingbirds that darted about Auntie's flowers and vines in the backyard in summer!

This little Juliette had been raised under a certain amount of authority, too, but the authority of a young and complacent father who overindulged his family so long as his own mood was genial, but who when his temper was ruffled, as Maud put it, like the heathen raged. Still a parent and father is parent and father. The foundation tenet to all known ethics in the family relation as Selina was familiar with them, that of unquestioning obedience to the man of the household, was being repudiated, and this by seemingly crushable little Juliette.

"I've talked college ever since our junior year at the high school," she here reminded Selina.

She had. Juliette had a northern cousin in Ohio whose letters to her began to be dated from such an institution that same year. There were several college-graduate women in their own community, too, figures upon whom Juliette and the rest of them had gazed, awed. And about whom they mutually confessed to find, a certain carriage and a definite assurance, a look and manner more common to busy men, of those having business to attend to and the will and the ability to do it.

But who had dreamed that seeds so chance as these could have sown themselves in little Juliette's breast to become the dominant possession of that wee abode?

Little? Wee? Volatile? Crushable?

It was as if Juliette there on her ottoman vigorously using her pocket handkerchief to stay the still welling tears, thus read these oft-repeated and disqualifying diminutives applied to her in Selina's mind.

"All of you, in the family and out of it, always infuriate me by fixing the measure of my ability by the size of my body!" The crimson of her fury rushed to her cheeks afresh. "When I read my graduating essay as an honor girl, nobody gave me any credit for having got the honor, whereas everybody clapped and said how cute and that sort of thing."

It was so. It had seemed a joke, little Juliette with her crimson cheeks and her unfurled essay. "Judy, poor Judy," murmured Selina, aghast the more at these revelations from this friend she had thought she knew.

"You went to teaching," Juliette was continuing, "and that made me think on my part. Then you went South, getting about your business in life as you saw it, and at that I up and told Papa what I wanted. He treated it as a huge joke on my part, chucked me under the chin, I always have loathed his doing that at any time, and said for perpetrating it he'd give me a box at the minstrels and I could ask my friends. He actually did say that, Selina. And when I persisted that it wasn't a joke, that I'd made up my mind I wanted to go to college, and sooner or later was going, he was incredulous at first, and then flew into a rage and told me I was a little fool and there'd been enough of this nonsense, and if I said any more I could go to my room and stay there until I could be sensible. When I took it up the next time and insisted he owed it to me to show me why he felt as he did about a girl going to college, he said he'd show me the only argument he purposed advancing, and took me by my shoulder and marched me up here to my room, and going out slammed the door. I wrote him a note then and sent it to him at the store by mail, saying if he'd show me truly and convincingly, why, I'd give in. He didn't answer, but told Mamma to tell me if there was any more of it, he'd stop the allowance I'd asked for my last birthday."

"And all this by yourself, Judy?" from Selina, deploringly. "And I not here near you to help you, nor to comfort you!"

"I've never touched my allowance since," hotly, "and I don't mean to. That's why I didn't come to Adele's. I didn't have the dress to wear and I wouldn't ask for it. I haven't said another word to him on the subject of college since and I'm not going to. I just went around to Professor Maynard's boys' school and asked him if he'd take me and get me ready for college, and he said he would. I had some money saved up; you see, both my grandfathers always give us children money at Christmas and birthdays. This was while you were gone, Selina. Mamma and baby were away, staying for a couple of weeks at Grandma's on account of the whooping-cough next door to us, and it made it easier for me to manage."

"Judy! And you had the courage! You little—well you are a little thing, and I have to say it. Algy told me something about it, told me that you were being coached but didn't want anything said about it."

"Algy helped me plan it. His father quarreled with him because he wouldn't go to college. It's the same sort of principle. He was sent to Professor Maynard's to be made ready and wouldn't stay. That's how I came to go there. Algy told me about him."

Algy! The butt of their fond joking and laughter! Truly, as Selina had said to herself along other lines, you never can tell! "And what happened next, Judy?"

"When Mamma came back from Grandma's, she began questioning, and I had to tell her. And of course Papa found out then. And because he's a stubbornly limited person, Oh, I'm going to say it, I've thought it long before this especial trouble between us—he thinks, for instance, that horrible bisque cupid in our parlor is the cutest thing in the house—Selina, my life and my wants are to be lopped off to his. I'm not going to stand it. I'm going to college somehow, you hear me now, Selina. I daresay it's his own stubbornness cropping out in me, but that doesn't deter me either. I've a right to my own life, and I'm going if planning can get me there."

But at least she disliked the bisque cupid! There was comfort in knowing that!