Never before had she taken the initiative in her life. The exact length for the lowering of her dress skirt for graduation, the chosen fashion for the tying of her white sash on that day, the manner of the arranging of her hair, her flowers, her fan, each detail was for these two dear but hitherto decreeing ladies to debate and decide upon.
When their Selina went forth upon her little pleasures and affairs, one saw her off from the front-door step, the other waved a farewell from the window above. When she returned one removed her hat and passed a readjusting hand over her shining fair hair, the other lifted and put away her cloak.
The initiative was to be Selina's now.
"I told you, Mamma and Auntie dear, of meeting Mrs. William Williams down street yesterday? And of her stopping me?"
She had. She brought all incidents to her absences home, and the two relived them with her. They saw Mrs. William Williams now in this recall, large, impressive, with her benevolently dealt-around interests and inquiries, as from a being of credentialed and superior parts to a world of lesser creatures. Though why this arrogance was permitted, the world of lesser beings could hardly say, but since authority even when self-arrogated, and authority's running mate, material prosperity, are ever potent, the world of Mrs. Wistar and Auntie submitted. Mr. William Williams, a successful dealer in leather and raw hides, had married Mrs. Williams late in both their lives, and one William Williams Jr. was the result.
Selina was continuing. "And I told you how she said she does not approve of the new methods called kindergarten that are beginning to be used in the schools, and wants William Williams Jr. taught at home, and did I know of any young person among my friends fitted to do it?"
"William Jr.'s head is too big," said Auntie, decidedly, "it rolls around on his neck. I've noticed him on the bench at Sunday-school."
Selina passed over the interruption. "I told her yesterday that I did not know of anyone. To-day I do. I am going to offer to teach him myself!" But her throat was dry, and her hands were cold as she said it.
Selina knew no women wage-earners except her teachers at the public school, who stood apart unique personalities in a world entered into and left behind at intervals, and a scattering of women clerks in the stores of her Southern city. Yes, on the contrary, she did know one, Miss Emma McRanney, a regular attendant at the same church as the Wistars, stolid, settled, and middle-aged, a setter of type at the State Institute for the Blind. Mamma and Auntie made a point of going out their ways on Sundays to stop her and shake hands with her kindly.
But she was the exception. In the world of Selina, in the world of her mother and her aunt, in that of the friends of her youth and their mothers and sisters and aunts, the accolading stamp of position, of gentility, of femininity, lay in the monetary dependence of womankind on its men.