"Miss Pocahontas Boswell, that I met at your aunt's musicale, says things of the same sort as Mrs. Harrison, things that evidently Aunt Juanita means, too, things that won't let you alone afterward for wondering if they're true, and that hurt your self-respect to think they are true."
"Give me the end of that scarf," Tuttle referred to the little affair of crêpe about her throat, a present not so long ago from Juliette, and which in the swirl of wind and snow was proving refractory. He caught the end, and halting her there in the snow and dusk again, they had gone perhaps thirty feet farther now, found its mate, and retied them. There was something like a woman in the skilful way he did it, and yet as he put her hand back on his arm for the third time, there was that which was not in the least like any woman, in the overlength of time he took in placing that hand where he wanted it. And there was that not in the least suggestive of any woman either, in the tiny pressure of reassurance he put upon those fingers as he left them.
And just what was it these manifestations from Tuttle meant?
Even in Selina's day a prude was a prude and no girl wanted to be one. On the one side, Mrs. Harrison and Miss 'Hontas Boswell and Aunt Juanita, possibly, too, would have said bluntly, "Look at the facts and try to find out what he means."
On the other hand, Mamma and Auntie, by their profound reticence, conveyed the idea, that once let a young man's attentions to a girl be so marked as to be a fact, and every instinct of maidenliness must erect itself in her mind, making blind alleys of all inquiry, wonder or surmise on her part, as to what such attentions mean.
And the facts in this case of Tuttle and Selina, were what? That a really prominent young man in the local little world of fashion, was devoting himself with pertinence and even pertinacity, to a pretty girl unknown in his world, an even quite pretty girl who unless she married, must find some way to earn a living and take care of herself.
The point might be held to be, were these attentions from Tuttle a passing thing, or sincere?
There was a good deal to make it reasonable that they were but passing. Tuttle was the son of Mr. Samuel Jones, wealthy and eminent citizen. True, some claimed that he was an eminent citizen last because he was a wealthy pork-packer first, but that may be permitted to pass. Tuttle was the son of this Mr. Samuel Jones by a second marriage. His mother in her public contributions to charity signed herself Alicia Tuttle Jones, which is all that needs be said on that score. And Tuttle, twenty-four years of age, neat, dapper, with sense enough of his own, was a beau, a great beau according to his aunt, a beau of such undoubted repute in his world, he even was dubbed the Oswald of it by those outside it and unkind to it, Preston Cannon and Culpepper, for example.
He also had the reputation according to his aunt once more, of being rather shrewdly unsusceptible. Or in other words, the words of Mr. Tate this time, used in defending him from the jocular side-thrusts of Preston and Culpepper, "he had a proper sense of his own value."
So much for Tuttle.