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.