About half-past eight Culpepper Buxton arrived at the Wistar house. He was good-humored and unruffled. Selina had turned him down the evening before for the first time in history. The pretty and lovable little minx! She was waking then! Juliette, who was clever with her dark eyes and her flashing smiles, or Amanthus herself, could not have done it any better.
As he came up, Selina was at the door saying good night to a stout, rather pleasant-voiced person.
He waited until this guest had gone, then went in with Selina.
"Who's your friend?" inquired Culpepper.
Selina diagramed the lady and her business briefly, so briefly that Culpepper might have taken it as cue to drop a dangerous subject. "She has to take an examination and wants me to coach her for it."
But Culpepper, in his unruffled good humor, failed to know his cue. "That's good. Just the sort of thing you've been wanting. No?"
For Selina, having started to push chairs and footstools back into place, here ceased abruptly and swung about on him furiously. "It's not good. I loathe everything she stands for. I hate shabbiness. I hate poverty, I don't like to be near either of them, they always seem to be reaching out fingers to drag me down to them. You're altogether and entirely wrong. I don't want to teach Miss McRanney."
Hoity-toity! As Culpepper's stepmother used to say to his early and childish bursts of temper. She was a little minx all at once! He didn't know that he'd put up with it.
"You'd better not teach her then, you won't do it halfway right," from Culpepper coolly.
"You're very priggish," from Selina, in return, and hot as he was cool. "You speak, I suppose, from the heights of masculine superiority?"