Selina meant for herself to go the whole way now. Being ashamed, she was very much ashamed. "I've been following every clue and chance for teaching I could hear of since I came home in November," she told Tuttle, "and nobody wanted me. I never quite understood until Miss Emma pointed out that I wasn't qualified as a teacher. I'm going to try for a certificate along with her in March."
Miss Emma nodded approval. "Now she's talking, Tuttle. Get busy and applaud her. This child's been going through that circle of purgatory Dante forgot to set down, finding herself a woman that's got to make her way, and taking her cue from the rest of the woman world, ashamed of the fact."
Selina dropped her head right down on the page of the open textbook before her on the table. The sob was coming and she could not stop it. Bye and bye when the pretty head with its masses of flaxen hair lifted, they all laughed together. For Miss Emma McRanney was chafing one of Selina's hands and Tuttle Jones the other one.
| * | * | * | * | * | * | * |
Culpepper's visits these days were to Auntie. He got in the way of running in and up to her room for a brief while in the evenings, and out again.
"She won't have a thing to do with me, ole Miss, and there's nothing for it but for me to take my medicine! 'Oh, yes, she's quite well, thank you!' when I do stop and speak to her 'and very busy.' She's not only getting Miss McRanney ready as far as she knows how, but trying to get herself ready for these examinations in March. That's about what she says to me, coolly and loftily, and goes on about her own affairs."
"I don't like it at all," from Auntie, stoutly, "And here's Emmeline's Tuttle around every lesson night looking like a model out of a store window, helping them with their algebra, both Emma and Selina." Auntie was innocent of guile. "It's his specialty, too, it seems," she added lamentingly.
"Why don't he stay where he's put?" grumbled Culpepper. "He's a dude, a dandy dude, you can tell it by his fashion, can't you, ole Miss? What's he got to do with our nice, humble, worthy ways, and with our Selina and her problems? I ask you that!"
There came a morning late in March when Miss Emma McRanney at nine-thirty, in her 'plain but perfectly genteel' best wool dress, stood waiting at the drugstore over which she lived, instead of being at the Institute mounted on a stool, and wearing a blue calico apron with sleeves, setting type.