Selina: Her Hopeful Efforts and Her Livelier Failures

by George Madden Martin

At home and these polite conversational returns to Mrs. Tuttle and Mrs. Sampson over with, and in her own room and the key turned and alone! She wanted to look at the facts. She wanted to put facts together and apply herself to what they said and try and get at the truth.

Put facts together and so get at the truth. That is the way to reach truth. Then why hadn't she found it those many, many times before when she wanted it so? Was it that she failed to know or to admit facts? Had been discouraged, even taught to shut her mind and her eyes to facts?

"Tuttle's taken his father's house, room by room now," Mrs. Tuttle was saying to Mrs. Sampson, "and made it over into an absolutely reproachless interior. And you'll have to allow, Sally, that your father's only idea when he built it was to spend money. It's a passion with the boy, a sort of mania to bring things up to convention and correctness. The more amenable his wife, the greater happiness Tuttle will get making her into the perfect thing he'd have her."

At home at length, and safe within her room, Selina cried bitterly, her hat and jacket thrown on the bed, and she dropped into a chair with her pretty head upon the table that also was desk and book-shelf.

So much for Tuttle? She could see it no other way now she came to look at it! And what then? Was it so bad a thing she was finding him guilty of? The repudiation of that world and its people and its things, that she belonged to? The keeping himself, with the exception of the Harrisons, skilfully unidentified with her group or their affairs?

And say this was the truth? Was it humiliation at base which Tuttle was offering her in place, part and identity in life through his own? Or was it laudation? In that he could conceive nothing better to offer than his best own?

And by way of contrast with Tuttle, what of Culpepper's attitude to her? Certainly he had not sinned along these lines? Culpepper made friends of her friends, made one with her family, easily and serenely, tolerantly and indulgently in fact, just as he took the confidences she gave him about her efforts at self-support, and her failures, just as he played escort and took her to doors and came after her, every way, indeed, but seriously.

"Play away," his amused manner seemed to say, "amuse yourself with these things, even improve your character through the effort put into them. When the time comes, the proper time, it's the man who'll sweep these out of the way, and have done with their assumptions, and take care of you."

Was this the truth, too? If she was to read Tuttle the one way, was this the way she was to read and understand Culpepper?

Quickly and passionately she got up and went and laved her face at the washstand, and as quickly and passionately went to the window of her room, through which the while she had heard voices. Auntie down there in the yard was moving about in company with old colored Uncle Taliaferro Bucklin. It was April, buds and blooms were on lilac bush and peach tree, and Auntie and Uncle Taliaferro were looking over the ground-plan of flower beds and borders preparatory to their yearly activities.