"I don't quite see what I'm coming back to," she said in the last one here on Selina's lap "and can only hope Mamma and Grandmamma do see. Débutantes of the first and second rank when they lapse over to a second winter, I've noticed, form into euchre clubs that play in the daytime with each other, and take classes in the Saturday morning sewing-schools. What becomes of lapsed-over débutantes of the third or even as bad as the fourth rank, apparently I'm being taken back home to find out. I didn't tell you before I left that Mr. Cannon has been engaged all this time to a cousin up at his own home. He told me about it when he came to say good-bye. I thought I'd like you to know, and now we'll drop it."
Selina took up the last of the letters. It was from Juliette and she wrote cheerfully in her crisp, spirited backhand.
Both Granddad and Grandfather came around in their stands, after they found I'd actually done the thing, and agreed to put me through the four years of college. And Algy went to see them it seems and up and told them he purposed doing this himself! That, as he understands it, and unless he was laboring under a mistake, he was the person whose name I'd undertaken to bear. And he's been sending me money right along while I'm here with my cousin making up my two conditions. But it's the money both Granddad and Grandfather have put in the bank for me I'm using and shall use. And so I can't understand all this talk from everybody at home of the shocking great deal I've taken from Algy in marrying him in this way. He and I, at any rate, understood it when we talked it over. My cousin asked me the other day what I meant to do about it when I got through college? Did I look on myself as Algy's wife, or did I not? I hadn't thought about this, and it's been worrying me considerably. Do you suppose he thinks that's the way of it? Do you know, Mamma never once spoke to me about the possibilities of my being anybody's wife in my life?
Selina, glancing up, put her letters hastily together and thrust them in her pocket and rang the bell. She had reached the corner where she left the car, half a block from her father's office.
CHAPTER FORTY
The street where Selina left the car was cool and dank between shabby brick stores and shabbier warehouses. It smelled of sugar and molasses and leather. The floor-space occupied by her father for fifteen years was in one of these buildings on the second floor.
Coming to it she went up the worn stairs by which this second floor was reached from the street, and, opening the glass-sashed door at the head of the staircase, came in on the long floor-space occupied with boilers, pumps, portable mills, what not, most of them second-hand. She went back through the long aisle between these to the office in the rear, which was shut off by a glass partition and overlooked an alley where, as she remembered it, drays drawn by mules forever stood being loaded or unloaded with heavy freight.
The door in this partition was open and through it she could see the interior of the office—two tall, shabby, sloping-topped desks, two tall stools one before either desk, two chairs, a stove and a strip of cocoa matting. That was the whole of it! That and her father and his general factotum, old Jerry, who was clerk, office boy, janitor, and, with some help from the outside for the lifting of machinery, porter. The whole of it, this, where her father for fifteen years had spent the larger part of his waking hours! And for the rest paid the bills Mamma made for the family, and played whist with a congenial group of his own sex once a fortnight! Husbands and fathers then did not always get a great deal out of it themselves!