Daughters are expected to solve their economic problems through marriage! Daughters have but the one business in life, which is to find husbands! Marriage as a solution for all her problems is a daughter's profession!
And if she fail? If she find no economic salvation for herself through a husband?
Rage, fury, shame, swept through Selina. The symbol of such failure stood piteously before her, Auntie! Auntie with a pittance doled out to her barely sufficient for her church dues and her few garments! Auntie stitching on fine muslin hands with no remuneration from any source for the perfection of those stitches, Auntie with all that magnificent endowment of perfect health and untiring energy that wasted itself so piteously in polishing brasses. Fury swept through Selina again, fury and resentment so hot they scorched and seared her. Say, for instance, that had Auntie been the man, and Papa the woman of the two of them?
Selina hurried along, one block, two blocks, three blocks, not that time pressed but that misery and indignation drove.
Then as she looked up and saw where she was, at the turn of a block where it touched on the courthouse neighborhood and the region of lawyers and their offices, she knew by prescience what was going to happen. Knew it with such certainty that her heart quickened and her breath caught even as a step came hurrying behind her, a cheerful voice as the steps drew nearer, spoke her name, and Culpepper, catching up with her, joined her.
"Our offices are in the second story back yonder. I saw you out the window as you went by."
He took off his straw hat and wiped his forehead with one of those amazingly big and wonderful linen handkerchiefs Cousin Maria gloried in keeping him supplied with. In his vigor, his strength, his confidence, he was overwhelming. He towered above Selina. To surrender to masterfulness like his? To lose oneself through such dominance? Could she? And be at peace forever in the certainty of his care, and the knowledge the fight was his, not hers? It all were easy then if one could.
Culpepper's blue eyes bold through those black lashes, but softened by solicitude right now, scanned her face, then looked relieved.
"You know then?"
She nodded, pretty creature that she was, the wealth of her shining hair showing beneath her wreathed hat. "And you know?"