The implication proved unfortunate. Selina's profile as it flashed about on Mamma flushed. Such a young, young profile. Such a young Selina in the plaid dress and the linen collar and the cuffs. Such a child quivering with abhorrence of the act of going to work, and wincing with shame because of the abhorrence. In her pitiful state she was inclined to take umbrage at anything. And what did her mother mean?
"Linen collar and cuffs are in keeping with what, Mamma?" she asked in reply, even sharply.
Mamma hastened to conciliate and again was unfortunate. "In keeping with the very worthy calling you are entering on. The pettifogic calling as we spoke of it under Mr. Aristides Welkin. He had a proper respect for his occupation as a teacher and saw to it that his pupils had."
"If he meant pedagogic, Mamma, he probably said so. And can't you understand if there's one thing I wouldn't want it to be, it's a calling? Mamma, please don't let's discuss the teaching any more. Yes, I've had all I want to eat. I did eat my egg, and I don't want any waffles."
"Selina, come here and kiss Auntie before you go," from that dear person. "I learned my a-b, abs, and my parlez-vous's, before the day of Mr. Welkin. In my time we all went to old Madame Noël de Jourde de Vaux, wife of a guillotined French nobleman, as I've often told you. In a little four-roomed cottage it was, not far from the market-house. I tasted my first olive there and sipped orange-flower water and sugar. She was a tiny old personage with twinkling eyes and manners that had served her well at court. She called it her A B C school for the babies."
Darling Auntie! Selina threw grateful, passionate arms around her and kissed her. One could see Madame de Vaux and her babies in the cottage near the market-house through a glamour, but one hated Mr. Aristides Welkin in his calling. Why? Selina couldn't have said. Then in a rush of self-reproach, she swept about and kissed Mamma.
"It's a quarter past eight and I said I'd be there at nine. I'll have to hurry."
She walked the ten blocks out to the opener neighborhood of the Williams'. The early morning of the Indian summer day was tinged with blue mistiness and underfoot was the pleasant rustle and crackle of leaves along the pavement. On the way she stopped in a drugstore that dealt in school supplies. She had told Mrs. Williams to have a primer and first reader for William and she must have one of each herself. As the man brought them she recognized them as the same she had used in her day, the primer with a salmon-pink cover in paper, the first reader in a blue cover in pasteboards.
She took them in their package and left. In her day? That meant at the little private school where she went at first and where she learned to read. What did happen in her day at that school? She had to teach William, and it might help her to remember?