"We can't get her dress washed and ironed now," from Mrs. Wistar, "and she took her sash down town to be cleaned and has not gotten it home. We'll have to give in this time and let her wear this dress of Anna's."
"Come feel the satin of it, Mamma," exulted Selina, "put your cheek against its sheen, Auntie. Or can one feel a sheen?" she laughed happily. "Maud says let the love of dress get in your blood and it will poison your life at its spring, and you even might come to marry for what a man could give you! She meant it for Juliette who cried because her mother wouldn't let her have high heels to make her taller. But I'm not sure I see Maud's logic. When we marry, we take from the man anyhow, don't we? Why shouldn't one care then, in the ratio of what one takes? Don't look so shocked, Auntie, I'm only thinking it out."
"Sometimes, Selina," said Auntie, dismayed, "you talk like you weren't the girl we brought you up to be! The dress fits well enough, that's all I can say for it."
"It looks a little like a fancy costume," admitted Selina doubtfully, "but anyhow it's wonderful and I love it. I think, Auntie dear," reassuringly, "it isn't that Maud and the rest of us are undependable. It's that we want something, and we don't know what we want. When we're with people who're grandly mental, we think it's that, or religious, it's that, or when it's someone who's a social personage, then it seems as if it's that. Does it sound weak-minded Auntie, veering so?"
This evening of the musicale Culpepper came for Selina on the moment, which he did not always do, and he and she in her gorgeousness, went off gayly together, Mamma and Auntie seeing them to the door.
"She's really a child at heart, Lavinia," worried Auntie, after they were gone, "a child, I sometimes fear, that has had so little experience in life that it's pitiful. And yet this afternoon she spoke shockingly. I wouldn't have her too helpless and inexperienced, but neither would I have her lose her illusions. There's mighty little left a woman when she parts with these."
"If I only felt more comfortable in my mind about that dress," from Mrs. Wistar. "Sometimes I could wish I were a person of more courage and finality; I didn't want to let her wear it."
"No, I wouldn't want her to feel we had failed her about it," agreed Auntie. "I wouldn't want her ever to feel we'd failed her anywhere, but sometimes I'm afraid she's going to."