CHAPTER SEVEN
The night was mild. When Culpepper and Selina reached the car-line on a nearby street, the car with its two jogging little mules was in sight. "There comes the car, and here comes the moon," said Culpepper. "Shall we ride or walk?"
They walked.
Now Selina and her girl friends knew a sufficient number of boys, always had known a plentiful number in fact, Tommy and Bliss and Brent and the rest, as she termed them. Culpepper, however, was not of these: he was older, he was from away and he was studying law; many reasons in fact combined to make it gratifying to have it Culpepper.
He with three other law students had rooms including a common sitting-room over a confectionery, where ordinarily young men away from home in the city would have been in boarding houses. From information dropped by Culpepper, they smoked pipes and played chess and read books by writers known as Darwin and Spencer and Buckle. That they were bold and buccaneeringly adventurous figures thus may be seen.
Added to all this, Culpepper did not care for girls, Selina being the only one he went with, and further, he had been so used to a big family connection and an overflowing house and habitual hubbub, Cousin Maria Buxton, his stepmother, being related to everybody in her part of the state, that his avowed dislike to gatherings and affairs was genuine.
"You men don't like to do a thing, and you say so and don't do it," wondered Selina; "Papa gave up night church long ago, and Mamma who loves to go, had to accommodate herself to it."
Culpepper defended his sex. "We're honest. You're not, women as a class, I mean. My stepmother is, but then she's independent."
"Independent?"
"Has her own means and manages her own affairs. It makes the rest of you propitiatory," bluntly.