It would seem he was taking note of Selina as a possible entity for the first time. "My aunt asked me to apologize to you about something I don't seem to understand. She says she can't come herself——
"—without making herself ridiculous," said this hitherto seemingly harmless young Miss Wistar with unlocked for and apparently astute bitterness. Miss Boswell looked surprised. Mr. Jones looked at Selina. He looked again. He might look away, as indeed he did, to concern himself with the final course for their table, but Selina was an entity now.
At half-past eleven she came downstairs amid the departing guests, Mamma's throw upon her head, Auntie's scarf about her shoulders, still in the comforting care of Miss Pocahontas Boswell and her aunt, Miss Boswell. Miss Pocahontas was all kindness to the end. "And may we not take you home? Our carriage is double?" she asked as they reached the hall.
"Culpepper is to come for me," Selina explained. "He would not know what to do."
"My niece tells me it is Maria Buxton's stepson, from up our way, you speak of," said Miss Boswell, the aunt; "I remember him as a very blunt, outspoken little son of a blunt father and outspoken stepmother. If he is to come for you we had surely better leave you for him."
But come for her is what Culpepper failed to do. The various groups departed, the crowd in the hallway thinned, a silver-chimed clock somewhere struck the quarter, and the street-cars would stop at twelve. The servants in the hall gathering up this and that, looked at Selina interrogatively, then departed, too.
It was here that Mrs. Tuttle came out into the hall and found her. This lady seemed engrossed in the closing of the house by the servants now, and to have forgotten the matter of Cousin Anna's dress and Vincent's perfidy.
"Culpepper who? Maria Buxton's boy?" This in answer to Selina's explanation. "Ann Eliza didn't tell me he was living here? Is he personable? A hostess always needs young men. Wait, Reuben," this to the gray-haired negro man in livery moving around in the background, "you know I always want to satisfy myself the window fastenings are secure," Then to Selina, "You say he said he would be here? What on earth are we going to do about it, say dear child?"
The lights were out now but for one or two, and everyone had disappeared but Mrs. Tuttle and Selina and Reuben. Seeing a reflected figure in a pier glass opposite her, and recognizing that disheveled and distraught figure to be her own, certain words heard from Juliette that afternoon, and which Selina had held to be inapt and wanting in relevancy, beat themselves to measure on her brain: