Auntie interrupted. "The Wistar men have seldom been money-makers. My father in his time was the exception. I'm sure Robert has tried."
Selina feeling she could not bear what she saw in these faces of her elders, looked about the room where she was sitting with them. In her time, which was twenty-five years ago, in an inland American city in a semi-southern state, bedrooms were sitting-rooms during the day.
What she saw was a ponderously ornate bedstead, ponderous walnut wardrobe, washstand, bureau, fading wall-paper of a pronounced pattern, framed family photographs, and carpet resolutely tacked the four ways of the floor. She did not know the day would come when she would learn that this room with its wool lambrequin above the open grate, its wool table-cover, its wool footstools, was mid-Victorian. Still less did this loving and anxious Selina know that these two dear ladies with whom she sat, were mid-Victorian with their room, and she of the next generation, a victim to their mild inefficiencies and their gentle sentimentalities. In looking about the room, she as by instinct of the hunted, was seeking a clue to escape from her anguish of spirit.
"It isn't as though your father were not giving me the same amount of money for the house as usual," her mother was saying. Mrs. Wistar always spoke a trifle precisely. "It is more that having dropped so behind with the bills, and knowing that he is worried so to give me as much as he does, I don't like to tell him so."
"The worry'd be no more now than when he does have to know," from Auntie.
"I suppose not," allowed Mrs. Wistar dubiously.
Selina sighed, and her gaze not finding the relief it sought within the room, went to the window and looked out between its discreet draperies. Thus far indeed Selina had gazed on all of life through discreet draperies. And if as she sat there in the cushioned chair with her eyes so sweetly anxious, she was incontinently young to look upon even for scant seventeen, in any real knowledge of life and of what life had a right to demand from her, she was pitiably younger. This story undertakes to be the tenderly smiling narrative of Selina's inefficiencies, the epic of her small aspirings and her, it is to be hoped, engaging failures.
If she, untrained, unarmed and unaware, is typical in any sense of the thousands of American girls of her period, shall it be assumed there are none like her to-day, piously guarded and yet piteously and absurdly unready for life's demands?
And if the conditions which surrounded her, and the inefficiencies which marked her, were in any degree usual in her day, may we not the better understand her generation's dissatisfaction with these conditions, as shown in those gropings toward something illy defined no doubt but deeply desired, which now appear to have been the first general expression of woman's discontent in this country?