Selina's gaze had wandered to the window to find but doubtful comfort there. For in her mind's eye she saw the relative position her squat, two-storied brick house with its square of grass and its iron fence set in stone coping, bore to the other houses on the block in size, appearance and importance. There were some few smaller and shabbier. She gave neighborly greeting to the dwellers within these homes when she met them, but without any knowledge as to why, and through no volition of her own that she was aware of, her life did not touch theirs.
"Impeccable yard plots, whitened flaggings and steps."
Of the other houses along the block, some were three-storied, others two-storied but double in width, the further characteristics of these eminently prosperous dwellings being impeccable yard plots, whitened flaggings and steps, burnished doorsills, burnished doorbells, doorplates. The dwellers within these altogether creditable establishments, Selina did know; their lives and hers did touch; they too were variations in a common inefficiency; they too were products of the same conditions as herself. Amanthus in the one house, enchanting and engaging, or so Selina saw her; Juliette in another, eager and diminutive, cheeks carmine, fiery with the faith of the ardent follower; Maud in a third, luscious, capable, inquiet, overflowing with protest, alert with innovation; Adele in a fourth, stickler and debater, full of a conscience for the pro and con: these four were Selina's own, these and their households, the friends, she would have told you, of her youth.
She had gone through measles and through mumps with them; through day school and dancing school with them; through the baby age, the overly conscientious age, the giggling age, the conscious age, the arriving age, when at birthdays and school-closings, she, Selina, and Amanthus, and Maud, and Juliette and Adele, exchanged clothbound and gilt-topped volumes, "Lucille," "Aurora Leigh," Tennyson.
But the gaze of Selina right now was out the window of her mother's bedroom, and in her mind's eye she was seeing, not these adored friends of her youth, but the macadamized street she lived upon, with its brick sidewalks and its occasional old sycamore tree, and the homes of herself and these friends along it. And her home was the squat and shabby one, her yard the untended one, and she, Selina Auboussier Wistar, the genteelly poor one of these friends of her youth.
Then her attention came back to matters within the room.
"I try to save Mr. Wistar everything of worry I can," her mother was saying defensively. "I've been setting a chair over that hole in the dining-room hearth rug for months."