Selina: Her Hopeful Efforts and Her Livelier Failures

by George Madden Martin

From the evening of the conversazione, Marcus aroused to a livelier sense of his pretty cousin Selina, and she gained a new conception of him. How had she failed to realize that it was not so much that he was singular as significant? She said as much to her mother and Auntie.

"He's Juanita's son," said Mamma guardedly. "If she is my sister, I have to allow that she's at times both eccentric and trying."

"He's Juanita's son but his own keeper," avowed Auntie. "If he's ever thought in his life for anybody but himself, I've yet to hear of it."

But Selina felt that she as well as they were mistaken. Within the next few weeks Marcus took her to the theater several times, and Oh, the wonder not only of seeing Booth's Hamlet and Modjeska's Rosalind through the medium of his kindness and his comment and elucidation, but of seeing how many persons in the audience strove to catch her cousin's eye and invite his recognition! He did editorial paragraphs which were clever for the leading daily paper, of course, but there was more to it than that! Apparently if one can successfully back up some chosen eccentricity, as of an old hat and shabby cape and the rest of it, by exactly the adequate manner, he attains to being a personage! And Selina for the better part of her seventeen years, had been thinking Marcus merely had bad manners!

"You must do a bit of reading of a little different nature, pretty cousin mine," he told her about this same time. "Aunt Lavinia and good Miss Ann Eliza keep you a child."

And accordingly he brought her books of a flattering nature, among them "The Story of Creation," differing from the narrative in the Pentateuch in a way which would have startled Mamma and Auntie unspeakably. But which she and Maud, adventurous soul that this person always was, set themselves to read faithfully.

And lastly, about February, Marcus came round with a letter from Miss Boswell who with her aunt was spending the remainder of the winter in the South. Evidently the intimacy between Marcus and Miss Pocahontas was close.

He read Selina one especial bit, which, or so it seemed to her who had seen nothing at all of the world, opened a wide-spreading and dismaying vista!

More and more [thus went the letter] I am convinced we ought to do some of our wandering early. Our sense of true values ought to come to us young. These glorious Florida nights of tropical softness and moonlight only gain through their recall of other scenes as lovely met in my wanderings when I was young with my invalid father and my mother in search of the health he was not to find. I don't suppose we ever really deplore the gain through experience, whatever the cost at the time. My love to the little sequestered way-side bloom, Selina. How sweet she was in her sheltered innocence and how touching. Do not forget how we discussed the chances for her, you and I, for a bit more of the world through you, her big cousin?

So? That was it? Miss Boswell with her tender eyes of comprehension was behind this kindness from Marcus? Still one must be thankful even for dictated favors once they are accepted.