Marcus read her bits again from a second letter full of the soft glamour of tropical scene and beauty. After he had gone, Selina hunted her old school geography and sought the map. A pale yellow lady-finger a little over-run in the baking, Florida was on the page, but in the mind of Selina as she sat there in the shabby parlor with the book outspread on her lap, Florida the ever-blooming and the tropical, was Ponce de Leon in gleaming apparel with banner and sword stepping ashore upon sands flowing golden beneath the fancied fountain of his search, Ponce de Leon the ever glorious and understandable to youth, symbol of quest, of faith in the fabled, of adventuring forth!
Maud walked in here on Selina in the parlor in the dusk, the open book still on her lap, the fire died to red embers, Auntie's brasses in the faint glow the one note of brightness amid the gloom. Selina's smile was a bit wan as she looked up and fluttered the pages of the unwieldy folio. "Thirty-seven maps herein of the world and its blue and pink and yellow grand divisions and kingdoms and countries, Maudie! Marcus has just been here and he's left me wincing over what he calls my limitations. I've been to Cincinnati, once, for two days, to the exposition and the musical festival with you and Judy and your mother. And I've been to Chicago for a week with Auntie and Cousin Anna to visit some Wistar kin who live in a dreary house right on the street, one of a row. Though Cousin Anna says it's a very good house and being in a real city is expected to sit on the street in a row, that I merely don't know any better. And that's the extent of my traveling!"
"Limitations is a very good word," decided Maudie promptly. "I'm deploring our deficiencies right along! I've a new word myself. Mr. Welling and I are reading German together. I gave up waiting for the rest of you to keep your appointments and asked him. That's what I came over to tell you. We started last night."
These friends of Culpepper were their friends now. As Maud put it, since they discovered they were outgrowing Brent and Sam and the rest, these newer acquisitions were a godsend!
Mr. Welling, by Christian name Henry, square-set by mind as by body though a wag, had seemed to gravitate to mercurial Maud.
"Apparently to correct what he chooses to call my sweeping mis-assertions," was Maud's way of explaining it.
Mr. Cannon, Preston by name, and perpetual joker, gravitated to Adele for whom he had to diagram each joke, and assure her he didn't mean it, while Mr. Tate, that scholastic young man, with earnest admiration sought Amanthus who told him wonderingly she'd always supposed Pompey was a buried city till he told her he was a general.
Something of the personal histories of these young men were known now to the young ladies. The father of Mr. Welling was a judge in his end of the state. Mr. Cannon's people lived in one of the mountain counties and were what is called land-poor, and Mr. Tate had been raised by a grandmother.
"And shows it," Maud said when she heard this. Mr. Tate had money left him by his grandfather too, in a quiet respectable sense, and when his grandmother died he would have a very considerable more.