"Better and better," laughed Miss Marcia Boswell, altogether a delightful personage. "I'll be ready when next they come twitting me."
The next day Miss Pocahontas and Selina in a pretty phaeton, drove about the town with its old state buildings, and out the road along the cliffs overlooking the river.
"Tell me about the teaching," Miss 'Hontas asked. "How does it go? Are you satisfied that it's the right thing?"
Selina flushed, hesitated and opened her heart. "It's the only thing I can do as far as I can see, if it paid better. My little boys seem to be getting along pretty well. But it don't pay at all, especially when I have to ride in bad weather. I can't talk much about it at home, Mamma and Auntie don't understand, and take it out in disliking the mothers of my little boys. And I don't seem to know how to find anything better for next year."
She hesitated, her gaze up the canyon of the rushing river winding between its cliffs of limestone softened with April verdure. She had seen little of any scenery before! "You're so practical and so definite, Miss 'Hontas, you and Miss Boswell, too. Auntie thinks it's terrible to make personal remarks, and I beg your pardon, but I envy it so."
"I'm not practical, I'm afraid, my dear, as you'll find. Look at the town there below us, Selina, nestling in its hollow? I'm a bit overenthusiastic instead. But perhaps what you see in Aunt Marcia and myself is the result of depending on ourselves for a good many years. My father died alone with me in Rome when I was fifteen, and my mother had died shortly before. Aunt Marcia and I have our own means and look after them."
The next day, on Sunday afternoon, Miss Pocahontas had callers: Mr. Mason, a bluff young man who let it be understood his interests were horses and in a milder degree the new stables he was building on his stock-farm, and Mr. Huger who talked in a prosperous way of the tobacco market and the present dullness in business. One could not associate either of them in mind with Miss 'Hontas.
After these callers were gone, Miss 'Hontas went upstairs to her sitting-room to write a note to a Miss Diana Talbot. Why she mentioned this name, Selina did not quite see, but later on she was to understand.
She went up to this sitting-room, too, at Miss Pocahontas' suggestion, and finding a seat on the broad white window-sill, not far from the desk, looked out on the gravel paths and the box edgings and the beds of jonquils and tulips in the garden sloping down to the river.