There was that in this unfamiliar view of herself through Marcus' estimate which hurt, and she went away silent.
Precedent and training had done all they might to make intercourse between Selina and her father strained and unnatural. She could remember when she was a bit of a thing, how on taking a pricked finger to him for attention, she had been snatched away as from an act of impiety, by womenkind, Mamma or Auntie, for womankind to attend it, and somehow the episode seemed typical.
To open confidence with your father was as desperate a violation of custom as to be immodest, and she had not forgotten the embarrassment of going to him for money for her teaching venture of the winter, even after her mother had opened the way. It came to her now that such a relation between a daughter and father was a bit shocking.
"She went to her father."
That night after her mother and her aunt were gone together to Wednesday evening service, she went to her father who was reading his paper as usual in the back parlor, and spoke quickly before her courage could fail her.
"You—you have been giving me five dollars a month for my carfare and change since I began teaching, Papa. And through Mamma you are paying for my clothes. Isn't it a losing business for you? I've only been giving Mamma the sixteen dollars I make a month, for Aunt Viney, and that's over with for the summer now."
"Instead of keeping the sixteen dollars for your carfare and incidentals and such?" smiled Papa, perhaps a little embarrassed, too, at the trend of the conversation. "Won't you sit down, Selina?"
"But it seems so much more to Mamma and Auntie to have it come from me this way."
"I bow to the processes in feminine logic more intricate than I can follow," agreed Papa. "And what then, Selina?"