Selina: Her Hopeful Efforts and Her Livelier Failures

by George Madden Martin

"Each lady was sitting by her standing work-basket of cane."

Mr. Robert Wistar, dear and very real gentleman as he was, and as his Selina saw and knew him, for many years now had had a floor space in a building in an off business street, and bought and sold machinery, new and old, on the varying and uncertain basis of commission. But at home in the squat and ugly brick house owned in part by him and in part by Auntie, who was his older sister, his household of womenkind upheld his prestige and dominance as their male and their protector.

His household of women! Selina's eyes went from the little person of her mother, ardent striver to keep up a fairly prosperous front, to the heavy person of her auntie, darling soul, who did not seem quite to grasp why a front must be kept up, but assured that it must, submitted. Big, lovable, personable auntie, could the pity of it be that she was always submitting? Each lady was sitting by her standing work-basket of cane, with work however abandoned into her respective dear lap.

Mamma, little person, meant by Heaven to be pretty if she had not in the stead to be so perturbed, just here seemed disposed and almost unreasonably, to harbor feeling against Aunt Viney for wanting what was coming to her. There had been similar feeling on her part toward the iceman, and, preceding him, toward the butcher.

"If it were anybody but Viney herself, coming upstairs to me right in my own room and asking for her money, I would feel I could not overlook it," she was saying. "She should have known that as soon as it was convenient for her to have it, I would give it to her."

"It is the second time the collector of dues on her funeral insurance has come around," reminded Auntie, "and I dare say he made her feel she had to ask for it."

"There's more to it than her merely coming upstairs to me about it," said Mamma. "Two dollars and a half to three dollars is all anyone thought of paying a servant in my day." Her tone would imply that her day and her authority were decades past and other people in this matter of Aunt Viney, altogether and unworthily responsible. "Four dollars to a servant is out of all reason."

And so indeed four dollars at that day and in that place would have been but for the agreement fixing the wages of this old person at this sum!