"I always meant to give Selina gold beads," said Cousin Anna.
"Why don't you give 'em then?" from Cousin Maria. "Selina, you look dear. With ankle-strap slippers and your finger in your mouth the way you had to be spanked out of, you'd seem about seven again. That's right, look pleased."
It was Mrs. Gwinne Tuttle, however, of all unpremeditated persons!—who gave Selina beads. She came trundling in just here to pay a visit to Auntie and her lifelong friend, Cousin Maria, leaving her carriage at the curb. Hearing voices upstairs, she came mounting up.
"As if Ann Eliza and Maria and I hadn't slept three in a bed in order to stay together, many a Friday night in our young days," she reminded Mamma. "I'd better add, we all were thinner then. Selina, that dress is something more like what it should be than the ones Anna here and Madame Vincent put on you and me. So you are going South, they tell me, with Pocahontas and my old friend, Marcia Boswell? I wish Pocahontas would make up her mind whom she's going to marry and do it. Huger with all his tobacco money, wants her, I hear, Maria, and young Mason, the jockey club's biggest man, is after her. Marcus Bruce is on her string, too, they tell me. She's too charming a person to grow restless and faddish, imagining she wants occupation and not a husband! That dress, Selina, with its round neck, needs beads."
There came a murmur from Cousin Anna.
"Well, who's keeping you from giving gold ones, Anna?" inquired Mrs. Tuttle. "I'm going to send Selina some beads on my own account. I owe her on a score she and I know about. I was tried that night of the musicale, Selina; two of my best soloists had failed me, and I can't seem to stand a person being apologetic and deprecatory anyhow. Why didn't you rise to it and tell me what you thought of me? My beads, Anna, are going to be coral, the coral of Selina's cheeks right now. The ingenue style of the dress and of Selina, call for coral."
"When a girl is young," said Cousin Maria, "I say have her look young."
"She does, Maria," returned Mrs. Tuttle. "Selina looks altogether young. She's pretty, too, and it's not going to hurt her to know it. It'll do her good instead, and give her spirit. I'm going down street and choose my corals now."
After Mrs. Tuttle and Cousin Anna both were gone, Cousin Maria broke forth: "I hope Diana Talbot isn't going to make a fiasco of her legacy with this school venture."