"We haven't heard anything about a legacy," said Mamma. "We liked Miss Diana very much when she called twice. She seemed very cheerful and certain about the school, and has offered Selina thirty-five dollars a month and her board and washing. She herself and the Episcopal minister at the place, so she said, are to teach the advanced classes."
"Diana is as cheerfully volatile and heady as the rest of the Talbots," claimed Cousin Maria. "They are in the county next to ours and I've known 'em always. Old Tom Talbot, the grandfather, built the first brandy distillery in the state in order to distill brandy from beets. Why, with corn everywhere and fortunes, too, to be made in sour-mash whisky, only a Talbot could say. He failed, of course, and later set out vineyards for claret on land that held fortunes in Burley tobacco. He had traveled and read too much to be practical, old Tom Talbot had."
"Why, of course," chimed in Auntie, "I remember the stories of him. He thought once he'd succeeded in making silk thread for weaving from milk-weed."
"It's in the blood," said Cousin Maria. "Bulkley Talbot, Tom's son, and Diana's father, had his craze planting yucca to make rope fiber with all his wife's inherited acres crying to God and nature for hemp. Diana's been kept down until now by her brothers who both married level-headed women who have kept them steady in harness themselves. In turn they've frowned down Diana until this last year when she came into a legacy of some several thousand dollars from an aunt. Immediately she disbanded the little school she had taught for half her life in her home town, and last fall went South. She said our winters were beginning to give her rheumatism and she was going down to sit on the equator or some of its tributaries and think things over. They tell me she has leased this hotel for two years, and I know she has had her school furniture shipped. I don't mean to discourage you, Selina. Diana is one of my old friends. In one sense you'll be as safe with her as with your mother here, or with Ann Eliza or myself. And I must say, too, I agree with Emmeline Tuttle that it looks freakish in Pocahontas to drag her aunt down there this early in the season that she may go to teaching when she doesn't have to. Young women didn't indulge in restlessness in my day."
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
It seemed as though everyone wanted to do something for Selina as the time drew near. Marcus stopped by one morning about a week before she was to go. He had added a carelessly floating tie to his make-up of cape and old hat, and his manner was even more easily negligent.
"Tell Uncle Robert not to do anything about a ticket for you, Selina. The matter's as good as settled and I stopped to tell you I have a pass for you."
This was news so astounding that Mamma on hearing it, lost her head. "Then we will get that piece of white opera cloth, Ann Eliza, and make her the evening cape she needs so badly. There'll be money enough for it now."