in tights and spangles, descending the long stairway, the most beautiful being she had ever seen.
“The thing I like about plays and books is that anything can happen. Anything! You never know,” Selina said, after one of these evenings.
“No different from life,” Simeon Peake assured her. “You’ve no idea the things that happen to you if you just relax and take them as they come.”
Curiously enough, Simeon Peake said this, not through ignorance, but deliberately and with reason. In his way and day he was a very modern father. “I want you to see all kinds,” he would say to her. “I want you to realize that this whole thing is just a grand adventure. A fine show. The trick is to play in it and look at it at the same time.”
“What whole thing?”
“Living. All mixed up. The more kinds of people you see, and the more things you do, and the more things that happen to you, the richer you are. Even if they’re not pleasant things. That’s living. Remember, no matter what happens, good or bad, it’s just so much”—he used the gambler’s term, unconsciously—“just so much velvet.”
But Selina, somehow, understood. “You mean that anything’s better than being Aunt Sarah and Aunt Abbie.”
“Well—yes. There are only two kinds of people in the world that really count. One kind’s wheat and the other kind’s emeralds.”
“Fanny Davenport’s an emerald,” said Selina, quickly, and rather surprised to find herself saying it.
“Yes. That’s it.”
“And—and Julie Hempel’s father—he’s wheat.”
“By golly, Sele!” shouted Simeon Peake. “You’re a shrewd little tyke!”
It was after reading “Pride and Prejudice” that she decided to be the Jane Austen of her time. She became very mysterious and enjoyed a brief period of unpopularity at Miss Fister’s owing to her veiled allusions to her “work”; and an annoying way of smiling to herself and tapping a ruminative toe as though engaged in visions far too exquisite for the common eye. Her chum Julie Hempel, properly enough, became enraged at this and gave Selina to understand that she must make her choice between revealing her secret or being cast out of the Hempel heart. Selina swore her to secrecy.
“Very well, then. Now I’ll tell you. I’m going to be a novelist.” Julie was palpably disappointed, though she said, “Selina!” as though properly impressed, but followed it up with: “Still, I don’t see why you had to be so mysterious about it.”
“You just don’t understand, Julie. Writers have to study life at first hand. And if people know you’re studying them they don’t act natural. Now, that day you were telling me about the young man in your father’s shop who looked at you and said——”
“Selina Peake, if you dare to put that in your book I’ll never speak——”
“All right. I won’t. But that’s what I mean. You see!”
Julie Hempel and Selina Peake, both finished products of Miss Fister’s school, were of an age—nineteen. Selina, on this September day, had been spending the afternoon with Julie, and now, adjusting her hat preparatory to leaving, she clapped her hands over her ears to shut out the sounds of Julie’s importunings that she stay to supper. Certainly the prospect of the usual Monday evening meal in Mrs. Tebbitt’s boarding house (the Peake luck was momentarily low) did not present sufficient excuse for Selina’s refusal. Indeed, the Hempel supper as sketched dish for dish by the urgent Julie brought little greedy groans from Selina.
“It’s prairie chickens—three of them—that a farmer west of town brought Father. Mother fixes them with stuffing, and there’s currant jell. Creamed onions and baked tomatoes. And for dessert, apple roll.”
Selina snapped the elastic holding her high-crowned hat under her chignon of hair in the back. She uttered a final and quavering groan. “On Monday nights we have cold mutton and cabbage at Mrs. Tebbitt’s. This is Monday.”
“Well then, silly, why not stay!”
“Father comes home at six. If I’m not there he’s disappointed.”
Julie, plump, blonde, placid, forsook her soft white blandishments and tried steel against the steel of Selina’s decision.
“He leaves you right after supper. And you’re alone every night until twelve and after.”
“I don’t see what that has to do with it,” Selina said, stiffly.
Julie’s steel, being low-grade, melted at once and ran off her in rivulets. “Of course it hasn’t, Selie dear. Only I thought you might leave him just this once.”
“If I’m not there he’s disappointed. And that terrible Mrs. Tebbitt makes eyes at him. He hates it there.”
“Then I don’t see why you stay. I never could see. You’ve been there four months now, and I think it’s horrid and stuffy; and oilcloth on the stairs.”
“Father has had some temporary business setbacks.”
Selina’s costume testified to that. True, it was modish, and bustled, and basqued, and flounced; and her high-crowned, short-rimmed hat, with its trimming of feathers and flowers and ribbons had come from New York. But both were of last spring’s purchasing, and this was September.
In the course of the afternoon they had been looking over the pages of Godey’s Ladies’ Book for that month. The disparity between Selina’s costume and the creations pictured there was much as the difference between the Tebbitt meal and that outlined by Julie. Now Julie, fond though defeated, kissed her friend good-bye.
Selina walked quickly the short distance from the Hempel house to Tebbitt’s, on Dearborn Avenue. Up in her second-floor room she took off her hat and called to her father, but he had not yet come in. She was glad of that. She had been fearful of being late. She regarded her hat now with some distaste, decided to rip off the faded spring roses, did rip a stitch or two, only to discover that the hat material was more faded than the roses, and that the uncovered surface showed up a dark splotch like a wall-spot when a picture, long hung, is removed. So she got a needle and prepared to tack the offending rose in its accustomed place.
Perched on the arm of a chair near the window, taking quick deft stitches, she heard a sound. She had never heard that sound before—that peculiar sound—the slow, ominous tread of men laden with a heavy inert burden; bearing with infinite care that which was well beyond hurting. Selina had never heard that sound before, and yet, hearing it, she recognized it by one of those pangs, centuries old, called woman’s instinct. Thud—shuffle—thud—shuffle—up the narrow stairway, along the passage. She stood up, the needle poised in her hand. The hat fell to the floor. Her eyes were wide, fixed. Her lips slightly parted. The listening look. She knew.
She knew even before she heard the hoarse man’s voice saying, “Lift ’er up there a little on the corner, now. Easy—e-e-easy.” And Mrs. Tebbitt’s high shrill clamour: “You can’t bring it in there! You hadn’t ought to bring it in here like this!”
Selina’s suspended breath came back. She was panting now. She had flung open the door. A flat still burden partially covered with an overcoat carelessly flung over the face. The feet, in their square-toed boots, wobbled
