Culpepper came down a week before it was necessary for his return to the law school, to see about this thing of Selina going away as he put it to Auntie bluntly. He walked in one evening big and sunburned and bold and blatant with health and stored energy and conviction.
It was the first week in September and hot and he found the household, Mamma, Auntie and Selina sitting out on the stone steps in the starlight, Papa inside reading his paper, the aroma of his cigar floating out.
"What does it all mean?" Culpepper without preamble demanded of the older ladies--"this thing Selina wrote about of going away to teach? Keep still, Selina, we know your side of it."
"And mine, I hope, Culpepper," came out through the open doorway from Papa reading under the gas-jet in the hall. "Kindly accept the fact that I am aiding and abetting her. She came to her father this time first."
Mamma, coming in on this tearfully, was most emphatic: "I blame Marcus, blame him entirely. He's Juanita's own child for stirring up trouble or trying to, for other people. He defended himself to my face by saying I had kept Selina so overyoung for her years she's almost ridiculous, and that he's trying to help her to find what I've deprived her of, her right to be a reasoning and thinking human creature." Mamma produced her pocket handkerchief.
"Juanita herself came around with him," said Auntie aggrievedly. "She'd better have stayed at home and mended her clothes. Her skirt was without a braid and frayed, and two buttons were gone from the front of her waist. Instead she told us that if we of the older generation didn't face the demands of the present younger one, it simply means they'll cut us out of their working plans and repudiate us. Don't ask me what she meant. You've heard Juanita. And she said the time was at hand and was ripe and she was warning us. What time she didn't specify. That she hadn't been prophesying to her sex all these years not to know the signs now they were here. She talked like an altogether determined and fanatical person, and with no more sense to it than just what I say, but then Juanita's talk is always more or less that way."
"Marcus, of course! I might have guessed he was in it," said Culpepper with small patience. But then these two never had struck it off anyway, neither ever willing to concede a thing to the other, Maud always said. "It's a fool proposition, I beg your pardon, Cousin Robert, since you say you're in it, but I'm with Cousin Lavinia and ole Miss here, every time. If Selina's got to teach, she'd better teach for less here at home where we all can look after her."
