She was horribly embarrassed, not being accustomed to discuss her affairs in this way with him, communications of an intimate nature between them always being through her mother. The thing was to end the interview as quickly as possible and get away from the disturbing proximity.
"It's settled, Papa, so don't decry it," she spoke stiffly and even while doing so was ashamed of it.
He was regarding her a little wistfully. "Your mother tells me, Selina, that you will need a winter dress?" Was he groping, perhaps sorrowfully, trying to find some point through which to reach her? "See to it that it comes from me, will you, and that it is a nice one?"
Again she was ashamed, this time of the relief with which she fled from his kiss and the touch of his hand on her shoulder.
Apparently there is everything in an undertaking being a success, even when it is teaching for your living, and you a woman. Selina told Juliette, what her four pupils were to bring her, and she told the others, they who had been so plainly shocked and full of distress for her, and they came hurrying over, filled with excitement and admiration now.
It was the afternoon following Selina's second day of teaching. She was in her own room which overlooked the backyard and Auntie's beds of salvias and dahlias still braving the first light frosts. Now Selina felt that her room didn't lack distinction. She would have preferred a set of cottage furniture like Maud's, of course, white with decalcomania decorations on it in flowers and landscapes, instead of the despised mahogany set that had belonged to the grandmother she was named for. Selina belonged to her own day and hour.
"Cottage furniture is adorable and mahogany relegated to attics and junk shops," she once had said discontentedly to her mother.
Still, with her books and her pictures, a panel in oils done by Cousin Anna, of cat-tails, and the companion to it in pond-lilies, and a Japanese parasol over her mantelpiece, her room did not lack for distinction.
She was looking over the first-reader books she had ordered for her pupils, and wondering what she was to do with them, when there was a tap at her door and Amanthus came in. Lashing the laughter of her cheeks and eyes, and Amanthus did not often stop being enchanted for side matters, this loveliest of creatures came hurrying to her and kissed her.