So Maud, splendid, loyal, honest, restless Maud!
Selina looked out the car-window and got her bearings. She had time in plenty yet and could resume her communings. Adele had been away since July at Cape May and to the mountains with her mother and grandmother. She would be home about the first of October. Her several letters to Selina had been listless and devoid of much hope.
"I don't quite see what I'm coming back to," she said in the last one here on Selina's lap "and can only hope Mamma and Grandmamma do see. Débutantes of the first and second rank when they lapse over to a second winter, I've noticed, form into euchre clubs that play in the daytime with each other, and take classes in the Saturday morning sewing-schools. What becomes of lapsed-over débutantes of the third or even as bad as the fourth rank, apparently I'm being taken back home to find out. I didn't tell you before I left that Mr. Cannon has been engaged all this time to a cousin up at his own home. He told me about it when he came to say good-bye. I thought I'd like you to know, and now we'll drop it."
Selina took up the last of the letters. It was from Juliette and she wrote cheerfully in her crisp, spirited backhand.
Both Granddad and Grandfather came around in their stands, after they found I'd actually done the thing, and agreed to put me through the four years of college. And Algy went to see them it seems and up and told them he purposed doing this himself! That, as he understands it, and unless he was laboring under a mistake, he was the person whose name I'd undertaken to bear. And he's been sending me money right along while I'm here with my cousin making up my two conditions. But it's the money both Granddad and Grandfather have put in the bank for me I'm using and shall use. And so I can't understand all this talk from everybody at home of the shocking great deal I've taken from Algy in marrying him in this way. He and I, at any rate, understood it when we talked it over. My cousin asked me the other day what I meant to do about it when I got through college? Did I look on myself as Algy's wife, or did I not? I hadn't thought about this, and it's been worrying me considerably. Do you suppose he thinks that's the way of it? Do you know, Mamma never once spoke to me about the possibilities of my being anybody's wife in my life?