She found voice. Moreover, she smiled bravely at Auntie. "No, don't take my cloak, please. I'm going out to find the girls and tell them and have it over with. The price, you say, Mamma?" Unexpectedly she sobbed again. The coincidence was mortifying. "Four dollars."
"I quite begin to follow your meaning, Ann Eliza, when you say Mrs. Williams was a McIntosh," said Mamma with dignity. "You are right; her old grandfather, Manuel McIntosh, used to sit outside his doorstep on the sidewalk in his shirt-sleeves."
"I've always had a big respect for cooking, myself," said Auntie with unexpected relevancy. "I've never thought we put enough emphasis on it as a calling. Feeding the body is a worthy thing. It comes first."
"Who said anything about cooking, Ann Eliza?" from Mamma sharply. "How you wander from the point! If you're going out before dark, Selina, you'd better go."
The two dear ladies at their respective windows, beside their respective work-baskets, watching for Selina to go out, saw her run right into her four friends at the gate. The inference was they were coming by on some of their common affairs. There was the weekly dancing club, the last volume from the circulating library always passed around, the new pattern-book, what-not, constantly bringing them together.
The group opened to Selina as she came through the gate, each individual of it talking as it did so, and closed about her in its midst. Selina was popular with her friends.
Maud Addison was the dashing one with the red-brown hair and the splendidly red and white skin. Maud's father was a solidly prosperous wholesale merchant and a Presbyterian elder, as Auntie was wont to say, as if the two things were bracketed, and Mrs. Addison, her mother, capable and authoritative, was a noted housekeeper. There were four children younger than Maud.
"I must say," commented Mrs. Wistar from her window to her sister-in-law at hers, "Maud's rushing the season for October. And Indian summer hardly begun. That's the new sealskin jacket her father and mother promised her at graduation in June. I'd like it better if it did not fit in like a basque."
"If only Selina might have suitable clothes," grieved Auntie, "she would wear clothes well with her nice carriage and her pretty skin, and her color that comes and goes. She would justify pretty things. She gets her features from you, Lavinia, and her hair and her skin from Robert."
