Selina sighed, and her gaze not finding the relief it sought within the room, went to the window and looked out between its discreet draperies. Thus far indeed Selina had gazed on all of life through discreet draperies. And if as she sat there in the cushioned chair with her eyes so sweetly anxious, she was incontinently young to look upon even for scant seventeen, in any real knowledge of life and of what life had a right to demand from her, she was pitiably younger. This story undertakes to be the tenderly smiling narrative of Selina's inefficiencies, the epic of her small aspirings and her, it is to be hoped, engaging failures.
If she, untrained, unarmed and unaware, is typical in any sense of the thousands of American girls of her period, shall it be assumed there are none like her to-day, piously guarded and yet piteously and absurdly unready for life's demands?
And if the conditions which surrounded her, and the inefficiencies which marked her, were in any degree usual in her day, may we not the better understand her generation's dissatisfaction with these conditions, as shown in those gropings toward something illy defined no doubt but deeply desired, which now appear to have been the first general expression of woman's discontent in this country?
Selina's gaze had wandered to the window to find but doubtful comfort there. For in her mind's eye she saw the relative position her squat, two-storied brick house with its square of grass and its iron fence set in stone coping, bore to the other houses on the block in size, appearance and importance. There were some few smaller and shabbier. She gave neighborly greeting to the dwellers within these homes when she met them, but without any knowledge as to why, and through no volition of her own that she was aware of, her life did not touch theirs.
[Illustration: "Impeccable yard plots, whitened flaggings and steps."]
Of the other houses along the block, some were three-storied, others two-storied but double in width, the further characteristics of these eminently prosperous dwellings being impeccable yard plots, whitened flaggings and steps, burnished doorsills, burnished doorbells, doorplates. The dwellers within these altogether creditable establishments, Selina did know; their lives and hers did touch; they too were variations in a common inefficiency; they too were products of the same conditions as herself. Amanthus in the one house, enchanting and engaging, or so Selina saw her; Juliette in another, eager and diminutive, cheeks carmine, fiery with the faith of the ardent follower; Maud in a third, luscious, capable, inquiet, overflowing with protest, alert with innovation; Adele in a fourth, stickler and debater, full of a conscience for the pro and con: these four were Selina's own, these and their households, the friends, she would have told you, of her youth.