When Selina went up to her room, she sat and thought about it all. "Unthwarted and undeterred individuality!" This it was then in Marcus which she had called selfishness! Was it selfishness, nevertheless, under another name? Or was it the courage of a pronounced character? And _were_ young people these days beginning to clamor for it? And was it better or worse for them who secured it?
Selina sat and thought. She wanted, Oh, she wanted to find--truth.
Selina and her aunt and uncle went home the next day. She watched the flying scene from the car window: the swirling, turbulent creek whose rocky bed the track followed; the towering walls of limestone cliffs mounting from the foaming, brawling water, their ledges white with dogwood and rosy with red-bud and green like Selina's own pretty dress, with the pale verdure of April.
Selina was nearing nineteen now. She watched this flying glory of freshet and cliffs and April flowering, but her thoughts were with Pocahontas whom she loved, and Marcus whom despite all she so resented. If anyone had told her that day would come when the personal equation as the factor, would have faded, and to recall this trip to Eadston for the wedding would be to see tumbling waters, wild gray cliffs and tender tints of April, she would have refuted it with young scorn.
She turned from the car window and spoke to her aunt. This person's bonnet was over one ear, and her breastpin was unfastened and dangling, but she looked at peace since the thing requiring all this recent sacrifice of a trip to Eadston of her was over.
[Illustration: "She watched the flying scene from the car window."]
"Miss Boswell says Pocahontas stands ready to complement--that's the word she used to you when she was talking about it this morning--whatever Marcus chooses in life. She, not he, it seems. I suppose the justification is that he considers he's got the talent to be exploited and not she."
Aunt Juanita responded but absently. She'd done her part by her son's wedding now, and was through with it, and it distracted her to have her mind drawn any longer from her own affairs.
"Marcus has to go the way he feels driven, naturally. We all have to if we're going to amount to any force at all. Selina," abruptly, "I seem to recall in the prospectus of that school you went South to teach in, and which Lavinia gave me to read, that you went down there to do something or other secretarial?"