"I had said Selina never should wear finery again not her own," explained Mamma.
"Well, isn't it her own?" returned Cousin Maria emphatically, "and haven't you and Ann Eliza been playing mothers to my Culpepper? Come now, Lavinia, I shall be downright put out. Ann Eliza, you may as well give in."
As for Selina herself, standing by, the good ladies, as was their custom, never for a moment thought of allowing her a voice in the discussion at all!
It was a dear dress that she, used to being obedient, here was bidden to try on, just as Cousin Anna Tomlinson happening by, came upstairs. There was not much to it, though in that perhaps lay its appeal. Scant and slip-like, with a show of her pretty throat, and a show, too, of her slim nice ankles, it consisted of hand needlework on a texture of limp mull.
"Like our India muslins when we were young," Auntie was obliged to allow to Cousin Maria with satisfaction.
"Made by the sisters here in the convent on Madeleine Street," said Cousin Maria.
"I always meant to give Selina gold beads," said Cousin Anna.
"Why don't you give 'em then?" from Cousin Maria. "Selina, you look dear. With ankle-strap slippers and your finger in your mouth the way you had to be spanked out of, you'd seem about seven again. That's right, look pleased."
It was Mrs. Gwinne Tuttle, however, of all unpremeditated persons!--who gave Selina beads. She came trundling in just here to pay a visit to Auntie and her lifelong friend, Cousin Maria, leaving her carriage at the curb. Hearing voices upstairs, she came mounting up.
"As if Ann Eliza and Maria and I hadn't slept three in a bed in order to stay together, many a Friday night in our young days," she reminded Mamma. "I'd better add, we all were thinner then. Selina, that dress is something more like what it should be than the ones Anna here and Madame Vincent put on you and me. So you are going South, they tell me, with Pocahontas and my old friend, Marcia Boswell? I wish Pocahontas would make up her mind whom she's going to marry and do it. Huger with all his tobacco money, wants her, I hear, Maria, and young Mason, the jockey club's biggest man, is after her. Marcus Bruce is on her string, too, they tell me. She's too charming a person to grow restless and faddish, imagining she wants occupation and not a husband! That dress, Selina, with its round neck, needs beads."