True! One saw Maud rising to the new demands of the situation. "If we'd only thought about it sooner," she mourned. "On our walk with Culpepper and his friends the other day, Mr. Welling that I was with, the square one with spectacles, told me they were deep in a book round at their rooms that they were having daily rows over, Adam Smith's 'Wealth of Nations.' My uncle has it on his shelves. We might have gotten up on that and showed them."
Amanthus happened in here and they explained the trouble.
"Why not talk in pairs and not trouble about a subject?" she asked hopefully. "Wouldn't it be a conversazione just the same?"
They ignored this whereas they might have said patently tolerant things to her. Amanthus was Amanthus and they must accept her as she was, which meant be magnanimous with her rather than lofty or pitying.
"I'll go round to the school to-morrow," said Maud, "and ask permission to look over the old minutes of our Sappho Literary Club. By looking up our program, I'll happen on some subject of general interest that we're all up on. As soon as you're home from your teaching, Selina, come over and we'll decide."
"Don't count me in on this conversazione," said Amanthus, "I'll come but I won't talk."
True, as she had said once before, lovely creature that she was, sunny-haired, violet of eyes, coral-lipped, she had no need for conversation, no, nor yet wit, nor repartee, in her business of life.
It almost would seem that Auntie agreed with Amanthus. "Selina's quite pretty enough, Lavinia, to do without this foolishness," she insisted. "It isn't on account of any brains she's got, or any she'll come to have, for example, that Culpepper comes round here. Selina's pretty and sweet and she looks up to him. So far as he and any other men she's likely to meet go, what on earth more do they want in her? I'm an old maid but I know."
It was the evening of the conversazione. Selina, dear child, as Auntie called her, pretty and flushed and frankly excited, wore the discredited graduation dress, furbished up once more by Mamma, and yet once more pressed by Aunt Viney.
"Never, never again do we let her wear garments not her own," said Mamma as Selina went down to welcome those first arrivals, the friends of her youth.