"You're mightily sure of yourself, being young," retorted Auntie. "I'll write Maria you're behaving. Selina, your mother says come right upstairs and get yourself ready for supper."
"Dinner, Auntie," from Selina quickly and reproachfully. Selina was scant seventeen.
"Dinner," Auntie corrected herself obediently.
"Dinner," mocked Culpepper with an alarmed air, "how're we plain folk ever going to live up to her, I put it to you, ole miss, If she goes on insisting on these things?"
When Selina came down to breakfast the next morning Papa was gone but Mamma and Auntie were lingering over their coffee and waffles, waiting for her.
She explained her tardiness. "I'm late because I didn't know just what to put on to teach in. I got out my cloth dress, but that seemed reckless when it's my best, so I put on the old plaid and this linen collar and cuffs."
"Which are tasty and yet severe," said Mamma approvingly, "and somehow in keeping."
The implication proved unfortunate. Selina's profile as it flashed about on Mamma flushed. Such a young, young profile. Such a young Selina in the plaid dress and the linen collar and the cuffs. Such a child quivering with abhorrence of the act of going to work, and wincing with shame because of the abhorrence. In her pitiful state she was inclined to take umbrage at anything. And what did her mother mean?
"Linen collar and cuffs are in keeping with what, Mamma?" she asked in reply, even sharply.
Mamma hastened to conciliate and again was unfortunate. "In keeping with the very worthy calling you are entering on. The pettifogic calling as we spoke of it under Mr. Aristides Welkin. He had a proper respect for his occupation as a teacher and saw to it that his pupils had."
"If he meant pedagogic, Mamma, he probably said so. And can't you understand if there's one thing _I wouldn't_ want it to be, it's a calling? Mamma, _please_ don't let's discuss the teaching any more. Yes, I've had all I want to eat. I _did_ eat my egg, and I don't _want_ any waffles."
"Selina, come here and kiss Auntie before you go," from that dear person. "I learned my a-b, abs, and my parlez-vous's, before the day of Mr. Welkin. In my time we all went to old Madame Noël de Jourde de Vaux, wife of a guillotined French nobleman, as I've often told you. In a little four-roomed cottage it was, not far from the market-house. I tasted my first olive there and sipped orange-flower water and sugar. She was a tiny old personage with twinkling eyes and manners that had served her well at court. She called it her A B C school for the babies."