Selina was continuing. "And I told you how she said she does not approve of the new methods called kindergarten that are beginning to be used in the schools, and wants William Williams Jr. taught at home, and did I know of any young person among my friends fitted to do it?"
"William Jr.'s head is too big," said Auntie, decidedly, "it rolls around on his neck. I've noticed him on the bench at Sunday-school."
Selina passed over the interruption. "I told her yesterday that I did not know of anyone. To-day I do. I am going to offer to teach him myself!" But her throat was dry, and her hands were cold as she said it.
Selina knew no women wage-earners except her teachers at the public school, who stood apart unique personalities in a world entered into and left behind at intervals, and a scattering of women clerks in the stores of her Southern city. Yes, on the contrary, she did know one, Miss Emma McRanney, a regular attendant at the same church as the Wistars, stolid, settled, and middle-aged, a setter of type at the State Institute for the Blind. Mamma and Auntie made a point of going out their ways on Sundays to stop her and shake hands with her kindly.
But she was the exception. In the world of Selina, in the world of her mother and her aunt, in that of the friends of her youth and their mothers and sisters and aunts, the accolading stamp of position, of gentility, of femininity, lay in the monetary dependence of womankind on its men.
Nor had life, as Selina came up through it, the private school of her baby days, the public schooling of later days, the friends of her youth, nor Mother, nor Auntie, nor those gilt-topped volumes, nor dancing school, nor Sunday-school, nor her tinkling music lessons, nor traditions, nor precedent, nor standards, nor prides, nor preoccupations, nor day dreams, prepared Selina for this step. And so her throat was dry and her hands were cold as she forced herself to say it.
"I am going to offer to teach him myself."
And then it was that the unexpected happened. The fight on the part of Mamma and Auntie had been a long one and a gruelling one, as long almost as Selina's life, and they by nature were clinging creatures. With the very note of her young utterance, as at the Gideon shout of the newer generation, their walls fell.