There was the school Selma had attended in Highboro: her experience there complementing her growing knowledge of her Aunt Nell and Uncle Felix. The girls she came to know had learned so early, so eagerly and automatically to deny they were themselves, or had a true, private self, they would now deny such a denial had been made—and believe they spoke truth in doing so. Is a girl born thinking the color pink, or a soft curl, or a mincy walk, or a put-on tender smile, or an affected giggle is feminine and to be desired? Who made such rules? Why is it wrong, if it is, to think more about rain than a mother? Would the world end if she burnt her Bible and never thought of it again? If she denied that music (the only kind they understood) was music at all to her ear?

At the first doubt or hesitation, purity and innocence begin the slow rust into what is called “experience” and “learning about life.” And when one is totally corrupted and compromised, one may then be considered “mature.”

In desperate need of some touch, some reassurance, Selma fell in love with a young schoolmate whose name was Elizabeth-Ann Malone and who was everything Selma was not—conventional, accepting, approving, hopeful. Even as she scoffed at her, as she scolded her young love for bowing to false idols, she herself began to accept those idols and in time found that she was able, if she tried very hard, to behave like the other girls: to shriek in seeming terror at an unexpected noise, to giggle at any small bit of dull news, to pretend a concern for clothes and cooking and sewing and even babies—to, indeed, “grow up,” betrayed and betraying all the purity and innocence and good, true selfishness she had been born with.

Bonard’s was another, and a different self-deception. Having been self-seeking and self-satisfying, he now felt a hunger for purity and innocence, and thought he saw these exemplified in the person of Selma. For all her recent seeming collaboration with convention, she was still unusual and original enough in appearance and conversation to delight by her freshness anyone who considered himself as jaded or sated with conventional society as Bonard considered himself to be.

Between them and not knowing it—in fact, they would have denied it had it been stated—both Selma and Bonard were ready to play parts in Deborah’s scheme of an alliance between them.

Haughty though he was to his inferiors, Bonard was lively and charming when with Selma; and she who could be odd to the point of eccentricity became in Bonard’s company the mild, shy maiden, a Sleeping Beauty to be quickened to life again by the kiss of the Prince.