r wives, who, twenty years before, would have
prated solemnly against a host of gay, enlivening or pretty customs as
incompatible with American virtue, were now adopting these as rapidly as
money could procure them--the brother and sister had remained
comparatively unaffected by the consequences of the transformation
scene. Certainly their home had. It was old-fashioned in its garniture
and its gentility. It spoke of a day, not so many years before, when
high thinking had led to blinking where domestic decoration was
concerned, and people had bought ugly wooden and worsted things to live
with because only the things of the spirit seemed of real importance.
Still time, with its marvellous touch, has often the gift of making
furniture and upholstery, which were hideous when bought, look
interesting and cosey when they have become old-fashioned. In this way
Pauline Wilbur's parlor was a delightful relic of a day gone by. There
was scarcely a pretty thing in it, as Wilbur himself well knew, yet, as
a whole, it had an atmosphere--an atmosphere of simple unaffected
refinement. Their domestic belongings had come to them from their
parents, and they had never had the means to replenish them. When, in
due time, they had realized their artistic worthlessness, they had held
to them through affection, humorously conscious of the incongruity that
two such modern individuals as themselves should be living in a domestic
museum. Then, presto! friends had begun to congratulate them on the
uniqueness of their establishment, and to express affection for it. It
had become a favorite resort for many modern spirits--artists, literary
men, musicians, self-supporting women--and Pauline's oyster suppers,
cooked in her grandmother's blazer, were still a stimulus to high
thinking.

So matters stood when Selma entered it as a bride. Her coming signified
the breaking up of the household and the establishment. Pauline had
thought that out in her clear brain over night since receiving Wilbur's
telegram. Wilbur must move into a modern house, and she into a modern
flat. She would keep the very old things, such as the blazer and some
andirons and a pair of candlesticks, for they were ancient enough to be
really artistic, but the furniture of the immediate past, her father and
mother's generation, should be sold at auction. Wilbur and she must, if
only for Selma's sake, become modern in material matters as well as in
their mental interests.

Pauline pr