ces of Europe nor the sons of
American leading citizens were paying that attention to her daughter
which the young lady's charms seemed to her to merit. If living lavishly
in hotels and seeing everybody right and left were not the high-road to
elegant existence and hence to a brilliant match for Lucretia, Mrs.
Parsons was ready to try the effect of a house on Fifth Avenue, though
she preferred the comforts of her present mode of life. Still one
advantage of a stable home would be that Mr. Parsons could be constantly
with them, instead of an occasional and intermittent visitor
communicated with more frequently by electricity than by word of mouth.
While Mr. Parsons was selecting the land, she and Lucretia had abandoned
themselves to an orgy of shopping, and with an eye to the new house,
their rooms at the hotel were already littered with gorgeous fabrics,
patterns of wall-paper and pieces of pottery.

Selma's facility in the New York manner was practised on Silas Parsons
with flattering success. He was captivated by her--more so than by
Flossy, who amused him as a flibbertigibbet, but who seemed to him to
lack the serious cast of character which he felt that he discerned
beneath the sprightliness of this new charmer. Mr. Parsons was what he
called a "stickler" for the dignity of a serious demeanor. He liked to
laugh at the theatre, but mistrusted a daily point of view which savored
of buffoonery. He was fond of saying that more than one public man in
the United States had come to grief politically from being a joker, and
that the American people could not endure flippancy in their
representatives. He liked to tell and listen to humorous stories in the
security of a smoking-room, but in his opinion it behooved a citizen to
maintain a dignified bearing before the world. Like other self-made men
who had come to New York--like Selma herself--he had shrunk from and
deplored at first the lighter tone of casual speech. Still he had grown
used to it, and had even come to depend on it as an amusement. But he
felt that in the case of Selma there was a basis of ethical earnestness,
appropriate to woman, beneath her chatty flow of small talk. That she
was comparatively a new-comer accounted partially for this impression,
but it was mainly due to the fact that she still reverted after her
sallies of pleasantry to a grave method of deportment.

Selma's chief hospitality toward the Parsonses took the form of a
theatre party, which inc