ange of true sympathy--that priceless privilege,"
answered Selma, her liking for a sententious speech rising paramount
even to the pleasure caused her by the allusion to her personal
appearance. Nevertheless it was agreeable to be preferred to his female
cousins on the score of comeliness.

Accordingly, within six months of her husband's death, the transition to
Benham was accomplished, and Selma was able to encounter the
metaphorically open arms, referred to by Mrs. Earle, without feeling
that she was a less important person than when she had been whisked off
as a bride by Littleton, the rising architect. She was returning as the
confidential, protecting companion of a successful, self-made old man,
who was relying on her to make his new establishment a pleasure to
himself and a credit to the wide-awake city in which he had elected to
pass his remaining days. She was returning to a house on the River Drive
(the aristocratic boulevard of Benham, where the river Nye makes a broad
sweep to the south); a house not far distant from the Flagg mansion at
which, as Mrs. Lewis Babcock, she had looked askance as a monument
inimical to democratic simplicity. Wilbur had taught her that it was
very ugly, and now that she saw it again after a lapse of years she was
pleased to note that her new residence, though slightly smaller, had a
more modern and distinguished air.

The new house was of rough-hewn red sandstone, combining solid dignity
and some artistic merit, for Benham had not stood still architecturally
speaking. The River Drive was a grotesque, yet on the whole encouraging
exhibit. Most of the residences had been designed by native talent, but
under the spur of experiment even the plain, hard-headed builders had
been constrained to dub themselves "architects," and adopt modern
methods; and here and there stood evidences that the seed planted by
Mrs. Hallett Taylor and Littleton had borne fruit, for Benham possessed
at least half a dozen private houses which could defy criticism.

The one selected by Mr. Parsons was not of these half dozen; but the
plain, hard-headed builder who had erected it for the original owner was
shrewd and imitative, and had avoided ambitious deviations from the type
he wished to copy--the red sandstone, swell front variety, which ten
years before would have seemed to the moral sense of Benham unduly
cheerful. Mr. Parsons was so fortunate as to be able to buy it just
after it had been completed, tog