from people residing on the River
Drive and in that neighborhood, indeed--but from people like the Flaggs,
for instance, who, having acquired large wealth and erected lordly
dwellings, were eager to dispense good-natured, lavish hospitality
without social experience. Her sensitive ordeal in New York had
quickened her social perceptions, so that whereas at the time of her
departure from Benham as Mrs. Littleton she regarded her present
neighborhood as an integral class, she was now prompt to separate the
sheep from the goats, and to remark that only the goats seemed conscious
of her existence. With the exception of Mrs. Taylor, who had called when
she was out, not one of a certain set, the outward manifestations of
whose stately being were constantly passing her windows, appeared to
take the slightest interest in her. Strictly speaking, Mrs. Taylor was
of this set, yet apart from it. Hers was the exclusive intellectual and
aesthetic set, this the exclusive fashionable set--both alike execrable
and foreign to the traditions of Benham. As Selma had discovered the one
and declared war against it, so she promised herself to confound the
other when the period of her mourning was over, and she was free to
appear again in society. Once more she congratulated herself that she
had come in time to nip in the bud this other off-shoot of aristocratic
tendencies. As yet either set was small in number, and she foresaw that
it would be an easy task to unite in a solid phalanx of
offensive-defensive influence the friendly souls whom these people
treated as outsiders, and purge the society atmosphere of the miasma of
exclusiveness. In connection with the means to this end, when the winter
slipped away and left her feeling that she had been ignored, and that
she was eager to assume a commanding position, she began to take more
than passing thought of the attentions of Mr. Lyons. That he was
interested by her there could be no doubt, for he plainly went out of
his way to seek her society, calling at the house from time to time, and
exercising a useful, nattering superintendence over her lecture course
in the other cities of the State, in each of which he appeared to have
friends on the newspaper press who put agreeable notices in print
concerning her performance. She had returned to Benham believing that
her married life was over; that her heart was in the grave with Wilbur,
and that she would never again part with her independence. The not