"Saying things for effect, and professing virtue which we do not possess."
Selma was silent a moment. "What does champagne cost a bottle?"
"About three dollars and a half."
"Do you really think their house barbaric?"
"It certainly suggests to me heterogeneous barbaric splendor. They bought their upholstery as they did their pictures, with free-handed self-confidence. Occasionally they made a brilliant shot, but oftener they never hit the target at all."
"I think I like brighter colors than you do, Wilbur," mused Selma. "I used to consider things like that as wrong; but I suppose that was because our fathers wished Europe to understand that we disapproved of the luxury of courts and the empty lives of the nobility. But if people here with purpose have money, it would seem sensible to furnish their houses prettily."
"Subject always to the crucifying canons of art," laughed Littleton. "I'm glad you're coming round to my view, Selma. Only I deny the ability of the free-born American, with the overflowing purse, to indulge his newly acquired taste for gorgeous effects without professional assistance."
"I suppose so. I can see that their house is crude, though I do think that they have some handsome things. It must be interesting to walk through shops and say: 'I'll take that,' just because it pleases you."
During her first marriage Selma had found the problem of dollars and cents a simple one. The income of Lewis Babcock was always larger than the demands made upon it, and though she kept house and was familiar with the domestic disbursements, questions of expenditure solved themselves readily. She had never been obliged to ask herself whether they could afford this or that outlay. Her husband had been only too eager to give her anything she desired. Consideration of the cost of things had seemed to her beneath her notice, and as the concern of the providing man rather than the thoughtful American wife and mother. After she had been divorced the difficulty in supplying herself readily with money had been a dismaying incident of her single life. Dismaying because it had seemed to her a limitation unworthy of her aspirations and abilities. She had married Littleton because she believed him her ideal of what a man should be, but she had been glad that he would be able to support her and exempt her from the necessity of asking what things cost.
By the end of their first year and a half of marriage, Selma realized that this necessity still stood, almost like a wolf at the door, between her and the free development of her desires and aspirations. New York prices were appalling; the demands of life in New York still more so. They had started house-keeping on a more elaborate scale than she had been used to in Benham. As Mrs. Babcock she had kept one hired girl; but in her new kitchen there were two servants, in deference to the desire of Littleton, who did not wish her to perform the manual work of the establishment. Men rarely appreciate in advance to the full extent the extra cost of married life, and Littleton, though intending to be prudent, found his bills larger than he had expected. He was able to pay them promptly and without worry, but he was obliged to make evident to Selma that the margin over and above their carefully considered expenses was very small. The task of watching the butcher's book and the provision list, and thinking twice before making any new outlay, was something she had not bargained for. All through her early life as a girl, the question of money had been kept in the background by the simplicity of her surroundings. In her country town at home they had kept no servants. A woman relative had done the work, and she had been free to pursue her mental interests and devote herself to her father. She had thought then that the existence of domestic servants was an act of treason against the institutions of the country by those who kept them. Yet she had accepted, with glee, the hired-girl whom Babcock had provided, satisfying her own democratic scruples by dubbing her "help," and by occasionally offering her a book to read or catechising her as to her moral needs. There is probably no one in the civilized world more proud of the possession of a domestic servant than the American woman who has never had one, and no one more prompt to consign her to the obscurity of the kitchen after a feeble pretence at making her feel at home. Selma was delighted to have two instead of one, and, after beholding Mrs. Williams's trig maids, was eager to see her own arrayed in white caps and black alpaca dresses. Yet, though she had become keen to cultivate the New York manner, and had succeeded in reconciling her conscience to the possession of beautiful things by people with a purpose, it irked her to feel that she was hampered in living up to her new-found faith by the bugbear of a lean purse. She had expected, as Wilbur's wife, to figure quickly and gracefully in the van of New York intellectual and social progress. Instead, she was one among thousands, living in a new and undeveloped locality, unrecognized by the people of whom she read in the newspapers, and without opportunities for displaying her own individuality and talents. It depressed her to see the long lines of houses, street after street, and to think that she was merely a unit, unknown by name, in this great sea of humanity—she, Selma Littleton, free-born American, conscious of virtue and power. This must not be; and she divined clearer and clearer every day that it need not be if she had more money.