A few months subsequent to this dinner party Flossy announced one day that Mr. Silas S. Parsons, whom Selma had seen with the Williamses at the theatre nearly three years before, had come to live in New York with his wife and daughter. Flossy referred to him eagerly as one of her husband's most valuable customers, a shrewd, sensible, Western business man, who had made money in patent machinery and was superbly rich. He had gone temporarily to a hotel, but he was intending to build a large house on Fifth Avenue near the park. Selma heard this announcement with keen interest, asking herself at once why Wilbur should not be the architect. Why not, indeed? She promptly reasoned that here was her chance to aid her husband; that he, if left to his own devices, would do nothing to attract the magnate's attention, and that it behooved her, as an American wife and a wide-awake, modern woman, to let Mr. Parsons know his qualifications, and to prepossess him in Wilbur's favor by her own attractions. The idea appealed to her exceedingly. She had been hoping that some opportunity to take an active part in the furtherance of Wilbur's career would present itself, for she felt instinctively that with her co-operation he would make more rapid progress. Here was exactly the occasion longed for. She saw in her mind's eye Mr. Parsons's completed mansion, stately and beautiful, the admired precursor of a host of important edifices—a revolutionizing monument in contemporary architecture. Wilbur would become the fashion, and his professional success be assured, thanks to the prompt ability of his wife to take advantage of circumstances. So she would prove herself a veritable helpmate, and the bond of marital sympathy would be strengthened and refreshed.
To begin with, Selma hinted to Mrs. Williams that Mr. Parsons might do worse than employ Wilbur to design his house. Flossy accepted the suggestion with enthusiasm and promised her support, adding that Mr. Parsons was a person of sudden and strong fancies, and that if he were to take a fancy to Wilbur, the desired result would be apt to follow. Selma quickly decided that Mr. Parsons must be made to like her, for she feared lest Wilbur's quiet, undemonstrative manner would fail to attract him. Evidently he admired the self-confidence and manly assertion of Gregory Williams, and would be liable to regard Wilbur as lacking in force and enterprise. The reflection that she would thus be working—as necessarily she would—for the eternal progress of truth, added a pleasant savor to the undertaking, for it was clear that her husband was an ideal architect for the purpose, and she would be doing a true service to Mr. Parsons in convincing him that this was so. Altogether her soul was in an agreeable flutter, notwithstanding that her neighbor Flossy had recently received invitations to two or three large balls, and been referred to in the society columns of the newspapers as the fascinating and clever wife of the rising banker Gregory Williams.
The Littletons were promptly given by Flossy the opportunity to make the acquaintance of the Parsons family. Mr. Parsons was a ponderous man of over sixty, with a solid, rotund, grave face and a chin whisker. He was absorbed in financial interests, though he had retired from active business, and had come to New York to live chiefly to please his wife and daughter. Mrs. Parsons, who was somewhat her husband's junior, was a devotee, or more correctly, a debauchee, of hotel life. Since the time when they had become exceedingly rich, about ten years before, they had made a grand tour of the hotels of this country and Europe. By so doing Mrs. Parsons and her daughter felt that they became a part of the social life of the cities which they visited. Although they had been used to plain, if not slovenly, house-keeping before the money came, both the wife and daughter had evolved into connoisseurs of modish and luxurious hotel apparatus and garniture. They had learned to revel in many courses, radiantly upholstered parlors, and a close acquaintance with the hotel register. Society for them, wherever they went, meant finding out the names of the other guests and dressing for them, being on easy terms with the head waiter and elevator boy, visiting the theatres, and keeping up a round of shopping in pursuit of articles of apparel. They wore rich garments and considerable jewelry, and plastered themselves—especially the daughter—with bunches of violets or roses self-bestowed. Mrs. Parsons was partial to perfume, and they both were addicted to the free consumption of assorted bonbons. To be sure they had made some acquaintances in the course of their peregrinations, but one reason for moving to New York was that Mrs. Parsons had come to the melancholy conclusion that neither the princes 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 included a supper at Delmonico's after the play. It was an expensive kind of entertainment, which she felt obliged to justify to Wilbur by the assertion that the Williamses had been so civil she considered it would be only decent to show attention to their friends. She was unwilling to disclose her secret, lest the knowledge of it might make Wilbur offish and so embarrass her efforts. There were eight in the party, and the affair seemed to Selma to go off admirably. She was enthralled by the idea of using her own personal magnetism to promote her husband's business. She felt that it was just the sort of thing she would like and was fitted for, and that here was an opportunity for her individuality to display itself. She devoted herself with engaging assiduity to Mr. Parsons, pleased during the active process of propitiation by the sub-consciousness that her table was one of the centres of interest in the large restaurant. She had dressed herself with formal care, and nothing in the way of compliment could have gratified her more than the remark which Mr. Parsons made, as he regarded her appreciatively, when he had finished his supper, that she suggested his idea of Columbia. Selma glowed with satisfaction. The comparison struck her as apt and appropriate, and she replied with a proud erection of her head, which imparted to her features their transcendental look, and caused her short curl to joggle tremulously, "I suppose I see what you mean, Mr. Parsons."
CHAPTER VII.
One evening, four or five days after this supper party, Wilbur laid down the book which he was pretending to read, and said, "Selma, I have come to the conclusion that I must give up dabbling in stocks. I am being injured by it—not financially, for, as you know, I have made a few thousand dollars—but morally."
"I thought you were convinced that it was not immoral," answered Selma, in a constrained voice.
"I do not refer to whether speculation is justifiable in itself, but to its effect on me as an individual—its distraction to my mind and consequent interference with my professional work."
"Oh."