"That's what I want," he said. "I took a liking to you the first time we met. Then it's settled?"
"Yes. I suppose," she added, after a moment's hesitation—speaking with an accent of scorn—"I suppose there may be people—people like those who are called fashionable here—who will criticise the arrangement on the ground—er—of propriety, because I'm not a relation, and you are not very old. But I despise conventions such as that. They may be necessary for foreigners; but they are not meant for self-respecting American women. I fancy my sister-in-law may not wholly approve of it, but I don't know. I shall take pleasure in showing her and the rest that it would be wicked as well as foolish to let a flimsy suggestion of evil interfere with the happiness of two people situated as we are."
Mr. Parsons seemed puzzled at first, as though he did not understand exactly what she meant, but when she concluded he said:
"You come to me, as you have yourself stated, on the footing of a daughter. If folk are not content to mind their own business, I guess we needn't worry because they don't happen to be suited. There's one or two relations of mine would be glad to be in your shoes, but I don't know of anything in the Bible or the Constitution of the United States which forbids an old man from choosing the face he'll have opposite to him at table."
"Or forbids the interchange 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, together with a stable and half an acre of ground, from one of the few Benhamites whose financial ventures had ended in disaster, and who was obliged to sell. It was a more ambitious residence than Mr. Parsons had desired, but it was the most available, inasmuch as he could occupy it at once. It had been painted and decorated within, but was unfurnished. Mr. Parsons, as a practical business man, engaged the builder to select and supply the bedroom and solid fittings, but it occurred to him to invite Selma to choose the furnishings for what he called the show rooms.
Selma was delighted to visit once more the New York stores, free from the bridle of Wilbur's criticism and unrestrained by economy. She found to her satisfaction that the internal decoration of the new house was not unlike that of the Williamses' first habitation—that is, gay and bedizened; and she was resolved in the selection of her draperies and ornaments to buy things which suggested by their looks that they were handsome, and whose claim to distinction was not mere sober unobtrusiveness. She realized that some of her purchases would have made Wilbur squirm, but since his death she felt more sure than ever that even where art was concerned his taste was subdued, timid, and unimaginative. For instance, she believed that he would not have approved her choice of light-blue satin for the upholstery of the drawing-room, nor of a marble statue—an allegorical figure of Truth, duly draped, as its most conspicuous ornament.
Selma was spared the embarrassment of her first husband's presence. Divorce is no bar to ordinary feminine curiosity as to the whereabouts of a former partner for life, and she had proved no exception to the rule. Mrs. Earle had kept her posted as to Babcock's career since their separation, and what she learned had tended merely to demonstrate the wisdom and justice of her action. As a divorced man he had, after a time, resumed the free and easy, coarse companionship to which he had been partial before his marriage, and had gradually become a heavy drinker. Presently he had neglected his business, a misfortune of which a rival concern had been quick to take advantage. The trend of his affairs had been steadily downhill, and had come to a crisis three months before Littleton's death, when, in order to avoid insolvency, he sold out his factory and business to the rival company, and accepted at the same hands the position of manager in a branch office in a city further west. Consequently, Selma could feel free from molestation or an appeal to her sensibilities. She preferred to think of Babcock as completely outside her life, as dead to her, and she would have disliked the possibility of meeting him in the flesh while shopping on Central avenue. It had been the only drawback to her proposed return to Benham.