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.