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.