people with busy brains and light purses.  Wilbur was in the throes of early progress.  He had no relatives or influential friends to give him business, and employment came slowly.  He had been an architect on his own account for two years, but was still obliged to supplement his professional orders by work as a draughtsman for others.  Yet his enthusiasm kept him buoyant.  In respect to his own work he was scrupulous; indeed, a stern critic.  He abhorred claptrap and specious effects, and aimed at high standards of artistic expression.  This gave him position among his brother architects, but was incompatible with meteoric progress.  His design for the church at Benham represented much thought and hope, and he felt happy at his success.

Littleton’s familiarity with women, apart from his sister, had been slight, but his thoughts regarding them were in keeping with a poetic and aspiring nature.  He hoped to marry some day, and he was fond of picturing to himself in moments of reverie the sort of woman to whom his heart would be given.  In the shrine of his secret fancy she appeared primarily as an object of reverence, a white-souled angel of light clad in the graceful outlines of flesh, an Amazon and yet a winsome, tender spirit, and above all a being imbued with the stimulating intellectual independence he had been taught to associate with American womanhood.  She would be the loving wife of his bosom and the intelligent sharer of his thoughts and aspirations—­often their guide.  So pure and exacting was his ideal that while alive to the value of coyness and coquetry as elements of feminine attraction for others, Wilbur had chosen to regard the maiden of his faith as too serious a spirit to condescend to such vanities; and from a similar vein of appreciation he was prone to think of her as unadorned, or rather untarnished, by the gewgaws of fashionable dressmaking and millinery.  His first sight of Selma had made him conscious that here was a face not unlike what he had hoped to encounter some day, and he had instinctively felt her to be sympathetic.  He was even conscious of disappointment when he heard her addressed as Mrs. Babcock.  Evidently she was a free-born soul, unhampered by the social weaknesses of a large city, and illumined by the spiritual grace of native womanliness.  So he thought of her, and Mrs. Taylor’s diagnosis rather confirmed than impaired his impression, for in Mrs. Taylor Wilbur felt he discerned a trace of antagonism born of cosmopolitan prejudice—­an inability to value at its true worth a nature not moulded on conventional lines.  Rigorous as he was in his judgments, and eager to disown what was cheap or shallow, mere conventionalism, whether in art or daily life, was no less abhorrent to him.  Here, he said to himself, was an original soul, ignorant and unenlightened perhaps, but endowed with swift perception and capable of noble development.