The first article was a success.  That is, Selma’s method was not interfered with, and she had the satisfaction of reading in the Sentinel during the week an item calling gratified attention to the change in its “What Women Wear” column, and indicating that it would contain new features from week to week.  It gave her a pleasant thrill to see her name, “Selma White,” signed at the end of the printed column, and she set to work eagerly to carry out the editor’s suggestions.  At the same time she tried her hand at a short story—­the story of an American girl who went to Paris to study art, refused to alter her mode of life to suit foreign ideas of female propriety, displayed exceptional talent as an artist, and finally married a fine-spirited young American, to the utter discomfiture of a French member of the nobility, who had begun by insulting her and ended with making her an offer of marriage.  This she sent to the Eagle, the other Benham newspaper, for its Sunday edition.

It took her a month to compose this story, and after a week she received it back with a memorandum to the effect that it was one-half too long, but intimating that in a revised form it would be acceptable.  This was a little depressing, especially as it arrived at a time when the novelty of her occupation had worn off and she was realizing the limitations of her present life.  She had begun to miss the advantages of a free purse and the importance of a domestic establishment.  She possessed her liberty, and was fulfilling her mission as a social force, but her life had been deprived of some of its savor, and, though she was thankful to be rid of Babcock, she felt the lack of an element of personal devotion to herself, an element which was not to be supplied by mere admiration on the part of Mrs. Earle and the other members of the Institute.  It did not suit her not to be able to gratify her growing taste in clothes and in other lines of expenditure, and there were moments when she experienced the need of being petted and made much of by a man.  She was conscious of loneliness, and in this mood she pitied herself as a victim of untoward circumstances, one who had wasted the freshness of her young life, and missed the happiness which the American wife is apt to find waiting for her.  Under the spell of this nostalgia she wrote a poem entitled “The Bitter Sweets of Solitude,” and disposed of it for five dollars to the Sentinel.  The price shocked her, for the verses seemed flesh of her flesh.  Still, five dollars was better than nothing, and she discerned from the manner of the newspaper editor that he cared little whether she left them or not.  It was on that evening that she received a letter from Littleton, stating that he was on the eve of leaving New York for Benham.  He was coming to consult concerning certain further interior decorations which the committee had decided to add to the church.