“He spends a great deal of money,” she said one day to her lawyer.  “I suppose in the usual ways.  But he is not quite like his father.  He has real affections, which his father hadn’t.  If he marries the right girl she can make him almost anything.”

She had her first inkling that he was interested in Elizabeth Wheeler one day when the head gardener reported that Mr. Wallace had ordered certain roses cut and sent to the Wheeler house.  She was angry at first, for the roses were being saved for a dinner party.  Then she considered.

“Very well, Phelps,” she said.  “Do it.  And I’ll select a plant also, to go to Mrs. Wheeler.”

After all, why not the Wheeler girl?  She had been carefully reared, if the Wheeler house was rather awful in spots, and she was a gentle little thing; very attractive, too, especially in church.  And certainly Wallie had been seeing a great deal of her.

She went to the greenhouses, and from there upstairs and into the rooms that she had planned for Wallie and his bride, when the time came.  She was more content than she had been for a long time.  She was a lonely woman, isolated by her very grandeur from the neighborliness she craved; when she wanted society she had to ask for it, by invitation.  Standing inside the door of the boudoir, her thoughts already at work on draperies and furniture, she had a vague dream of new young life stirring in the big house, of no more lonely evenings, of the bustle and activity of a family again.

She wanted Wallie to settle down.  She was tired of paying his bills at his clubs and at various hotels, tired and weary of the days he lay in bed all morning while his valet concocted various things to enable him to pull himself together.  He had been four years sowing his wild oats, and now at twenty-five she felt he should be through with them.

The south room could be the nursery.

On Decoration Day, as usual, she did her dutiful best by the community, sent flowers to the cemetery and even stood through a chilly hour there while services were read and taps sounded over the graves of those who had died in three wars.  She felt very grateful that Wallie had come back safely, and that if only now he would marry and settle down all would be well.

The service left her emotionally untouched.  She was one of those women who saw in war, politics, even religion, only their reaction on herself and her affairs.  She had taken the German deluge as a personal affliction.  And she stood only stoically enduring while the village soprano sang “The Star Spangled Banner.”  By the end of the service she had decided that Elizabeth Wheeler was the answer to her problem.

Rather under pressure, Wallie lunched with her at the country club, but she found him evasive and not particularly happy.

“You’re twenty-five, you know,” she said, toward the end of a discussion.  “By thirty you’ll be too set in your habits, too hard to please.”