Pauline regarded this behavior on the part of her friends as normal, and having done her social duty in the afternoon tea line, without a suspicion that Selma was disappointed by the experience, she gave herself up to the congenial undertaking of becoming intimate with her sister-in-law. She ascribed Selma's reserve, and cold, serious manner partly to shyness due to her new surroundings, and partly to the spiritual rigor of the puritan conscience and point of view. She had often been told that individuals of this temperament possessed more depth of character than more emotional and socially facile people, and she was prepared to woo. In comparison with Wilbur, Pauline was accustomed to regard herself as a practical and easy-going soul, but she was essentially a woman of fine and vigorous moral and mental purpose. Like many of her associates in active life, however, she had become too occupied with concrete possibilities to be able to give much thought to her own soul anatomy, and she was glad to look up to her brother's wife as a spiritual superior and to recognize that the burden lay on herself to demonstrate her own worthiness to be admitted to close intimacy on equal terms. Wilbur was to her a creature of light, and she had no doubt that his wife was of the same ethereal composition. Pauline was glad, too, of the opportunity really to know a countrywoman of a type so different from her own friends. She, like Wilbur, had heard all her life of these interesting and inspiring beings; intense, marvellously capable, peerless, free-born creatures panoplied in chastity and endowed with congenital mental power and bodily charms, who were able to cook, educate children, control society and write literature in the course of the day's employment. The newspapers and popular opinion had given her to understand that these were the true Americans, and caused her to ask herself whether the circle to which she herself belonged was not retrograde from a nobler ideal. In what way she did not precisely understand, except that she and her friends did not altogether disdain nice social usages and conventional womanly ways. But, nevertheless, the impression had remained in her mind that she must be at fault somehow, and it interested her that she would now be able to understand wherein she was inferior. She went to see Selma as often as she could, and encouraged her to call at her lodgings on the mornings when she was at home, expecting that it might please her sister-in-law to become familiar with the budding educational enterprises, and that thus a fresh bond of sympathy would be established between them. Selma presented herself three or four times in the course of the next three months, and on the first occasion expressed gratifying appreciation of the cosiness of the new lodgings.