Selma, however, supplemented her words with her tense spiritual look. She felt happier than she had for weeks, inasmuch as life seemed to be opening before her. For a few moments she listened to Mr. Glynn unfold his hopes in regard to the new church, trying to make him feel that she was no common woman. She considered it a tribute to her when he took Lewis aside later and asked him to become a junior warden. CHAPTER III. At this time the necessity for special knowledge as to artistic or educational matters was recognized grudgingly in Benham. Any reputable citizen was considered capable to pass judgment on statues and pictures, design a house or public building, and prescribe courses of study for school-children. Since then the free-born Benhamite, little by little, through wise legislation or public opinion, born of bitter experience, has been robbed of these prerogatives until, not long ago, the un-American and undemocratic proposition to take away the laying out of the new city park from the easy going but ignorant mercies of the so-called city forester, who had been first a plumber and later an alderman, prevailed. An enlightened civic spirit triumphed and special knowledge was invoked. That was twenty-five years later. Mrs. Hallett Taylor had found herself almost single-handed at the outset in her purpose to build the new church on artistic lines. Or rather the case should be stated thus: Everyone agreed that it was to be the most beautiful church in the country, consistent with the money, and no one doubted that it would be, especially as everyone except Mrs. Taylor felt that in confiding the matter to the leading architect in Benham the committee would be exercising a wise and intelligent discretion. Mr. Pierce, the individual suggested, had never, until recently, employed the word architect in speaking of himself, and he pronounced it, as did some of the committee, "arshitect," shying a little at the word, as though it were caviare and anything but American. He was a builder, practised by a brief but rushing career in erecting houses, banks, schools, and warehouses speedily and boldly. He had been on the spot when the new growth of Benham began, and his handiwork was writ large all over the city. The city was proud of him, and had, as it were, sniffed when Joel Flagg went elsewhere for a man to build his new house. Surely, if it were necessary to pay extra for that sort of thing, was not home talent good enough? Yet it must be confessed that the ugly splendor of the Flagg mediæval castle had so far dazed the eye of Benham that its "arshitect" had felt constrained, in order to keep up with the times, to try fancy flights of his own. He had silenced any doubting Thomases by his latest effort, a new school-house, rich in rampant angles and scrolls, on the brown-stone front of which the name _Flagg School_ appeared in ambitious, distorted hieroglyphics.