"Yes. I suppose," she added, after a moment's hesitation--speaking with an accent of scorn--"I suppose there may be people--people like those who are called fashionable here--who will criticise the arrangement on the ground--er--of propriety, because I'm not a relation, and you are not very old. But I despise conventions such as that. They may be necessary for foreigners; but they are not meant for self-respecting American women. I fancy my sister-in-law may not wholly approve of it, but I don't know. I shall take pleasure in showing her and the rest that it would be wicked as well as foolish to let a flimsy suggestion of evil interfere with the happiness of two people situated as we are." Mr. Parsons seemed puzzled at first, as though he did not understand exactly what she meant, but when she concluded he said: "You come to me, as you have yourself stated, on the footing of a daughter. If folk are not content to mind their own business, I guess we needn't worry because they don't happen to be suited. There's one or two relations of mine would be glad to be in your shoes, but I don't know of anything in the Bible or the Constitution of the United States which forbids an old man from choosing the face he'll have opposite to him at table." "Or forbids the interchange of true sympathy--that priceless privilege," answered Selma, her liking for a sententious speech rising paramount even to the pleasure caused her by the allusion to her personal appearance. Nevertheless it was agreeable to be preferred to his female cousins on the score of comeliness. Accordingly, within six months of her husband's death, the transition to Benham was accomplished, and Selma was able to encounter the metaphorically open arms, referred to by Mrs. Earle, without feeling that she was a less important person than when she had been whisked off as a bride by Littleton, the rising architect. She was returning as the confidential, protecting companion of a successful, self-made old man, who was relying on her to make his new establishment a pleasure to himself and a credit to the wide-awake city in which he had elected to pass his remaining days. She was returning to a house on the River Drive (the aristocratic boulevard of Benham, where the river Nye makes a broad sweep to the south); a house not far distant from the Flagg mansion at which, as Mrs. Lewis Babcock, she had looked askance as a monument inimical to democratic simplicity. Wilbur had taught her that it was very ugly, and now that she saw it again after a lapse of years she was pleased to note that her new residence, though slightly smaller, had a more modern and distinguished air.