Almost every thing was very expensive, and she was obliged
to pass by the patterns and materials she desired to possess, and accept
articles of a more sober and less engaging character. Many of these, to
be sure, were declared by Wilbur to be artistically charming and more
suitable than many which she preferred, but it would have suited her
better to fix on the rich upholstery and solid furniture, which were
evidently the latest fashion in household decoration, rather than go
mousing from place to place, only at last to pick up in the back corner
of some store this or that object which was both reasonably pretty and
reasonably cheap. When it was all over Selma was pleased with the effect
of her establishment, but she had eaten of the tree of knowledge. She
had visited the New York shops. These, in her capacity of a God-fearing
American, she would have been ready to anathematize in a speech or in a
newspaper article, but the memory of them haunted her imagination and
left her domestic yearnings not wholly satisfied.
Wilbur Littleton's scheme of domestic life was essentially spiritual,
and in the development of it he felt that he was consulting his wife's
tastes and theories no less than his own. He knew that she understood
that he was ambitious to make a name for himself as an architect; but to
make it only by virtue of work of a high order; that he was unwilling to
become a time-server or to lower his professional standards merely to
make temporary progress, which in the end would mar a success worth
having.
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