wife.

Partly as a consequence of their limited means, partly owing to
absorption in their respective studies and interests, the Littletons,
though of gentle stock, lived simple lives according to New York
standards. They were aware of the growth of luxury resulting from the
accumulation of big fortunes since the war. As an architect, Wilbur saw
larger and more elaborate public and private buildings being erected on
every side. As a house-keeper and a woman with social interests, Pauline
knew that the power of money was revolutionizing the public taste in the
matter of household expenditure; that in the details of domestic life
there was more color and more circumstance, and that people who were
well-to-do, and many who were not, were requiring as daily comforts all
sorts of things to which they had been unaccustomed. But though they
both thus knew vaguely that the temper of society had changed, and that
sober citizens and their wives, who, twenty years before, would have
prated solemnly against a host of gay, enlivening or pretty customs as
incompatible with American virtue, were now adopting these as rapidly as
money could procure them--the brother and sister had remained
comparatively unaffected by the consequences of the transformation
scene. Certainly their home had. It was old-fashioned in its garniture
and its gentility. It spoke of a day, not so many years before, when
high thinking had led to blinking where domestic decoration was
concerned, and people had bought ugly wooden and worsted things to live
with because only the things of the spirit seemed of real importance.
Still time, with its marvellous touch, has often the gift of making
furniture and upholstery, which were hideous when bought, look
interesting and cosey when they have become old-fashioned. In this way
Pauline Wilbur's parlor was a delightful relic of a day gone by. There
was scarcely a pretty thing in it, as Wilbur himself well knew, yet, as