scrupulous; indeed, a stern critic. He abhorred claptrap and specious
effects, and aimed at high standards of artistic expression. This gave
him position among his brother architects, but was incompatible with
meteoric progress. His design for the church at Benham represented much
thought and hope, and he felt happy at his success.

Littleton's familiarity with women, apart from his sister, had been
slight, but his thoughts regarding them were in keeping with a poetic
and aspiring nature. He hoped to marry some day, and he was fond of
picturing to himself in moments of reverie the sort of woman to whom his
heart would be given. In the shrine of his secret fancy she appeared
primarily as an object of reverence, a white-souled angel of light clad
in the graceful outlines of flesh, an Amazon and yet a winsome, tender
spirit, and above all a being imbued with the stimulating intellectual
independence he had been taught to associate with American womanhood.
She would be the loving wife of his bosom and the intelligent sharer of
his thoughts and aspirations--often their guide. So pure and exacting
was his ideal that while alive to the value of coyness and coquetry as
elements of feminine attraction for others, Wilbur had chosen to regard
the maiden of his faith as too serious a spirit to condescend to such
vanities; and from a similar vein of appreciation he was prone to think
of her as unadorned, or rather untarnished, by the gewgaws of
fashionable dressmaking and millinery. His first sight of Selma had made
him conscious that here was a face not unlike what he had hoped to
encounter some day, and he had instinctively felt her to be sympathetic.
He was even conscious of disappointment when he heard her addressed as
Mrs. Babcock. Evidently she was a free-born soul, unhampered by the
social weaknesses of a large city, and illumined by the spiritual grace
of native womanliness. So he thought of her, and Mrs. Taylor's diagnosis
rather confirmed than impaired his impression, for in Mrs. Taylor Wilbur