This Marrying by Margaret Culkin Banning

Maud had her own plans for Horatia. She herself was finding life very pleasantly successful and she followed her leaders carefully, trusting no habits of life which they did not trust and indeed regarding all other types of living as either impossible to attain or impossible to endure. She was developing the best possible setting for herself and her family. Her house broke none of the rules laid down in "House and Garden," with its striped cretonnes and plain linens and comfortable furniture. It was not too ostentatious because the young people around her were not ostentatious, but it was a beginning. And she saw her future before her with delightful clearness through a succession of increasingly expensive automobiles, through a succession of increasingly elaborate gowns up to the day when she would own a great brick house in the city and a winter home in California. She did not take great credit to herself for this ambition. It was due to her own astuteness and Harvey's cleverness.

So she gave dinner parties to people whom she knew and liked and other dinner parties to people who were useful to her husband, and enjoyed her progress along the reasonable way of luxury and importance. The things Horatia talked about, odd things picked up in her newspaper office, of a new spirit in the world, of the relentless advance of the hordes of workers, bothered her not at all. She knew that servants were increasingly hard to get and to keep "in their place" and that there were "labor troubles" in some of the manufactories managed by people whom she knew and that "everybody was striking. " But she knew too that Harvey placed the responsibility on the war for much of the trouble, and she had no doubt that, the war being over, those little matters would adjust and allow the right people to run things as they should be run. Horatia talked a great deal but Maud had no doubts about her sister's ultimate destiny. Somewhere along the line, and not too far along, she meant to marry Horatia to some desirable man. She had discovered that Horatia was an asset at a dinner party just as she was a blight at a bridge. She was one person when she was making inexcusable and enraging blunders at a bridge-table and another when she appeared at a tea, able and willing to talk of the newest local interest or problem to important and serious-minded ladies or when, in some queer effective dinner-dress, she sat with her bright, grave face turned in constant interest to the man beside her.