no secret of the fact that they deplored in me what they were
pleased to call plutocratic obsessions, nor had their disapproval always
been confined to badinage. Nancy, too, they looked upon as a renegade.
I was able to bear their reproaches with the superior good nature that
springs from success, to point out why the American tradition to which
they so fatuously clung was a things of the past. The habit of taking
dinner with them at least once a week had continued, and their arguments
rather amused me. If they chose to dwell in a backwater out of touch
with the current of great affairs, this was a matter to be deplored,
but I did not feel strongly enough to resent it. So long as I remained
a bachelor the relationship had not troubled me, but now that I was
married I began to consider with some alarm its power to affect my
welfare.

It had remained for Nancy to inform me that I had married a woman with a
mind of her own. I had flattered myself that I should be able to control
Maude, to govern her predilections, and now at the very beginning of
our married life she was showing a disquieting tendency to choose for
herself. To be sure, she had found my intimacy with the Peterses and
Blackwoods already formed; but it was an intimacy from which I was
growing away. I should not have quarrelled with her if she had not
discriminated: Nancy made overtures, and Maude drew back;
Susan presented herself, and with annoying perversity and in an
extraordinarily brief time Maude had become her intimate. It seemed
to me that she was always at Susan's, lunching or playing with the
children, who grew devoted to her; or with Susan, choosing carpets and
clothes; while more and more frequently we dined with the Peterses and
the Blackwoods, or they with us. With Perry's wife Maude was scarcely
less intimate than with Susan. This was the more surprising to me since
Lucia Blackwood was a dyed-in-the-wool "intellectual," a graduate of
Radcliffe, the daughter of a Harvard professor. Perry had fallen in
love with her during her visit to Susan. Lucia was, perhaps, the most
influential of the group; she scorned the world, she held strong views
on the higher education of women; she had long discarded orthodoxy
for what may be called a Cambridge stoicism of simple living and high
thinking; while Maude was a strict Presbyterian, and not in the least
given to theories. When, some months after our homecoming, I ventured
to warn her gently of the dangers