ional success lay, and she yielded, though without
waiving her privilege of making a more or less good-humored grievance of
it. However, she found the place much more tolerable than riding into
and out of it on the train a few times had led her to expect.
She knew a few people of exactly the right sort and she neatly and
almost painlessly detached her husband from his old Lake View
associations. She looked out a house in precisely the right
neighborhood, and furnished it to combine the splendor of her income
with the simple austerity of his profession in just the right
proportions. She trailed her game with unfailing precision, never barked
up the wrong tree, could distinguish a goat from a sheep as far as she
could see one, and in no time at all had won the exact position she
wanted.
Her attitude toward her husband (you have already had a sample of it at
Frederica's famous dinner, where Rodney was supposed to take the
preliminary steps toward marrying Hermione Woodruff) attracted general
admiration, and it was fortified, of course, by the story of their
romantic marriage. It was conceded she had done a very fine and splendid
thing in marrying the man she loved, settling down to live with him on
so comparatively simple and modest a scale, and devoting herself so
whole-heartedly to his career. She had an air--and it wasn't consciously
assumed, either--of living wholly with reference to him, which people
found exceedingly engaging. (A cynic might observe at this point that
the same quality in a homely unattractive woman would fail of producing
this effect.)
Indeed, he had much to be grateful for. But for the fact that his wife
was accepted without reserve, a man whose principal preoccupation was
with matters of sex psychology, who was said to cure hysterical and
neurasthenic patients by the interpretation of their dreams, would have
been regarded askance by the average run of common-sense, golf-playing
men of affairs. Even his most miraculous cures would be attributed to
the imaginary nature of the disease, rather than to the skill of the
physician.
Not even his wife's undeniable charm could altogether efface this
impression from the mind of this sort of man. But though his way of
turning the theme of a smoking-room story into a subject for serious
scientific discussion might make you uncomfortable, you couldn't meet
James Randolph and hear him talk, without respecting him. He was
attractive to women (it amounted
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