occupied in "taking care" of his wife, continually harassed by the idea
that he didn't and couldn't understand her.

But Beatrice Blaine! There was a woman! Early pictures taken on her
father's estate at Lake Geneva, Wisconsin, or in Rome at the Sacred Heart
Convent--an educational extravagance that in her youth was only for the
daughters of the exceptionally wealthy--showed the exquisite delicacy
of her features, the consummate art and simplicity of her clothes. A
brilliant education she had--her youth passed in renaissance glory,
she was versed in the latest gossip of the Older Roman Families; known by
name as a fabulously wealthy American girl to Cardinal Vitori and Queen
Margherita and more subtle celebrities that one must have had some
culture even to have heard of. She learned in England to prefer whiskey
and soda to wine, and her small talk was broadened in two senses during
a winter in Vienna. All in all Beatrice O'Hara absorbed the sort of
education that will be quite impossible ever again; a tutelage measured
by the number of things and people one could be contemptuous of and
charming about; a culture rich in all arts and traditions, barren of all
ideas, in the last of those days when the great gardener clipped the
inferior roses to produce one perfect bud.

In her less important moments she returned to America, met Stephen Blaine
and married him--this almost entirely because she was a little bit weary,
a little bit sad. Her only child was carried through a tiresome season
and brought into the world on a spring day in ninety-six.

When Amory was five he was already a delightful companion for her.
He was an auburn-haired boy, with great, handsome eyes which he would
grow up to in time, a facile imaginative mind and a taste for fancy
dress. From his fourth to his tenth year he did the country with his