beginning his bent toward the psychological aspect of it was marked and
his father was sympathetic enough to give it free sway. After graduating
from one of the Chicago medical colleges he went to Johns Hopkins, and
after that to Vienna, where he worked mostly under Professor Freud.

It was in Vienna that he met Eleanor Blair. She, too, was a native of
Illinois, but this fact cut a very different figure in her life from
that which it cut in his. Her grandfather, a pioneer, forceful, thrifty
and probably rather unscrupulous, had settled on the wonderfully fertile
land at a time when one had almost to drive the Indians off it. He had
accumulated it steadily to the day of his death and died in possession
of about thirty thousand acres of it. It was in much this fashion that a
feudal adventurer became the founder of a line of landed nobility, but
the centrifugal force of American life caused the thing to work out
differently. His son had an eastern college education, got elected to
Congress, as a preliminary step in a political career, went to
Washington, fell in love with and married the beautiful daughter of an
unreconstructed and impoverished southern gentleman. She detested the
North, and as her love for the South found its expression in passionate
laments over its ruin, uncomplicated by any desire to live there, she
spent more and more of her time--her husband's faint wishes becoming
less and less operative with her until they ceased altogether--in one
after another of the European capitals.

So Eleanor, two generations away from the fertile soil of central
Illinois, was as exotic to it as an orchid would be in a New England
garden. Two or three brief perfunctory visits to the land her income
came from, and to the relatives who still lived upon it, became the
substitute for what, in an older and stabler civilization, would have
been the dominant tradition in her life.