She must have been a source of profound satisfaction to large numbers of
French, Italian, Austrian and English persons, to whose eminent social
circles her mother's wealth and breeding gained admittance, by embodying
for them, with perfect authenticity, their notion of the American girl.
She was rich, beautiful, clever in a rather shallow, "American" way, she
had a will of her own, and was indulged by her mother with an astounding
amount of liberty; she was audacious, yet with a tempering admixture of
cool shrewdness, which kept her out of the difficulties she was always
on the brink of.

Kept her out of them, that is, until, in Vienna, as I have said, she met
James Randolph. That she fell in love with him is one of those facts
which seem astonishing the first time you look at them, and inevitable
when you look again. Physically, a sanguine blond, with a narrow head, a
forward thrusting nose, and really blue eyes, his dominating spiritual
quality was the sort of asceticism which proclaims not weak anemic
desires, but strong unruly ones, curbed in by the hand of a still
stronger will. He was highly imaginative, as a successful follower of
the Freudian method must be. He was capable of the gentlest sympathy,
and of the most relentless insistence. And he thought, until he met
Eleanor Blair, that he was, indisputably, his own master.

The wide social gulf between them--between a beautiful American heiress
with the entry into all circles of aristocratic society, except the
highest, and an only decently pecunious medical student, caught both of
them off their guard. The utter unlikelihood of anything coming of such
an acquaintance as theirs, was just the ambush needed to make it
possible for them to fall in love. They would, probably, have attracted
each other anywhere. But, in a city like Vienna, where all the sensuous