appurtenances of life are raised to their highest power, the attraction
became irresistible.

He did resist as long as he could--successfully, indeed, to the point of
holding himself back from asking her to marry him, or even explicitly
from making love to her. But the thing shone through his deeply-colored
emotions, like light through a stained-glass window. And when she asked
him to marry her, as she did in so many words--pleaded her homesickness
for a home she had never known, and a loneliness she had suddenly become
aware of, amid would-be friends and lovers, who could not, not one of
them, be called disinterested, his resistance melted like a powder of
April snow.

It was the only serious obstacle she had to overcome. The terms of her
father's will left her share of the income of the estate wholly at her
disposal. And so, in spite of her mother's horrified protest, they were
married, and not long afterward, her mother, who was still a year or two
on the sunny side of fifty, gratified her aristocratic yearnings by
marrying a count herself.

The Randolphs came back to America and, somewhat against Eleanor's
wishes, settled in Chicago. With her really very large income, her
exotic type of beauty and her social skill, she was probably right in
thinking she could have made a success anywhere. One of the larger
eastern cities--preferably New York or Washington, would have suited her
better. But Chicago, he said, was where he belonged and where his best
chance for professional 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.