zzo of the sixteenth century. If one questioned Mrs.
Rasselyer-Brown at dinner in regard to this (which was only a fair
return for drinking five dollar champagne), she answered that the
facade was _cinquecentisti_, but that it reproduced also the Saracenic
mullioned window of the Siennese School. But if the guest said later in
the evening to Mr. Rasselyer-Brown that he understood that his house
was _cinquecentisti_, he answered that he guessed it was. After which
remark and an interval of silence, Mr. Rasselyer-Brown would probably
ask the guest if he was dry.

So from that one can tell exactly the sort of people the
Rasselyer-Browns were.

In other words, Mr. Rasselyer-Brown was a severe handicap to Mrs.
Rasselyer-Brown. He was more than that; the word isn't strong enough.
He was, as Mrs. Rasselyer-Brown herself confessed to her confidential
circle of three hundred friends, a drag. He was also a tie, and a
weight, and a burden, and in Mrs. Rasselyer-Brown's religious moments a
crucifix. Even in the early years of their married life, some twenty or
twenty-five years ago, her husband had been a drag on her by being in
the coal and wood business. It is hard for a woman to have to realize
that her husband is making a fortune out of coal and wood and that
people know it. It ties one down. What a woman wants most of all--this,
of course, is merely a quotation from Mrs. Rasselyer-Brown's own
thoughts as expressed to her three hundred friends--is room to expand,
to grow. The hardest thing in the world is to be stifled: and there is
nothing more stifling than a husband who doesn't know a Giotto from a
Carlo Dolci, but who can distinguish nut coal from egg and is never
asked to dinner without talking about the furnace.

These, of course, were early trials. They had passed to some extent, or
were, at any rate, garlanded with the roses of time.

But the drag remained.

Even when the retail coal and wood stage was long since over, it was
hard to have to put up with a husband who owned a coal mine and who
bought pulp forests instead of illuminated missals of the twelfth
century. A coal mine is a dreadful thing at a dinner-table. It humbles
one so before one's guests.

It wouldn't have been so bad--this Mrs. Rasselyer-Brown herself
admitted--if Mr. Rasselyer-Brown _did_ anything. This phrase should be
clearly understood. It meant if there was any one thing that he _did_.
For instance if he had only _collected_ anything. Thus,