air. 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.

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