Free This Side of Glory by Gwen Bristow

never encountered such habitual elegance of deportment as his. She was proud to be seen with him; she liked the admiring glances women gave him when he entered a restaurant. Eleanor was not given to self-depreciation, but there were times when she was filled with wonder that so captivating a man should have chosen her, and felt positively humble to be the recipient of such a favor.
    But the ease with which everything came to him made Kester a stranger to the ideas of order and self-discipline she had been taught to consider important. He forgot to wind his watch, he could never remember where he had put anything, when he changed his clothes he threw things about wildly, and Eleanor often exclaimed that she spent her whole honeymoon picking up her husband’s belongings. He bought quantities of newspapers and scattered them about till the room looked as if it might have been occupied by a political committee bent on informing itself of every phase of the Balkan War and the coming Presidential election, and if she threw away one of them he lamented that it contained a most important article he hadn’t had time to read. “I believe you like disorder,” Eleanor exclaimed to him. “You don’t care whether Wilson or Taft or Roosevelt gets elected, you just like to have things lying around.” Kester laughed at her attempts at tidiness and blithely went ahead as usual. When she protested at the way he wrote checks without making out stubs for them he answered, “Why, honeybug, the bank sends a statement. That’s what they’re for.” Eleanor laughed at him rebukingly, and said, “You seem to think the angels are going to take care of you,” to which Kester retorted, “Well, they always have. And now they’ve sent you to do it, haven’t they?”
    Whereupon he went to the bar and got a Manhattan cocktail, though it was mid-afternoon and the mercury was over ninety. Eleanor wondered that liquor on such a day did not make him miserable, but nothing seemed able to quench his buoyancy.
    When their holiday was over they went to Ardeith. The servants and tenants were assembled in front of the house to cheer their homecoming, and Kester’s mother, with twenty of her cousins and friends, stood on the gallery to welcome Eleanor among them. Eleanor and Kester went upstairs, to the room in which Kester and his father had been born, where tulips bloomed on the marble mantel and the great fourposter bed under its canopy of crimson silk looked like a couch placed there for the begetting of heirs to a great tradition. Opening from the bedroom was a little boudoir furnished in rosewood and damask for a lady of beloved fragility; and as she looked around it, and back at the bedroom, and at the oaks beyond the windows whispering as they had whispered to many generations, Eleanor felt the tradition enfolding her, as though she were no longer an individual but part of a unit, like one stone in a castle wall.
    “It’s so lovely,” she murmured to Kester. “So—important.”
    Later, while her bath water was running, she stood before the old mahogany bureau and looked at herself, and thought of the other women whose reflections had come back to them from this mirror in years long past. The bureau drawer stuck slightly as she tried to open it to put in her clothes. Eleanor remembered her room at home, where the furniture was new and shining and practical. Nobody in the Upjohn family had time for drawers that stuck, or for idleness before ancient mirrors. She felt as if she had stepped into an enchanted world where nothing was quite real but everything had the vague loveliness of pleasant dreams.
    2
    “I am doing nothing in the most delightful fashion,” Eleanor wrote her father. “Picture me if you can, waking up in this vast fourposter, reaching up to pull an embroidered bellcord (the bells work by a system of wires and pulleys of about 1840 construction and my bedroom cord jingles something far down in the back regions where I have as