He had expected this and believed he was prepared for it, but when it came he found his preparation not complete. He had no answer to make—none at least that seemed to him to go to the point. During these last weeks it had come over him with a quiet irresistible unmerciful force that Mrs. Dexter Freer had been right in saying to him that Sunday afternoon in Jermyn Street, the summer before, that he would find it wasn’t so simple to be an American. Such a character was complicated in just the measure that she had foretold by the difficulty of domesticating any wife at all liberally chosen. The difficulty wasn’t dissipated by his having taken a high tone about it; it pinched him from morning till night, it hurt him like a misfitting shoe. His high tone had given him courage when he took the great step; but he began to perceive that the highest tone in the world couldn’t change the nature of things. His ears tingled as he inwardly noted that if the Dexter Freers, whom he had thought alike abject in their hopes and their fears, had been by ill luck spending the winter in New York, they would have found his predicament as good fun as they could wish. Drop by drop the conviction had entered his mind—the first drop had come in the form of a word from Lady Agatha—that if his wife should return to England she would never again later recross the Atlantic. That word from the competent source had been the touch from the outside at which often a man’s fear crystallises. What she would do, how she would resist—this he wasn’t yet prepared to tell himself; but he felt every time he looked at her that the beautiful woman he had adored was filled with a dumb insuperable ineradicable purpose. He knew that if she should plant herself firm no power on earth would move her; and her blooming antique beauty and the general loftiness of her breeding came fast to seem to him but the magnificent expression of a dense patient ponderous power to resist. She wasn’t light, she wasn’t supple, and after six months of marriage he had made up his mind that she wasn’t intelligent—in spite of all which she would elude him. She had married him, she had come into his fortune and his consideration—for who was she after all? he was on occasion so angry as to ask himself, remembering that in England Lady Claras and Lady Florences were as thick as blackberries—but she would have nothing to do, if she could help it, with his country. She had gone in to dinner first in every house in the place, but this hadn’t satisfied her. It _had_ been simple to be an American in the good and easy sense that no one else in New York had made any difficulties; the difficulties had sprung from the very, the consummate, make of her, which were after all what he had married her for, thinking they would be a fine temperamental heritage for his brood. So they would, doubtless, in the coming years and after the brood should have appeared; but meanwhile they interfered with the best heritage of