23. Our intimacy progressed, and the time came when Sylvia told me about her marriage. She had accepted Douglas van Tuiver because she had lost Frank Shirley, and her heart was broken. She could never imagine herself loving any other man; and not knowing exactly what marriage meant, it had been easier for her to think of her family, and to follow their guidance. They had told her that love would come; Douglas had implored her to give him a chance to teach her to love him. She had considered what she could do with his money--both for her home-people and for those she spoke of vaguely as “the poor.” But now she was making the discovery that she could not do very much for these “poor.” “It isn’t that my husband is mean,” she said. “On the contrary, the slightest hint will bring me any worldly thing I want. I have homes in half a dozen parts of America--I have _carte blanche_ to open accounts in two hemispheres. If any of my people need money I can get it; but if I want it for myself, he asks me what I’m doing with it--and so I run into the stone-wall of his ideas.” At first the colliding with this wall had merely pained and bewildered her. But now the combination of Veblen and myself had helped her to realize what it meant. Douglas van Tuiver spent his money upon a definite system: whatever went to the maintaining of his social position, whatever added to the glory, prestige and power of the van Tuiver name--that money was well-spent; while money spent to any other end was money wasted--and this included all ideas and “causes.” And when the master of the house knew that his money was being wasted, it troubled him. “It wasn’t until after I married him that I realized how idle his life is,” she remarked. “At home all the men have something to do, running their plantations, or getting elected to some office. But Douglas never does anything that I can possibly think is useful.” His fortune was invested in New York City real-estate, she went on to explain. There was an office, with a small army of clerks and agents to attend to it--a machine which had been built up and handed on to him by his ancestors. It sufficed if he dropped in for an hour or two once a week when he was in the city, and signed a batch of documents now and then when he was away. His life was spent in the company of people whom the social system had similarly deprived of duties; and they had, by generations of experiment, built up for themselves a new set of duties, a life which was wholly without relationship to reality. Into this unreal existence Sylvia had married, and it was like a current sweeping her in its course. So long as she went with it, all was well; but let her try to catch hold of something and stop, and it would tear her loose and almost strangle her.