The question of Max [antikvár]

Kate Fansler's life had achieved, within the last year, a neat division between úrban eleganee and rural simplicity, even if, as was certain, the rural simplicity was a lot simpler than the úrban eleganee was elegant. Her farmer neighbors observed with ill-concealed scorn her one-room cabin and unmowed grass, while her úrban associates placed her on the scale of eleganee only so far as their own eyes could reach. If she appeared easily affluent to her colleagues, she was considered, by those of her mother's generation who chanced to come across her, to be close to slumming. At this particular moment in March, she was priding herself on the sharp contradictions in her life, those contradictions which gave flavor to experience and rest to the soul. Such sharp contradictions, of course, require a dexterity bordering upon gymnastics. With a sense, therefore, of an acrobat whose muscles have suddenly frozen, Kate watched Maximillian Reston search in vain the uncut meadow surrounding her cabin for a path to her door. Max was the last person in the world to whom a wild rural retreat would hold any attraction. But even had her country refuge been run on the elegant lines of Edith Wharton's famous turn-of-the-century mansion