Mr. Wilbur Edes was an admired accessory of his wife.  He was so very tall and slender as to suggest forcible elongation.  He carried his head with a deprecatory, sidewise air as if in accordance with his wife’s picture hat, and yet Mr. Wilbur Edes, out of Fairbridge and in his law office on Broadway, was a man among men.  He was an exception to the personal esteem which usually expanded a male citizen of Fairbridge, but he was the one and only husband of Mrs. Wilbur Edes, and there was not room at such an apex as she occupied for more than one.  Tall as Wilbur Edes was, he was overshadowed by that immaculate blond pompadour and that plumed picture hat.  He was a prime favourite in Fairbridge society; he was liked and admired, but his radiance was reflected, and he was satisfied that it should be so.  He adored his wife.  The shadow of her black picture hat was his place of perfect content.  He watched the admiring glances of other men at his wonderful possession with a triumph and pride which made him really rather a noble sort.  He was also so fond and proud of his little twin daughters, Maida and Adelaide, that the fondness and pride fairly illuminated his inner self.  Wilbur Edes was a clever lawyer, but love made him something bigger.  It caused him to immolate self, which is spiritually enlarging self.

In one respect Wilbur Edes was the biggest man in Fairbridge; in another, Doctor Sturtevant was.  Doctor Sturtevant depended upon no other person for his glory.  He shone as a fixed star, with his own lustre.  He was esteemed a very great physician indeed, and it was considered that Mrs. Sturtevant, who was good, and honest, and portly with a tight, middle-aged portliness, hardly lived up to her husband.  It was admitted that she tried, poor soul, but her limitations were held to be impossible, even by her faithful straining following of love.

When the splendid, florid Doctor, with his majestically curving expanse of waistcoat and his inscrutable face, whirred through the streets of Fairbridge in his motor car, with that meek bulk of womanhood beside him, many said quite openly how unfortunate it was that Doctor Sturtevant had married, when so young, a woman so manifestly his inferior.  They never failed to confer that faint praise, which is worse than none at all, upon the poor soul.

“She is a good woman,” they said.  “She means well, and she is a good housekeeper, but she is no companion for a man like that.”

Poor Mrs. Sturtevant was aware of her status in Fairbridge, and she was not without a steady, plodding ambition of her own.  That utterly commonplace, middle-aged face had some lines of strength.  Mrs. Sturtevant was a member of the women’s club of Fairbridge, which was poetically and cleverly called the Zenith Club.