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intellectual interests and lost themselves in a routine of diapers, dinners, and smug contentment with life, that I was determined this should not happen to me. I wanted a big family but I also wanted to continue my life as an individual.
    I believe she was often desperately unhappy in her marriage, especially at first. She went to a psychiatrist, on whom she leaned heavily. She tried to escape any problems with her marriage and motherhood by studying Chinese art and language and by maintaining her connections to “291” and developing an interest in collecting modern art. She had already met a man who was to be one of the great influences in her life, the industrialist and pioneer collector Charles Lang Freer. They met at an exhibit of Chinese art, and he, having heard of her interest, invited her to Detroit to see his collection. She responded, “Next week I am going to have a baby, but I’ll come as soon after that as I can.” My father went along as chaperone and he, too, became a friend of Freer’s.
    From January 1913 until his death, my mother studied under and collected with Freer. Often they would divide up the shipments from his personal representatives in China. She had already studied the Chinese language at Columbia from 1911 to 1913, and for the next five years, with the aid of a Chinese scholar whom she often had in residence at Mount Kisco, she amassed research materials for an analysis of the contributions of Confucianism, Taoism, and Buddhism to the development of the T’ang and Sung dynasties. This resulted in the publication, in 1923, of her book
Chinese Painting as Reflected in the Thought and Art of Li Lung-Mien
. Unfortunately, Freer, to whom it was dedicated, had died in 1919. She visited him constantly throughout his long, agonizing illness. At his death, Freer designated five trustees for his gallery in Washington, of whom my parents were two.
    As another outlet for her mind, she enrolled in postgraduate study in biology, economics, and history at Columbia University, where she met and became involved with the historians Charles and Mary Beard. When the Beards, John Dewey, and others founded the free and liberal New School for Social Research, she helped modestly to fund it and also helped in psychology classes when it opened in 1919.
    At the same time, she grew even more involved with “291” and with Steichen in promoting modern art, especially that of John Marin, whosent over his watercolors from Paris. She was instrumental in founding the periodical named for the gallery,
“291,”
and became an editor of this first avant-garde journal in America. My mother was already caught up in these activities by the time the first baby, my oldest sister, Florence, was born. She later told stories of deciding to nurse the baby but forgetting to come home from her “extramural activities” and racing home to find a screaming baby being pacified by poor Powelly.
    During these first years of my mother’s struggles with marriage, my father had some business setbacks. He had entered the budding automobile business in a big way, investing heavily in a company called the United States Motor Company, which produced the Maxwell. This company had run into trouble, and my father had helped reorganize it into the Maxwell Motor Company, which was still in trouble. His heavy investments in copper had not begun to pay off, and, for the first time, he felt financially squeezed. My parents had moved into a large, elegant house at 70th Street and Park Avenue. In an effort to retrench, they sold the house and moved into an entire floor at the St. Regis Hotel—not exactly poverty row, but enough to set off rumors that Wall Street’s boy wonder had gotten into trouble.
    He eventually emerged from the tumultuous experience with Maxwell with a substantial profit and went on believing in the automobile business. A little later he made a brilliantly successful investment in the Fisher Body Company, run by seven able