Awfully brilliant... but not as brilliant as she thinks.

In "Roman Fever," by Edith Wharton, Mrs. Ansley's description of Mrs. Slade is "Alida Slade's awfully brilliant, but not as brilliant as she thinks." Mrs. Slade's assumptions about herself and Mrs. Ansley slowly unravel over the course of the story until they're absolutely shattered. Mrs. Slade is "vivid," and she knows it. Mrs. Ansley is respectable, distinguished... boring. How terribly sad for her. No, wait. Charming and distinguished Mrs. Ansley had slept with Mrs. Slade's fiance, gotten pregnant, and then hurriedly married Horace Ansley two months later.

Mrs. Slade is clearly wrong about Mrs. Ansley-- is she wrong about herself as well? Mrs. Ansley certainly agrees with Mrs. Slade's description of herself as edgy/vivid/full of life. But, for the few moments we see her perspective, she says that "on the whole [Mrs. Slade] had had a sad life. Full of failures and mistakes; Mrs. Ansley had always been rather sorry for her..."

Failures and mistakes? Well, as far as I can tell:

• Mrs. Slade's husband was perfectly willing to cheat on her as her fiance, and easily could have been having affairs throughout their supposedly admirable marriage
• Regardless of her husband's theoretical affairs, she still enjoyed the entertaining and traveling the world that came with his job, and after he died she was left with nothing to do
• Her son had died as a child
• She doesn't understand or relate to her daughter

Also,

• Her friend, who she evidently barely knew at all despite going back for years, slept with her fiance and had his child. One would hope she has better friends than that, but it's possible that nearly all her relationships are that superficial. 

Mrs. Slade's thoughts on the surface seem to indicate a mostly happy life marred with a few tragedies, but a closer examination shows that there's a lot more wrong hiding under the surface than she's willing to admit.