What does the sentence mean? Why would "as" be followed by an adjective ？ Provided that husband and wife are not in the same or directly comparable lines of work, the harsh fact of her great success can be obscured by a genial conspiracy to reject a purely monetary measure of achievement as intolerably crude. What does the latter part of the sentence mean? And why would "as" be followed by the adjective “crude”? I thought when "as" is an adverb, it only can be followed by a noun or a noun phrase or like "as old as".