Claire Escapes from Respectability

Claire's ambition had once been babies and a solid husband, but as
various young males of the species appeared before her, sang their
mating songs and preened their newly dry-cleaned plumage, she found that
the trouble with solid young men was that they were solid. Though she
liked to dance, the "dancing men" bored her. And she did not understand
the district's quota of intellectuals very well; she was good at
listening to symphony concerts, but she never had much luck in
discussing the cleverness of the wood winds in taking up the main motif.
It is history that she refused a master of arts with an old violin, a
good taste in ties, and an income of eight thousand.

The only man who disturbed her was Geoffrey Saxton, known throughout the
interwoven sets of Brooklyn Heights as "Jeff." Jeff Saxton was
thirty-nine to Claire's twenty-three. He was clean and busy; he had no
signs of vice or humor. Especially for Jeff must have been invented the
symbolic morning coat, the unwrinkable gray trousers, and the moral
rimless spectacles. He was a graduate of a nice college, and he had a
nice tenor and a nice family and nice hands and he was nicely successful
in New York copper dealing. When he was asked questions by people who
were impertinent, clever, or poor, Jeff looked them over coldly before
he answered, and often they felt so uncomfortable that he didn't have to
answer.

The boys of Claire's own age, not long out of Yale and Princeton, doing
well in business and jumping for their evening clothes daily at
six-thirty, light o' loves and admirers of athletic heroes, these lads
Claire found pleasant, but hard to tell apart. She didn't have to tell
Jeff Saxton apart. He did his own telling. Jeff called--not too often.
He sang--not too sentimentally. He took her father and herself to the
theater--not too lavishly. He told Claire--in a voice not too
serious--that she was his helmed Athena, his rose of all the world. He
informed her of his substantial position--not too obviously. And he was
so everlastingly, firmly, quietly, politely, immovably always there.