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.

She watched the hulk of marriage drifting down on her frail speed-boat

of aspiration, and steered in desperate circles.

Then her father got the nervous prostration he had richly earned. The

doctor ordered rest. Claire took him in charge. He didn't want to

travel. Certainly he didn't want the shore or the Adirondacks. As there

was a branch of his company in Minneapolis, she lured him that far away.

Being rootedly of Brooklyn Heights, Claire didn't know much about the

West. She thought that Milwaukee was the capital of Minnesota. She was

not so uninformed as some of her friends, however. She had heard that in

Dakota wheat was to be viewed in vast tracts--maybe a hundred acres.

Mr. Boltwood could not be coaxed to play with the people to whom his

Minneapolis representative introduced him. He was overworking again, and

perfectly happy. He was hoping to find something wrong with the branch

house. Claire tried to tempt him out to the lakes. She failed. His

nerve-fuse burnt out the second time, with much fireworks.

Claire had often managed her circle of girls, but it had never occurred

to her to manage her executive father save by indirect and pretty

teasing. Now, in conspiracy with the doctor, she bullied her father. He

saw gray death waiting as alternative, and he was meek. He agreed to

everything. He consented to drive with her across two thousand miles of

plains and mountains to Seattle, to drop in for a call on their

cousins, the Eugene Gilsons.

Back East they had a chauffeur and two cars--the limousine, and the

Gomez-Deperdussin roadster, Claire's beloved. It would, she believed, be

more of a change from everything that might whisper to Mr. Boltwood of

the control of men, not to take a chauffeur. Her father never drove, but

she could, she insisted. His easy agreeing was pathetic. He watched her

with spaniel eyes. They had the Gomez roadster shipped to them from New

York.

On a July morning, they started out of Minneapolis in a mist, and as it

has been hinted, they stopped sixty miles northward, in a rain, also in

much gumbo. Apparently their nearest approach to the Pacific Ocean would

be this oceanically moist edge of a cornfield, between Schoenstrom and

Gopher Prairie, Minnesota.




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