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.