Her Infinite Variety Read Online Free PDF Page A

drafted by Colonials stand in the way of any starry-eyed young radical who thinks he can legislate a new heaven? Would that suit you, Miss What's-your-name?"
    "Longcope," Clara retorted coolly. "No, I think the Constitution, like the House of Lords in England, may have a useful function in acting as a temporary break to legislation that may have been too hastily passed. But necessary social measures should not be held up indefinitely by the economic creed of nine old men."
    "You would prefer nine young women, I suppose."
    "I think, on the whole, I would."
    "Now, now," interposed a nervous Mrs. Milton, "as my revered father, the bishop, used to say when the conversation at table waxed too hot: 'We will now discuss the recent excavations in Crete!' And I might remind you, Clara, of the old saying: 'In society we pass lightly over topics.'"
    After which Mrs. Milton turned all her attention to the ruffled judge to try to divert him with inquiries about his cherished garden, which bordered on her own.
    Clara, for perhaps the first time in her life, felt the steely chill of unanimous disapproval. The dozen persons at the Miltons' dining room table reacted with silent shock and tightened lips to the brash young woman's impertinence to a revered and venerable figure. Even her friend Polly, cat-faced and raven-haired, of a chameleon disposition, sided with the table, and on their return to Vassar in the fall spread the word that Clara was allowing her radical theories to make a fool of herself and was no longer a reliable guest in one's parents' house. It was not that Clara was in any way ostracized, even by girls of the most unreconstructed Wall Street background, but she had lost the sparkle of a fresh and idealistic figure; she was being laughed at. There were even those who hinted that she was becoming something of a crank.
    And Clara was devastated. She had as yet grown no hedge around the little rose garden of her extreme sensibility; she was still absurdly vulnerable. She chose now to see in her friend Polly all that was meretricious in the "great world" that she—solely at her mother's instigation, she now insisted—had been so assiduously cultivating. Polly was mean, snobbish, crassly materialistic and a slave to the smallest rules of fashion. And her other friends were not much better. Clara resolved that her future would not lie among such women or the type of mates she could easily predict they would choose.
    It was at this point in her life that she first became aware of Bobbie Lester as a singularly attractive young man. She had known him for a year as her father's assistant and had at first associated him too closely with her family to see him in a romantic light. But that rapidly passed as she turned her eyes to new horizons, and Bobbie, as if drawn by a magnet, had immediately responded to her new attention with a passionate and flattering ardor. The impact of this had shocked her into a new vision of the future, stripped of the tinsel goals of Polly and her crowd, a life shared with this handsome and noble-spirited youth in an idealistic academy devoted to training boys in how best to serve their community. She would aid and assist him in his tasks; she would even, she already suspected, make up for his perhaps too naive and trusting nature by cultivating the senior masters and trustees of the school and smoothing his way to an ultimate headmastership!
    When her mother had rudely torn the tinted glasses from her deluded eyes and she had for the first time seen poor Bobbie, not in the flesh—for that was perhaps all she
had
seen—but in the full poverty of his simple and honest self, she had known she could never marry him. She had fled, cutting her college courses, to the oasis of a sympathetic godmother in Philadelphia and had remained in seclusion for a week until Bobbie had tracked her down and followed her. At her godmother's firm insistence she had at last consented to see him, and this scene, not