Her Infinite Variety Read Online Free PDF

quite as painful to her as she had feared, ensued:
    "You fell for a girl who doesn't exist, Bobbie," she told him sadly, and it came over her that she was watching herself, as she would have an actress on the stage. "When you realize that, you will be cured of your infatuation. And far better off. Believe me."
    "But how can you say that? How can you say that when you're right there before me, the girl I adore?" There were actually tears in his eyes, which didn't help his cause at all. "How can you be a different Clara from the one I love? The one I'll always love?"
    "There's no way that I can make this easier for you. You'll just have to learn to take it. No is no, Bobbie. Talk to my mother. She might be able to explain it to you."
    "Your mother deceived me. When I went to her after you left she led me to believe that everything would be all right. Was she just playing for time?"
    "I don't know. But she wasn't deceiving
me.
"
    And that was that.
    ***
    Clara had met Trevor Hoyt at the end of his Yale senior year and of her junior at Vassar; in the fall and winter that followed he was working in his father's bank on Wall Street (he had opted, after all, to start there), and they were seeing each other every weekend, either on his visits to Poughkeepsie or hers to New York. He treated her with an easygoing, jocular, inoffensively possessive charm of manner; he talked about his being in love with her with just enough mild self-mockery not to alarm her into the idea that she was making any serious commitment. When he departed for the city or put her on a train to Vassar, he would embrace her with considerable fervor, but he did not press her for greater concessions, though she knew he had had a reputation for wildness in his sophomore year prior to an unexplained change of heart that had put him on a sounder track. As his mother had once unexpectedly put it to her: "We don't know quite what happened. Trevor suddenly grew up." That he was now a soberly directed and very ambitious young man nobody doubted. Clara at times was almost in awe of him.
    It was now apparent that any social status she might have lost with Polly Milton's snotty little crowd had been wholly regained by being Trevor Hoyt's "best girl." Any lingering opprobrium for a tiresome parlor pink had vanished in the hard sunlight emitted by the House of Hoyt. Whatever it was that Clara had wanted to attain, whatever fantasy of belonging, of being in the right crowd, the
gratin,
the
société la plus fermée,
had now been achieved with a totality that made her wonder if it really existed as a state more desirable than—or even very different from—any other that she had or might have achieved. At any rate, a world once spurned was less contemptible when it smiled.
    Certainly the Hoyts themselves welcomed her, almost too warmly. They evidently wanted to get their boy settled, and wasn't the lovely Miss Longcope with her bright eyes and bright mind and unimpeachable academic background just what the doctor ordered? They had no need of a dowry; money dripped from every branch of the family tree. Mr. Hoyt, as gray and gaunt and thin and silently authoritative as a great banker should be, though with a spicy reputation for marital infidelity, paid her the small, faintly smiling attention that Trevor's older sisters seemed to regard as a flattering departure from his usual reserve. They, Elena and Maribel, one wed to an aide of Mr. Hoyt and the other to a young partner in the bank's counsel, were big bony handsome women, strongly resembling their brother, with blunt but friendly manners. The Hoyt genes must have been strong, for none of the three children favored their mother, who was round and square-faced and inclined to be dumpy. Charlotte Hoyt, however, made up for her looks in the creative energy with which she dominated her family and household in all matters save those rare ones where a decisive and unappealable paternal veto was imposed.
    Clara felt that