ught her steely blue eyes held only happiness; a latent strength,
a realism, was brought to its fullest development by the facts that
she was compelled to face. She was alone in the world, with two small
children, little money, and, worst of all, a host of friends. He saw
her that winter in Philadelphia entertaining a houseful of men for an
evening, when he knew she had not a servant in the house except the
little colored girl guarding the babies overhead. He saw one of the
greatest libertines in that city, a man who was habitually drunk and
notorious at home and abroad, sitting opposite her for an evening,
discussing _girls' boarding-schools_ with a sort of innocent excitement.
What a twist Clara had to her mind! She could make fascinating and
almost brilliant conversation out of the thinnest air that ever floated
through a drawing-room.

The idea that the girl was poverty-stricken had appealed to Amory's
sense of situation. He arrived in Philadelphia expecting to be told
that 921 Ark Street was in a miserable lane of hovels. He was even
disappointed when it proved to be nothing of the sort. It was an old
house that had been in her husband's family for years. An elderly aunt,
who objected to having it sold, had put ten years' taxes with a
lawyer and pranced off to Honolulu, leaving Clara to struggle with the
heating-problem as best she could. So no wild-haired woman with a hungry
baby at her breast and a sad Amelia-like look greeted him. Instead,
Amory would have thought from his reception that she had not a care in
the world.

A calm virility and a dreamy humor, marked contrasts to her
level-headedness--into these moods she slipped sometimes as a refuge.
She could do the most prosy things (though she was wise enough never
to stultify herself with such "household arts" as _knitting_ and
_embroidery_), yet immediately afterward pick up a book and let her
imagination rove as a formless cloud with the wind. Deepest of all in
her personality was the golden radiance that she diffused around her.
As an open fire in a dark room throws romance and pathos into the quiet
faces at its edge, so she cast her lights and shadows around the rooms
that held her, until she made of her prosy old uncle a man of quaint and
meditative charm, metamorphosed the stray telegraph boy into a Puck-like
creature of delightful originality. At first this quality of hers
somehow irritated Amory. He considered his own uniqueness sufficient,
and it ra