ther embarrassed him when she tried to read new interests into
him for the benefit of what other adorers were present. He felt as if
a polite but insistent stage-manager were attempting to make him give a
new interpretation of a part he had conned for years.

But Clara talking, Clara telling a slender tale of a hatpin and an
inebriated man and herself.... People tried afterward to repeat her
anecdotes but for the life of them they could make them sound like
nothing whatever. They gave her a sort of innocent attention and the
best smiles many of them had smiled for long; there were few tears in
Clara, but people smiled misty-eyed at her.

Very occasionally Amory stayed for little half-hours after the rest of
the court had gone, and they would have bread and jam and tea late in
the afternoon or "maple-sugar lunches," as she called them, at night.

"You _are_ remarkable, aren't you!" Amory was becoming trite from where
he perched in the centre of the dining-room table one six o'clock.

"Not a bit," she answered. She was searching out napkins in the
sideboard. "I'm really most humdrum and commonplace. One of those people
who have no interest in anything but their children."

"Tell that to somebody else," scoffed Amory. "You know you're perfectly
effulgent." He asked her the one thing that he knew might embarrass her.
It was the remark that the first bore made to Adam.

"Tell me about yourself." And she gave the answer that Adam must have
given.

"There's nothing to tell."

But eventually Adam probably told the bore all the things he thought
about at night when the locusts sang in the sandy grass, and he must
have remarked patronizingly how _different_ he was from Eve, forgetting
how different she was from him... at any rate, Clara told Amory much
about herself that evening. She had had a harried life from sixteen on,
and her education had stopped sharply with her leisure. Browsing in her
library, Amory found a tattered gray book out of which fell a yellow
sheet that he impudently opened. It was a poem that she had written
at school about a gray convent wall on a gray day, and a girl with
her cloak blown by the wind sitting atop of it and thinking about the
many-colored world. As a rule such sentiment bored him, but this was
done with so much simplicity and atmosphere, that it brought a picture
of Clara to his mind, of Clara on such a cool, gray day with her keen
blue eyes staring out, trying to see her tragedies com