sand.

The only man who disturbed her was Geoffrey Saxton, known throughout the
interwoven sets of Brooklyn Heights as "Jeff." Jeff Saxton was
thirty-nine to Claire's twenty-three. He was clean and busy; he had no
signs of vice or humor. Especially for Jeff must have been invented the
symbolic morning coat, the unwrinkable gray trousers, and the moral
rimless spectacles. He was a graduate of a nice college, and he had a
nice tenor and a nice family and nice hands and he was nicely successful
in New York copper dealing. When he was asked questions by people who
were impertinent, clever, or poor, Jeff looked them over coldly before
he answered, and often they felt so uncomfortable that he didn't have to
answer.

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 ofte