Claire Boltwood lived on the Heights, Brooklyn. Persons from New York
and other parts of the Middlewest have been known to believe that
Brooklyn is somehow humorous. In newspaper jokes and vaudeville it is so
presented that people who are willing to take their philosophy from
those sources believe that the leading citizens of Brooklyn are all
deacons, undertakers, and obstetricians. The fact is that North
Washington Square, at its reddest and whitest and fanlightedest,
Gramercy Park at its most ivied, are not so aristocratic as the section
of Brooklyn called the Heights. Here preached Henry Ward Beecher. Here,
in mansions like mausoleums, on the ridge above docks where the good
ships came sailing in from Sourabaya and Singapore, ruled the lords of a
thousand sails. And still is it a place of wealth too solid to emulate
the nimble self-advertising of Fifth Avenue. Here dwell the
fifth-generation possessors of blocks of foundries and shipyards. Here,
in a big brick house of much dignity, much ugliness, and much
conservatory, lived Claire Boltwood, with her widower father.
Henry B. Boltwood was vice-president of a firm dealing in railway
supplies. He was neither wealthy nor at all poor. Every summer, despite
Claire's delicate hints, they took the same cottage on the Jersey Coast,
and Mr. Boltwood came down for Sunday. Claire had gone to a good school
out of Philadelphia, on the Main Line. She was used to gracious leisure,
attractive uselessness, nut-center chocolates, and a certain wonder as
to why she was alive.
She wanted to travel, but her father could not get away. He consistently
spent his days in overworking, and his evenings in wishing he hadn't
overworked. He was attractive, fresh, pink-cheeked, white-mustached, and
nerve-twitching with years of detail.
Claire's ambition had once been babies and a solid husband, but as
various young males of the species appeared before her, sang their
mating songs and preened their newly dry-cleaned plumage, she found that
the trouble with solid young men was that they were solid. Though she
liked to dance, the "dancing men" bored her. And she did not understand
the district's quota of intellectuals very well; she was good at
listening to symphony concerts, but she never had much luck in
discussing the cleverness of the wood winds in taking up the main motif.
It is history that she refused a master of arts with an old violin, a
good taste in ties, and an income of eight thousand.
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.