Claire cordially liked Goldwin. If he had been obscure she would still
have liked him, though his importance was so knit in with his
personality, he exhaled such an atmosphere of pecuniary and patrician
celebrity, that one could ill think of him as ever being or ever having
been obscure. She was boldly frank with him regarding her ambitious
aims. He would throw back his handsome head and laugh most heartily at
her ingenuous confidences. He would tell her that she was the most
exquisite joke in the world, and yet that he was somehow forced to
accept her as quite the opposite of one. "Ah, yes, intensely opposite,"
he would add, with a fluttered pull at his silken mustache that she felt
to be studied in its emotional suggestiveness, with a large sigh that
she suspected of being less studied, and with a look in his charming
hazel eyes that would nearly always make her avert her own. His homage
had become a very substantial fact, and she knew just how much of it the
popular standard of wifely discretion would permit her to receive--just
how much of it would be her advantage and not her detriment. He was too
keen not to have perceived that she had drawn this judicious line of
calculation. Now and then he made little semi-jocose attempts to
overleap it, but at the worst a word could curb him where a glance
failed. She found him, all in all, saltatory but never vicious; a stout
pull of the rein always brought him to terms.