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 rather 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....