"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.