As a rule such sentiment bored him, but this was done with so much simplicity and atmosphere, that it brought a picture of Clara to his mind, of Clara on such a cool, gray day with her keen blue eyes staring out, trying to see her tragedies come marching over the gardens outside.

He envied that poem.

How he would have loved to have come along and seen her on the wall and talked nonsense or romance to her, perched above him in the air.

He began to be frightfully jealous of everything about Clara: of her past, of her babies, of the men and women who flocked to drink deep of her cool kindness and rest their tired minds as at an absorbing play.
"_Nobody_ seems to bore you," he objected.
"About half the world do," she admitted, "but I think that's a pretty good average, don't you ?" and she turned to find something in Browning that bore on the subject.

She was the only person he ever met who could look up passages and quotations to show him in the middle of the conversation, and yet not be irritating to distraction.