Franklin often occurred to her as a solace, but he never occurred to her as an escape.
He was a young man of very homespun extraction, who hovered in Boston on the ambiguous verge between the social and the scholastic worlds; the sort of young man whom one asked to tea rather than to dinner.

He was an earnest student, and was attached to the university by an official, though unimportant, tie.

A physicist, and, in his own sober way, with something of a reputation, he was profoundly involved in theories that dealt with the smallest things and the largest--molecules and the formation of universes.
He had first proposed to Althea when she was eighteen.

She was now thirty-three, and for all these years Franklin had proposed to her on every occasion that offered itself.

He was deeply, yet calmly, determinedly, yet ever so patiently, in love with her; and while other more eligible and more easily consoled aspirants had drifted away and got married and become absorbed in their growing families, Franklin alone remained admirably faithful.