Explore "An American Tragedy" by Theodore Dreiser on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
The ensuing December days brought to Clyde some pleasing and yet complicating and disturbing developments. For Sondra Finchley, having found him so agreeable an admirer of hers, was from the first inclined neither to forget nor neglect him. But, occupying the rather prominent social position which she did, she was at first rather dubious as to how to proceed. For Clyde was too poor and decidedly too much ignored by the Griffiths themselves, even, for her to risk any marked manifestation of interest in him.
And now, in addition to the primary motivating reason for all this-- her desire to irritate Gilbert by being friends with his cousin-- there was another. She liked him. His charm and his reverence for her and her station flattered and intrigued her. For hers was a temperament which required adulation in about the measure which Clyde provided it--sincere and romantic adulation. And at the very same time he represented physical as well as mental attributes which were agreeable to her--amorousness without the courage at the time, anyhow, to annoy her too much; reverence which yet included her as a very human being; a mental and physical animation which quite matched and companioned her own.