Actually, she decided, it was the combination of provincialism and adventurousness that did the trick. This man was the frontier, though the American frontier had closed, she knew, forever, somewhere out in Oregon in her father’s day. Her father, when that door had shut, had remained on the inside. In his youth, as she had learned to her surprise, from some yellowed newspaper clippings her aunt had forgotten in an old bureau drawer, he had been some kind of wildcat radical, full of workmen’s compensation laws and state ownership of utilities; but he had long ago hardened into a corporation lawyer, Eastern style. She remembered how once she had challenged him with those clippings, thinking to shame him with the betrayal of ideals and how calmly he had retorted, “Things were different then.” “But you fought the railroads,” she had insisted. “And now you’re their lawyer.” “You had to fight the railroads in those days,” he had answered innocently, and her aunt had put in, with her ineffable plebeian sententiousness, “Your father always stands for what is right.” But she saw now that her father had honestly perceived no contradiction between the two sets of attitudes, which was the real proof that it was not he, so much as the times, that had changed.