She had received very few of those.
What she wanted was something more difficult to find.
A place where her abilities mattered more than the surprise people felt when she entered a room.
She lived in a modest two-story house outside Independence with her widowed aunt, Beatrice Whitmore, who was sixty-three and possessed an impressive talent for expressing disapproval without raising her voice.
Aunt Beatrice loved Clara.
That had never been in question.
But she worried about her niece constantly.
She worried when Clara traveled.
When she accepted bookkeeping work.
When she declined invitations from men who seemed interested in her family's modest inheritance.
And especially when she spoke about leaving Missouri.
Clara's weight had made her life physically demanding in ways most people never considered. Ordinary furniture was frequently unsuitable, public transportation required careful planning, and even finding clothing that fit properly could become an exhausting undertaking.
She had learned to commission garments from seamstresses who treated her as a customer rather than a curiosity.
She used carefully constructed chairs and a reinforced carriage for longer journeys.
She paced demanding activities.
And she had become remarkably skilled at recognizing which physical obstacles were genuine and which existed simply because nobody had considered that a woman of her size might want to enter a particular building.
But the greatest obstacles weren't always physical.
They were the assumptions people made before asking her a single question.
Some believed her body made her helpless.
Others believed she was foolish.
A few treated her with exaggerated kindness that felt more like pity than respect.
Men sometimes stared at her in the street.
Women whispered when she entered shops.
And respectable acquaintances frequently suggested that she should be grateful for whatever attention she received.
Clara had long ago decided that gratitude was not a substitute for dignity.
Her father had taught her that.
Samuel Whitmore was a carpenter, property clerk, and sometime surveyor's assistant who spent much of his life repairing other people's buildings while helping them understand the documents connected to their land.
He was not wealthy.
He owned a modest workshop.
A collection of excellent tools.
And a reputation for being almost offensively honest.
When Clara was young, he taught her to recognize different woods by their grain.
Later, he showed her how to read plans, calculate material costs, and maintain reliable account books.