Oliver's Compensation

You're right, Barbara, Oliver is a real piece of work. As I hope this will clarify...

It was for her flan as much as her company that Oliver proposed marriage. No one made a flan like Claudia, which he felt at the time more than made up for any shortcomings that she may have exhibited. Really, though, Claudia's actions were more on the order of eccentricities than shortcomings, things to be overlooked in the spirit of simple generosity. To Oliver, Claudia's flans and her easygoing ways were ample compensation.
Claudia, too, was generous in her way, given what she knew and what she believed. The thing was that she could never keep something straight in her mind. A given fact was always snowballing, always gathering stray and spurious facts to it in an accelerating downhill course. Her opinions were colorful, to say the least. For this reason, among others, Claudia was often the highlight at dinner parties, pronouncing, as she would, opinions of the most unusual and varied sort.
Just why Oliver felt himself attracted to the woman with the silvery curls was beyond him, something he could not put his finger on. If he had to describe her in one word, that word would have been 'smokey'. It seemed completely matter-of-fact, that she could immediately detect falseness, tuned as a seismometer is tuned to the shudderings of the earth. She is committed to her own heart, Oliver thought. He had seen the woman before at the cafe. Not the second time or the third, even, but that one with Kim the first in which the scent of smokiness reached out to him. Claudia, by contrast, was sweet and safe as dime store perfume.

Bob