Born to Harvard, she had gone to Smith and returned to marry Harvard. She had grown up in contact with the beauty and chivalry of Cambridge. She, and presumably her husband as well, represented the cultivation, good manners, consideration for others, cleanliness of body and brightness of mind and dedication to high thinking that were the goals of outsiders like me, dazzled western barbarians aspiring to Rome.

-- Wallace Stegner, in the novel Crossing to Safety (1987)