quotation from the winter dreams

""I'm nobody," he announced. "My career is largely a matter of futures."
"Are you poor?"
"No," he said frankly, "I'm probably making more money than any man my age in the Northwest. I know that's an obnoxious remark, but you advised me to start right."(Part 3)

This exchange between Dexter and Judy shows that what Judy really cared was whether Dexter was rich or not, but not his other traits and his personality. And the fact that Dexter says he's a nobody but defined himself with his luxury presents the idea of his winter dream, a dream to become materialistically rich. Furthermore, when Judy asked him who he was, he immediately connected this question to his career but not other aspects of him, which shows that ever since he had left Minnesota to aspire to his affluence by first getting an education in a prominent college and then starting a business to pursue monetary gain, he's never really grown much in terms of his personality and spirits as well as other forms of social traits, which made him unable to define himself with other things besides his wealth.