For many years the farmer did not appear to pay much attention to his
daughter Clara, who was his only child. Throughout her childhood she was
under the care of one of his five sisters, all of whom except the one who
lived with him and managed his household being comfortably married. His own
wife had been a somewhat frail woman, but his daughter had inherited his
own physical strength.
When Clara was seventeen, she and her father had a quarrel that eventually
destroyed their relationship. The quarrel began late in July. It was a busy
summer on the farms and more than a dozen men were employed about the
barns, in the delivery of ice and milk to the town, and at the slaughtering
pens a half mile away. During that summer something happened to the girl.
For hours she sat in her own room in the house reading books, or lay in
a hammock in the orchard and looked up through the fluttering leaves of
the apple trees at the summer sky. A light, strangely soft and enticing,
sometimes came into her eyes. Her figure that had been boyish and strong
began to change. As she went about the house she sometimes smiled at
nothing. Her aunt hardly noticed what was happening to her, but her father,
who all her life had seemed hardly to take account of her existence, was
interested. In her presence he began to feel like a young man. As in the
days of his courtship of her mother and before the possessive passion in
him destroyed his ability to love, he began to feel vaguely that life about
him was full of significance.
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