She pretended an
innocence that was not hers. School girls know many things that they do not
apply to themselves until something happens to them such as had happened to
Clara. The farmer's daughter became conscious. She knew a thousand things
she had not known a month before and began to take her revenge upon men for
their betrayal of her. In the darkness as they walked home together, she
tempted the young man into kissing her, and later lay in his arms for two
hours, entirely sure of herself, striving to find out, without risk to
herself, the things she wanted to know about life.
That night she again quarreled with her father. He tried to scold her for
remaining out late with a man, and she shut the door in his face. On
another evening she walked boldly out of the house with the school teacher.
The two walked along a road to where a bridge went over a small stream.
John May, who was still determined that the farmer's daughter was in
love with him, had on that evening followed the school teacher to the
Butterworth house and had been waiting outside intending to frighten his
rival with his fists. On the bridge something happened that drove the
school teacher away. John May came up to the two people and began to make
threats. The bridge had just been repaired and a pile of small, sharp-edged
stones lay close at hand. Clara picked one of them up and handed it to the
school teacher.
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