It seemed to
Clara that every additional year spent at the University but served to
emphasize its inadequacy. It was so also with the books she read and the
thoughts and actions of the older people about her. Her aunt and uncle
did not talk much, but seemed to take it for granted she wanted to live
such another life as they were living. She thought with horror of the
probability of marrying a maker of plows or of some other dull necessity
of life and then spending her days in the making of stockings for babies
that did not come, or in some other equally futile manifestation of her
dissatisfaction. She realized with a shudder that men like her uncle, who
spent their lives in adding up rows of figures or doing over and over some
tremendously trivial thing, had no conception of any outlook for their
women beyond living in a house, serving them physically, wearing perhaps
good enough clothes to help them make a show of prosperity and success, and
drifting finally into a stupid acceptance of dullness--an acceptance that
both she and the passionate, twisted man beside her were fighting against.
In a class in the University Clara had met, during that her third year
there, a woman named Kate Chanceller, who had come to Columbus with her
brother from a town in Missouri, and it was this woman who had given her
thoughts form, who had indeed started her thinking of the inadequacy of
her life.
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