Nothing would happen. Her
father would remain silent in her presence. She would become bored and
weary of the endless small talk of the town girls. If one of the town boys
began to pay her special attention, her father would become suspicious and
that would lead to resentment in herself. She would do something she did
not want to do. In the houses along the streets through which the car
passed, she saw women moving about. Babies cried and men came out of the
doors and stood talking to one another on the sidewalks. She decided
suddenly that she was taking the problem of her own life too seriously.
"The thing to do is to get married and then work things out afterward," she
told herself. She made up her mind that the puzzling, insistent antagonism
that existed between men and women was altogether due to the fact that they
were not married and had not the married people's way of solving such
problems as Frank Metcalf had been talking about all afternoon. She wished
she were with Kate Chancellor so that she could discuss with her this new
viewpoint. When she and Frank Metcalf got off the car she was no longer in
a hurry to go home to her uncle's house. Knowing she did not want to marry
him, she thought that in her turn she would talk, that she would try to
make him see her point of view as all the afternoon he had been trying to
make her see his.
For an hour the two people walked about and Clara talked.
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