"How can I explain my thoughts when they're not clear in my own
mind, when I am myself just groping blindly about?" she asked herself. "She
wants me to be good," she thought. "What would she think if I told her that
I had come to the conclusion that, judging by her standards, I have been
altogether too good? What's the use trying to talk to her when I would only
hurt her and make things harder than ever?" She got to a street crossing
and looked back. Her aunt was still standing at the door of her house and
looking at her. There was something soft, small, round, insistent, both
terribly weak and terribly strong about the completely feminine thing she
had made of herself or that life had made of her. Clara shuddered. She did
not make a symbol of the figure of her aunt and her mind did not form
a connection between her aunt's life and what she had become, as Kate
Chanceller's mind would have done. She saw the little, round, weeping woman
as a boy, walking in the tree-lined streets of a town, sees suddenly the
pale face and staring eyes of a prisoner that looks out at him through
the iron bars of a town jail. Clara was startled as the boy would be
startled and, like the boy, she wanted to run quickly away. "I must think
of something else and of other kinds of women or I'll get things terribly
distorted," she told herself. "If I think of her and women like her I'll
grow afraid of marriage, and I want to be married as soon as I can find the
right man.
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