Instead he sat by his window in the presence of the moonlit
night and thought of women as beings utterly unlike himself. Words dropped
by Sarah Shepard to the awakening boy came creeping back to his mind. He
thought women were for other men but not for him, and told himself he did
not want a woman.
And then in Turner's Pike something happened. A farmer boy, who had been
to town and who had the daughter of a neighbor in his buggy, stopped in
front of the house. A long freight train, grinding its way slowly past the
station, barred the passage along the road. He held the reins in one hand
and put the other about the waist of his companion. The two heads sought
each other and lips met. They clung to each other. The same moon that shed
its light on Rose McCoy in the distant farmhouse lighted the open place
where the lovers sat in the buggy in the road. Hugh had to close his eyes
and fight to put down an almost overpowering physical hunger in himself.
His mind still protested that women were not for him. When his fancy made
for him a picture of the school teacher Rose McCoy sleeping in a bed, he
saw her only as a chaste white thing to be worshiped from afar and not to
be approached, at least not by himself. Again he opened his eyes and looked
at the lovers whose lips still clung together. His long slouching body
stiffened and he sat up very straight in his chair. Then he closed his eyes
again.
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