Several times during those evenings in the presence of the two
men, who talked only of making money out of the products of another man's
mind, she almost forced her mind out into a concrete thought concerning
women, and then it became again befogged.
Clara grew tired of thinking, and listened to the talk. The name of Hugh
McVey played through the persistent conversation like a refrain. It became
fixed in her mind. The inventor was not married. By the social system under
which she lived that and that only made him a possibility for her purposes.
She began to think of the inventor, and her mind, weary of playing about
her own figure, played about the figure of the tall, serious-looking man
she had seen on Main Street. When Alfred Buckley had driven away to town
for the night, she went upstairs to her own room but did not get into bed.
Instead, she put out her light and sat by an open window that looked out
upon the orchard and from which she could see a little stretch of the road
that ran past the farm house toward town. Every evening before Alfred
Buckley went away, there was a little scene on the front porch. When the
visitor got up to go, her father made some excuse for going indoors or
around the corner of the house into the barnyard. "I will have Jim Priest
hitch up your horse," he said and hurried away. Clara was left in the
company of the man who had pretended he wanted to marry her, and who, she
was convinced, wanted nothing of the kind.
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