Hugh's hair was coarse like the mane of a
horse, and his nose was like the nose of a horse. He was, she decided, very
like a horse; an honest, powerful horse, a horse that was humanized by the
mysterious, hungering thing that expressed itself through his eyes. "If I
have to live with an animal; if, as Kate Chanceller once said, we women
have to decide what other animal we are to live with before we can begin
being humans, I would rather live with a strong, kindly horse than a wolf
or a wolfhound," she found herself thinking.
CHAPTER XIV
Hugh had no suspicion that Clara had him under consideration as a possible
husband. He knew nothing about her, but after she went away he began to
think. She was a woman and good to look upon and at once took Rose McCoy's
place in his mind. All unloved men and many who are loved play in a half
subconscious way with the figures of many women as women's minds play with
the figures of men, seeing them in many situations, vaguely caressing them,
dreaming of closer contacts. With Hugh the impulse toward women had started
late, but it was becoming every day more active. When he talked to Clara
and while she stayed in his presence, he was more embarrassed than he had
ever been before, because he was more conscious of her than he had ever
been of any other woman. In secret he was not the modest man he thought
himself. The success of his corn-cutting machine and his car-dumping
apparatus and the respect, amounting almost to worship, he sometimes saw in
the eyes of the people of the Ohio town had fed his vanity.
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