An
instinct led him to go past the creek again and he knelt on the grass at
the edge and again washed his hands.
Hugh's growing vanity was fed by the thought that Clara was interested in
him, but it was not yet strong enough to sustain the thought. He took a
long walk, going north from the shop along Turner's Pike for two or three
miles and then by a cross road between corn and cabbage fields to where he
could, by crossing a meadow, get into a wood. For an hour he sat on a log
at the wood's edge and looked south. Away in the distance, over the roofs
of the houses of the town, he could see a white speck against a background
of green--the Butterworth farm house. Almost at once he decided that the
thing he had seen in Clara's eyes and that was sister to something he had
seen in Rose McCoy's eyes had nothing to do with him. The mantle of vanity
he had been wearing dropped off and left him naked and sad. "What would she
be wanting of me?" he asked himself, and got up from the log to look with
critical eyes at his long, bony body. For the first time in two or three
years he thought of the words so often repeated in his presence by Sarah
Shepard in the first few months after he left his father's shack by the
shore of the Mississippi River and came to work at the railroad station.
She had called his people lazy louts and poor white trash and had railed
against his inclination to dreams.
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