By struggle and work he had conquered
the dreams but could not conquer his ancestry, nor change the fact that he
was at bottom poor white trash. With a shudder of disgust he saw himself
again a boy in ragged clothes that smelled of fish, lying stupid and half
asleep in the grass beside the Mississippi River. He forgot the majesty of
the dreams that sometimes came to him, and only remembered the swarms of
flies that, attracted by the filth of their clothes, hovered over him and
over the drunken father who lay sleeping beside him.
A lump arose in his throat and for a moment he was consumed with self-pity.
Then he went out of the wood, crossed the field, and with his peculiar,
long, shambling gait that got him over the ground with surprising rapidity,
went again along the road. Had there been a stream nearby he would have
been tempted to tear off his clothes and plunge in. The notion that he
could ever become a man who would in any way be attractive to a woman like
Clara Butterworth seemed the greatest folly in the world. "She's a lady.
What would she be wanting of me? I ain't fitten for her. I ain't fitten for
her," he said aloud, unconsciously falling into the dialect of his father.
Hugh walked the entire afternoon away and in the evening went back to his
shop and worked until midnight. So energetically did he work that several
knotty problems in the construction of the hay-loading apparatus were
cleared away.
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