He put up his hand and swept it across his face, an
unconscious return of the perpetual movement of brushing flies away from
his face as he lay half asleep by the river.
Little lustful thoughts kept coming to Hugh and made him ashamed. He moved
restlessly in the buggy seat and a lump came into his throat. Again he
looked at Clara. "I'm a poor white," he thought. "It isn't fitten I should
marry this woman."
From the high spot in the road Clara looked down at her father's house and
below at the lights of the town, that had already spread so far over the
countryside, and up through the hills toward the farm where she had spent
her girlhood and where, as Jim Priest had said, "the sap had begun to run
up the tree." She began to love the man who was to be her husband, but like
the dreamers of the town, saw him as something a little inhuman, as a man
almost gigantic in his bigness. Many things Kate Chanceller had said as the
two developing women walked and talked in the streets of Columbus came back
to her mind. When they had started again along the road she continually
worried the horse by tapping him with the whip. Like Kate, Clara wanted to
be fair and square. "A woman should be fair and square, even with a man,"
Kate had said. "The man I'm going to have as a husband is simple and
honest," she thought. "If there are things down there in town that are not
square and fair, he had nothing to do with them.
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