* * * * *
From the chair where Clara sat at the wedding feast provided by the energy
of her father and the enthusiasm of Jim Priest, she could see over her
father's shoulder into the farm house kitchen. As when she was a child, she
closed her eyes and dreamed of another kind of feast. With a growing sense
of bitterness she realized that all her life, all through her girlhood and
young womanhood, she had been waiting for this, her wedding night, and
that now, having come, the occasion for which she had waited so long and
concerning which she had dreamed so many dreams, had aborted into an
occasion for the display of ugliness and vulgarity. Her father, the only
other person in the room in any way related to her, sat at the other end
of the long table. Her aunt had gone away on a visit, and in the crowded,
noisy room there was no woman to whom she could turn for understanding.
She looked past her father's shoulder and directly into the wide window
seat where she had spent so many hours of her childhood. Again she wanted
brothers and sisters. "The beautiful men and women of the dreams were meant
to come at this time, that's what the dreams were about; but, like the
unborn children that ran with outstretched hands, they cannot get over the
bridge and into the house," she thought vaguely. "I wish Mother had lived,
or that Kate Chanceller were here," she whispered to herself as, raising
her eyes, she looked at her father.
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