"Kate was right about men. They want something from women, but what do they
care what kind of lives we lead after they get what they want?" she thought
grimly.
The more to separate herself from the feasting, laughing crowd, Clara
tried to think out the details of her mother's life. "It was the life of
a beast," she thought. Like herself, her mother had come to the house
with her husband on the night of her marriage. There was just such
another feast. The country was new then and the people for the most part
desperately poor. Still there was drinking. She had heard her father and
Jim Priest speak of the drinking bouts of their youth. The men came as they
had come now, and with them came women, women who had been coarsened by the
life they led. Pigs were killed and game brought from the forests. The men
drank, shouted, fought, and played practical jokes. Clara wondered if any
of the men and women in the room would dare go upstairs into her sleeping
room and tie knots in her night clothes. They had done that when her mother
came to the house as a bride. Then they had all gone away and her father
had taken his bride upstairs. He was drunk, and her own husband Hugh was
now getting drunk. Her mother had submitted. Her life had been a story of
submission. Kate Chanceller had said it was so married women lived, and
her mother's life had proven the truth of the statement.
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