Fragments of the broken glass fell with a
sharp little tinkling sound upon a heap of twisted pieces of iron and steel
lying beside the anvil....
Hugh did not eat lunch that day nor did he go to the farmhouse or return to
work at the shop. He walked, but this time did not walk in country roads
where male and female birds dart in and out of bushes. An intense desire to
know something intimate and personal concerning men and women and the lives
they led in their houses had taken possession of him. He walked in the
daylight up and down in the streets of Bidwell.
To the right, over the bridge leading out of Turner's Road, the main street
of Bidwell ran along a river bank. In that direction the hills out of the
country to the south came down to the river's edge and there was a high
bluff. On the bluff and back of it on a sloping hillside many of the more
pretentious new houses of the prosperous Bidwell citizens had been built.
Facing the river were the largest houses, with grounds in which trees and
shrubs had been planted and in the streets along the hill, less and less
pretentious as they receded from the river, were other houses built and
being built, long rows of houses, long streets of houses, houses in brick,
stone, and wood.
Hugh went from the river front back into this maze of streets and houses.
Some instinct led him there. It was where the men and women of Bidwell who
had prospered and had married went to live, to make themselves houses.
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