The
motor car was driven by Tom Butterworth and in it sat his daughter Clara
with her husband Hugh McVey. During the week before, Tom had brought the
car from Cleveland, and the mechanic who rode with him had taught him the
art of driving. Now he drove alone and boldly. Early in the evening he had
run out to the farmhouse to take his daughter and son-in-law for their
first ride. Hugh sat in the seat beside him and after they had started and
were clear of the town, Tom turned to him. "Now watch me step on her tail,"
he said proudly, using for the first time the motor slang he had picked up
from the Cleveland mechanic.
As Tom sent the car hurling over the roads, Clara sat alone in the back
seat unimpressed by her father's new acquisition. For three years she
had been married and she felt that she did not yet know the man she had
married. Always the story had been the same, moments of light and then
darkness again. A new machine that went along roads at a startlingly
increased rate of speed might change the whole face of the world, as her
father declared it would, but it did not change certain facts of her life.
"Am I a failure as a wife, or is Hugh impossible as a husband?" she asked
herself for perhaps the thousandth time as the car, having got into a long
stretch of clear, straight road, seemed to leap and sail through the air
like a bird. "At any rate I have married me a husband and yet I have no
husband, I have been in a man's arms but I have no lover, I have taken hold
of life, but life has slipped through my fingers.
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