He wanted men and women and close association with men and
women. Often his problem was yet more simple. He wanted a woman, one who
would love him and lie close to him at night. He wanted the respect of his
fellows in the town where he had come to live his life. He wanted to
succeed at the particular task to which he had set his hand.
The attack made upon him by the insane harness maker had at first seemed to
settle all his problems. At the moment when the frightened and desperate
man sank his teeth and fingers into Hugh's neck, something had happened to
Clara. It was Clara who, with a strength and quickness quite amazing, had
torn the insane man away. All through that evening she had been hating her
husband and father, and then suddenly she loved Hugh. The seeds of a child
were already alive in her, and when the body of her man was furiously
attacked, he became also her child. Swiftly, like the passing of a shadow
over the surface of a river on a windy day, the change in her attitude
toward her husband took place. All that evening she had been hating the new
age she had thought so perfectly personified in the two men, who talked
of the making of machines while the beauty of the night was whirled away
into the darkness with the cloud of dust thrown into the air by the flying
motor. She had been hating Hugh and sympathizing with the dead past he and
other men like him were destroying, the past that was represented by the
figure of the old harness maker who wanted to do his work by hand in the
old way, by the man who had aroused the scorn and derision of her father.
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