Page:Poor White.djvu/173

 thing to happen. John May was disconcerted by Clara's words. He had thought she wanted him to pursue her. He stepped toward the school teacher, who dropped the stone that had been put into his hand and ran away. Clara went back along the road to- ward her own house followed by the muttering farm hand who, after her speech at the bridge, did not dare approach. " Maybe she was making a bluff. Maybe she didn't want that young fellow to get on to what is between us," he muttered, as he stumbled along in the darkness. In the house Clara sat for a half hour at a table in the lighted living room beside her father, pretend- ing to read a book. She half hoped he would say something that would permit her to attack him. When nothing happened she went upstairs and to bed, only again to spend the night awake and white with anger at the thought of the cruel and unexplainable things life seemed trying to do to her.

In September Clara left the farm to attend the State University at Columbus. She was sent there because Tom Butterworth had a sister who was married to a manufacturer of plows and lived at the State Capital. After the incident with the farm hand and the misun- derstanding that had sprung up between himself and his daughter, he was uncomfortable with her in the house and was glad to have her away. He did not want to frighten his sister by telling of what had happened, and when he wrote, tried to be diplomatic. " Clara has been too much among the rough men who work on my farms and had become a little rough," he wrote. " Take her in hand. I want her to become more of