The Woodburn house in Columbus, like the Butterworth house in the country south of Bidwell, sat on a hill. The street fell away rather sharply as one went toward the business portion of the city and the street car line, and on the morning when her aunt spoke to her and tried with her feeble hands to tear some stones out of the wall that was being built between them, Clara hurried along the street under the trees, feeling as though she would like also to weep. She saw no possibility of explaining to her aunt the new thoughts she was beginning to have about life and did not want to hurt her by trying. “How can I explain my thoughts when they're not clear in my own mind, when I am myself just groping blindly about?” she asked herself. “She wants me to be good,” she thought. “What would she think if I told her that I had come to the conclusion that, judging by her standards, I have been altogether too good? What's the use trying to talk to her when I would only hurt her and make things harder than ever?” She got to a street crossing and looked back. Her aunt was still standing at the door of her house and looking at her. There was something soft, small, round, insistent, both terribly weak and terribly strong about the completely feminine thing she had made of herself or that life had made of her. Clara shuddered. She did not make a symbol of the figure of her aunt and her mind did not form a connection between her aunt's life and what she had become, as Kate Chanceller's mind would have done. She saw the little, round, weeping woman as a boy, walking in the tree-lined streets of a town, sees suddenly the pale face and staring eyes of a prisoner that looks out at him through the iron bars of a town jail. Clara was startled as the boy would be startled and, like the boy, she wanted to run quickly away. “I must think of something else and of other kinds of women or I'll get things terribly distorted,” she told herself. “If I think of her and women like her I'll grow afraid of marriage, and I want to be married as soon as I can find the right man. It's the only thing I can do. What else is there a woman can do?”