Clara tried to think of Alfred Buckley as a husband. Like Hugh McVey he was tall and gaunt but unlike the inventor, whom she had seen two or three times on the street, he was not carelessly dressed. There was something sleek about him, something that suggested a well-bred dog, a hound perhaps. As he talked he leaned forward like a greyhound in pursuit of a rabbit. His hair was carefully parted and his clothes fitted him like the skin of an animal. He wore a diamond scarf pin. His long jaw, it seemed to her, was always wagging. Within a few days after the receipt of his letter she had made up her mind that she did not want him as a husband, and she was convinced he did not want her. The whole matter of marriage had, she was sure, been in some way suggested by her father. When she came to that conclusion she was both angry and in an odd way touched. She did not interpret it as fear of some sort of indiscretion on her part, but thought that her father wanted her to marry because he wanted her to be happy. As she sat in the darkness on the front porch of the farmhouse the voices of the two men became indistinct. It was as though her mind went out of her body and like a living thing journeyed over the world. Dozens of men she had seen and had casually addressed, young fellows attending school at Columbus and boys of the town with whom she had gone to parties and dances when she was a young girl, came to stand before her. She saw their figures distinctly, but remembered them at some advantageous moment of her contact with them. At Columbus there was a young man from a town in the southern end of the State, one of the sort that is always in love with a woman. During her first year in school he had noticed Clara, had been undecided as to whether he had better pay attention to her or to a little black-eyed town girl who was in their classes. Several times he walked down the college hill and along the street with Clara. The two stood at a street crossing where she was in the habit of taking a car. Several cars went by as they stood together by a bush that grew by a high stone wall. They talked of trivial matters, a comedy club that had been organized in the school, the chances of victory for the football team. The young man was one of the actors in a play to be given by the comedy club and told Clara of his experiences at rehearsals. As he talked his eyes began to shine and he seemed to be looking, not at her face or body, but at something within her. For a time, perhaps for fifteen minutes, there was a possibility that the two people would love each other. Then the young man went away and later she saw him walking under the trees on the college campus with the little black-eyed town girl.