There was but one man of them all who was not a schemer. Hugh was what she wanted to be. He was a creative force. In his hands dead inanimate things became creative forces. He was what she wanted not herself but perhaps a son, to be. The thought, at last definitely expressed, startled Clara, and she arose from the chair by the window and prepared to go to bed. Something within her body ached, but she did not allow herself to pursue further the thoughts she had been having. On the day when she went with her father and Alfred Buckley to visit Hugh's shop, Clara knew that she wanted to marry the man she would see there. The thought was not expressed in her but slept like a seed newly planted in fertile soil. She had herself managed that she be taken to the factory and had also managed that she be left with Hugh while the two men went to look at the half-completed hay-loader at the back of the shop. She had begun talking to Hugh while the four people stood on the little grass plot before the shop. They went inside and her father and Buckley went through a door toward the rear. She stopped by a bench and as she continued talking Hugh was compelled to stop and stand beside her. She asked questions, paid him vague compliments, and as he struggled, trying to make conversation, she studied him. To cover his confusion he half turned away and looked out through a window into Turner's Pike. His eyes, she decided, were nice. They were somewhat small, but there was something gray and cloudy in them, and the gray cloudiness gave her confidence in the person behind the eyes. She could, she felt, trust him. There was something in his eyes that was like the things most grateful to her own nature, the sky seen across an open stretch of country or over a river that ran straight away into the distance. Hugh's hair was coarse like the mane of a horse, and his nose was like the nose of a horse. He was, she decided, very like a horse; an honest, powerful horse, a horse that was humanized by the mysterious, hungering thing that expressed itself through his eyes. “If I have to live with an animal; if, as Kate Chanceller once said, we women have to decide what other animal we are to live with before we can begin being humans, I would rather live with a strong, kindly horse than a wolf or a wolfhound,” she found herself thinking. CHAPTER XIV