It was past two o'clock when the feast came to an end. When the guests began to depart, Clara stood for a moment alone and tried to get herself in hand. Something inside her felt cold and old. If she had often thought she wanted a man, and that life as a married woman would put an end to her problems, she did not think so at that moment. “What I want above everything else is a woman,” she thought. All the evening her mind had been trying to clutch and hold the almost forgotten figure of her mother, but it was too vague and shadowy. With her mother she had never walked and talked late at night through streets of towns when the world was asleep and when thoughts were born in herself. “After all,” she thought, “Mother may also have belonged to all this.” She looked at the people preparing to depart. Several men had gathered in a group by the door. One of them told a story at which the others laughed loudly. The women standing about had flushed and, Clara thought, coarse faces. “They have gone into marriage like cattle,” she told herself. Her mind, running out of the room, began to caress the memory of her one woman friend, Kate Chanceller. Often on late spring afternoons as she and Kate had walked together something very like love-making had happened between them. They went along quietly and evening came on. Suddenly they stopped in the street and Kate had put her arms about Clara's shoulders. For a moment they stood thus close together and a strange gentle and yet hungry look came into Kate's eyes. It only lasted a moment and when it happened both women were somewhat embarrassed. Kate laughed and taking hold of Clara's arm pulled her along the sidewalk. “Let's walk like the devil,” she said, “come on, let's get up some speed.” Clara put her hands to her eyes as though to shut out the scene in the room. “If I could have been with Kate this evening I could have come to a man believing in the possible sweetness of marriage,” she thought. CHAPTER XVIII Jim Priest was very drunk, but insisted on hitching a team to the Butterworth carriage and driving it loaded with guests to town. Every one laughed at him, but he drove up to the farmhouse door and in a loud voice declared he knew what he was doing. Three men got into the carriage and beating the horses furiously Jim sent them galloping away. When an opportunity offered, Clara went silently out of the hot dining-room and through a door to a porch at the back of the house. The kitchen door was open and the waitresses and cooks from town were preparing to depart. One of the young women came out into the darkness accompanied by a man, evidently one of the guests. They had both been drinking and stood for a moment in the darkness with their bodies pressed together. “I wish it were our wedding night,” the man's voice whispered, and the woman laughed. After a long kiss they went back into the kitchen.