Halfway down the hill the tall woman stopped by the roadside. Darkness was coming on and the glow of the coke ovens lighted the sky. “One living up here and never going down there might think it rather grand and big,” he said. Again the hatred came. “They might think the men who lived down there knew something instead of being just a lot of cattle.” A smile came into the face of the tall woman and a gentler look stole into her eyes. “We get at one another,” she said, “we can’t let one another alone. I wish we hadn’t quarrelled. We might be friends if we tried. You have got something in you. You attract women. I’ve heard others say that. Your father was that way. Most of the women here would rather have been the wife of Cracked McGregor, ugly as he was, than to have stayed with their own husbands. I heard my mother say that to father when he lay quarrelling in bed at night and I lay listening.” The boy was overcome with the thought of a woman talking to him so frankly. He looked at her and said what was in his mind. “I don’t like the women,” he said, “but I liked you, seeing you standing in the stairway and thinking you had been doing as you pleased. I thought maybe you amounted to something. I don’t know why you should be bothered by what I think. I don’t know why any woman should be bothered by what any man thinks. I should think you would go right on doing what you want to do, like mother and me about my being a lawyer.” He sat on a log beside the road near where he had met her and watched her go down the hill. “I’m quite a fellow to have talked to her all afternoon like that,” he thought, and pride in his growing manhood crept over him. CHAPTER VIII _Sherwood Anderson on This Side of Freud_