The blow struck was terrific. Into it Hugh put all of his protest against the grotesque position into which he had been thrown by his marriage to Clara.
The blow accomplished nothing. The sledge descended and the comparatively delicate metal wheel was twisted, knocked out of shape. It spurted from under the head of the sledge and shot past Hugh's head and out through a window, breaking a pane of glass. Fragments of the broken glass fell with a sharp little tinkling sound upon a heap of twisted pieces of iron and steel lying beside the anvil....
Hugh did not eat lunch that day nor did he go to the farmhouse or return to work at the shop. He walked, but this time did not walk in country roads where male and female birds dart in and out of bushes. An intense desire to know something intimate and personal concerning men and women and the lives they led in their houses had taken possession of him. He walked in the daylight up and down in the streets of Bidwell.
To the right, over the bridge leading out of Turner's Road, the main street of Bidwell ran along a river bank. In that direction the hills out of the country to the south came down to the river's edge and there was a high bluff. On the bluff and back of it on a sloping hillside many of the more pretentious new houses of the prosperous Bidwell citizens had been built. Facing the river were the largest houses, with grounds in which trees and shrubs had been planted and in the streets along the hill, less and less pretentious as they receded from the river, were other houses built and being built, long rows of houses, long streets of houses, houses in brick, stone, and wood.
Hugh went from the river front back into this maze of streets and houses. Some instinct led him there. It was where the men and women of Bidwell who had prospered and had married went to live, to make themselves houses. His father-in-law had offered to buy him a river front place and already that meant much in Bidwell.
He wanted to see women who, like Clara, had got themselves husbands, what they were like. “I've seen enough of men,” he thought half resentfully as he went along.
All afternoon he walked in streets, going up and down before houses in which women lived with their men. A detached mood had possession of him. For an hour he stood under a tree idly watching workmen engaged in building another house. When one of the workmen spoke to him he walked away and went into a street where men were laying a cement pavement before a completed house.