Kate Chanceller was excited as Clara told the tale and listened with a fiery light burning in her eyes. Something in her manner encouraged Clara to tell also of her experiments with the school teacher and for the first time she got a sense of justice toward men by talking to the woman who was half a man. “I know that wasn't square,” she said. “I know now, when I talk to you, but I didn't know then. With the school teacher I was as unfair as John May and my father were with me. Why do men and women have to fight each other? Why does the battle between them have to go on?”
Kate walked up and down before Clara and swore like a man. “Oh, hell,” she exclaimed, “men are such fools and I suppose women are as bad. They are both too much one thing. I fall in between. I've got my problem too, but I'm not going to talk about it. I know what I'm going to do. I'm going to find some kind of work and do it.” She began to talk of the stupidity of men in their approach to women. “Men hate such women as myself,” she said. “They can't use us, they think. What fools! They should watch and study us. Many of us spend our lives loving other women, but we have skill. Being part women, we know how to approach women. We are not blundering and crude. Men want a certain thing from you. It is delicate and easy to kill. Love is the most sensitive thing in the world. It's like an orchid. Men try to pluck orchids with ice tongs, the fools.”
Walking to where Clara stood by a table, and taking her by the shoulder, the excited woman stood for a long time looking at her. Then she picked up her hat, put it on her head, and with a flourish of her hand started for the door. “You can depend on my friendship,” she said. “I'll do nothing to confuse you. You'll be in luck if you can get that kind of love or friendship from a man.”
Clara kept thinking of the words of Kate Chanceller on the evening when she walked through the streets of the suburban village with Frank Metcalf, and later as the two sat on the car that took them back to the city. With the exception of another student named Phillip Grimes, who had come to see her a dozen times during her second year in the University, young Metcalf was the only one of perhaps a dozen men she had met since leaving the farm who had been attracted to her. Phillip Grimes was a slender young fellow with blue eyes, yellow hair and a not very vigorous mustache. He was from a small town in the northern end of the State, where his father published a weekly newspaper. When he came to see Clara he sat on the edge of his chair and talked rapidly. Some person he had seen in the street had interested him. “I saw an old woman on the car,” he began. “She had a basket on her arm. It was filled with groceries. She sat beside me and talked aloud to herself.” Clara's visitor repeated the words of the old woman on the car. He speculated about her, wondered what her life was like. When he had talked of the old woman for ten or fifteen minutes, he dropped the subject and began telling of another experience, this time with a man who sold fruit at a street crossing. It was impossible to be personal with Phillip Grimes. Nothing but his eyes were personal. Sometimes he looked at Clara in a way that I made her feel that her clothes were being stripped from her body, and that she was being made to stand naked in the room before her visitor. The experience, when it came, was not entirely a physical one. It was only in part that. When the thing happened Clara saw her whole life being stripped bare. “Don't look at me like that,” she once said somewhat sharply, when his eyes had made her so uncomfortable she could no longer remain silent. Her remark had frightened Phillip Grimes away. He got up at once, blushed, stammered something about having another engagement, and hurried away.