Like her father, Hugh seemed to Clara absorbed in only the things outside himself, the outer crust of life. He was like and yet unlike her father. She was baffled by him. There was something in the man she wanted and could not find. “The fault must be in me,” she told herself. “He's all right, but what's the matter with me?”
After that night when he ran away from her bridal bed, Clara had more than once thought the miracle had happened. It did sometimes. On that night when he came to her out of the rain it had happened. There was a wall a blow could shatter, and she raised her hand to strike the blow. The wall was shattered and then builded itself again. Even as she lay at night in her husband's arms the wall reared itself up in the darkness of the sleeping room.
Over the farmhouse on such nights dense silence brooded and she and Hugh, as had become their habit together, were silent. In the darkness she put up her hand to touch her husband's face and hair. He lay still and she had the impression of some great force holding him back, holding her back. A sharp sense of struggle filled the room. The air was heavy with it.
When words came they did not break the silence. The wall remained.
The words that came were empty, meaningless words. Hugh suddenly broke forth into speech. He spoke of his work at the shop and of his progress toward the solution of some difficult, mechanical problem. If it were evening when the thing happened the two people got out of the lighted house where they had been sitting together, each feeling darkness would help the effort they were both making to tear away the wall. They walked along a lane, past the barns and over the little wooden bridge across the stream that ran down through the barnyard. Hugh did not want to talk of the work at the shop, but could find words for no other talk. They came to a fence where the lane turned and from where they could look down the hillside and into the town. He did not look at Clara but stared down the hillside and the words, in regard to the mechanical difficulties that had occupied his mind all day, ran on and on. When later they went back to the house he felt a little relieved. “I've said words. There is something achieved,” he thought.