In a furtive way he kept looking about for women, hungering to see their faces. “What are they up to? I'd like to find out,” his mind seemed to be saying.
The women came out of the doors of the houses and passed him as he went slowly along. Other women in carriages drove in the streets. They were well-dressed women and seemed sure of themselves. “Things are all right with me. For me things are settled and arranged,” they seemed to say. All the streets in which he walked seemed to be telling the story of things settled and arranged. The houses spoke of the same things. “I am a house. I am not built until things are settled and arranged. I mean that,” they said.
Hugh grew very tired. In the later afternoon a small bright-eyed woman--no doubt she had been one of the guests at his wedding feast--stopped him. “Are you planning to buy or build up our way, Mr. McVey?” she asked. He shook his head. “I'm looking around,” he said and hurried away.
Anger took the place of perplexity in him. The women he saw in the streets and in the doors of the houses were such women as his own woman Clara. They had married men--“no better than myself,” he told himself, growing bold.
They had married men and something had happened to them. Something was settled. They could live in streets and in houses. Their marriages had been real marriages and he had a right to a real marriage. It was not too much to expect out of life.
“Clara has a right to that also,” he thought and his mind began to idealize the marriages of men and women. “On every hand here I see them, the neat, well-dressed, handsome women like Clara. How happy they are!
“Their feathers have been ruffled though,” he thought angrily. “It was with them as with that bird I saw being pursued through the trees. There has been pursuit and a pretense of trying to escape. There has been an effort made that was not an effort, but feathers have been ruffled here.”
When his thoughts had driven him into a half desperate mood Hugh went out of the streets of bright, ugly, freshly built, freshly painted and furnished houses, and down into the town. Several men homeward bound at the end of their day of work called to him. “I hope you are thinking of buying or building up our way,” they said heartily.