From his shop window Hugh stared at the backs of the heads of the three people. The top of Tom Butterworth's buggy had been let down, and when he talked Alfred Buckley leaned forward and his head disappeared. Hugh thought Clara must look like the kind of woman men meant when they spoke of a lady. The farmer's daughter had an instinct for clothes, and Hugh's mind got the idea of gentility by way of the medium of clothes. He thought the dress she had worn the most stylish thing he had ever seen. Clara's friend Kate Chanceller, while mannish in her dress, had an instinct for style and had taught Clara some valuable lessons. “Any woman can dress well if she knows how,” Kate had declared. She had taught Clara how to study and emphasize by dress the good points of her body. Beside Clara, Rose McCoy looked dowdy and commonplace.
Hugh went to the rear of his shop to where there was a water-tap and washed his hands. Then he went to a bench and tried to take up the work he had been doing. Within five minutes he went to wash his hands again. He went out of the shop and stood beside the small stream that rippled along beneath willow bushes and disappeared under the bridge beneath Turner's Pike, and then went back for his coat and quit work for the day. An instinct led him to go past the creek again and he knelt on the grass at the edge and again washed his hands.
Hugh's growing vanity was fed by the thought that Clara was interested in him, but it was not yet strong enough to sustain the thought. He took a long walk, going north from the shop along Turner's Pike for two or three miles and then by a cross road between corn and cabbage fields to where he could, by crossing a meadow, get into a wood. For an hour he sat on a log at the wood's edge and looked south. Away in the distance, over the roofs of the houses of the town, he could see a white speck against a background of green--the Butterworth farm house. Almost at once he decided that the thing he had seen in Clara's eyes and that was sister to something he had seen in Rose McCoy's eyes had nothing to do with him. The mantle of vanity he had been wearing dropped off and left him naked and sad. “What would she be wanting of me?” he asked himself, and got up from the log to look with critical eyes at his long, bony body. For the first time in two or three years he thought of the words so often repeated in his presence by Sarah Shepard in the first few months after he left his father's shack by the shore of the Mississippi River and came to work at the railroad station. She had called his people lazy louts and poor white trash and had railed against his inclination to dreams. By struggle and work he had conquered the dreams but could not conquer his ancestry, nor change the fact that he was at bottom poor white trash. With a shudder of disgust he saw himself again a boy in ragged clothes that smelled of fish, lying stupid and half asleep in the grass beside the Mississippi River. He forgot the majesty of the dreams that sometimes came to him, and only remembered the swarms of flies that, attracted by the filth of their clothes, hovered over him and over the drunken father who lay sleeping beside him.