“Well, the night is fine,” he said. Clara hugged the thought that he was uncomfortable. “He has taken me for a green country girl, impressed with him because he is from the city and dressed in fine clothes,” she thought. Sometimes her father stayed away five or ten minutes and she did not say a word. When her father returned Alfred Buckley shook hands with him and then turned to Clara, apparently now quite at his ease. “We have bored you, I'm afraid,” he said. He took her hand and leaning over, kissed the back of it ceremoniously. Her father looked away. Clara went upstairs and sat by the window. She could hear the two men continuing their talk in the road before the house. After a time the front door banged, her father came into the house and the visitor drove away. Everything became quiet and for a long time she could hear the hoofs of Alfred Buckley's horse beating a rapid tattoo on the road that led down into town.
Clara thought of Hugh McVey. Alfred Buckley had spoken of him as a backwoodsman with a streak of genius. He constantly harped on the notion that he and Tom could use the man for their own ends, and she wondered if both of the men were making as great a mistake about the inventor as they were about her. In the silent summer night, when the sound of the horse's hoofs had died away and when her father had quit stirring about the house, she heard another sound. The corn-cutting machine factory was very busy and had put on a night shift. When the night was still, or when there was a slight breeze blowing up the hill from town, there was a low rumbling sound coming from many machines working in wood and steel, followed at regular intervals by the steady breathing of a steam engine.
The woman at the window, like every one else in her town and in all the towns of the mid-western country, became touched with the idea of the romance of industry. The dreams of the Missouri boy that he had fought, had by the strength of his persistency twisted into new channels so that they had expressed themselves in definite things, in corn-cutting machines and in machines for unloading coal cars and for gathering hay out of a field and loading it on wagons without aid of human hands, were still dreams and capable of arousing dreams in others. They awoke dreams in the mind of the woman. The figures of other men that had been playing through her mind slipped away and but the one figure remained. Her mind made up stories concerning Hugh. She had read the absurd tale that had been printed in the Cleveland paper and her fancy took hold of it. Like every other citizen of America she believed in heroes. In books and magazines she had read of heroic men who had come up out of poverty by some strange alchemy to combine in their stout persons all of the virtues. The broad, rich land demanded gigantic figures, and the minds of men had created the figures. Lincoln, Grant, Garfield, Sherman, and a half dozen other men were something more than human in the minds of the generation that came immediately after the days of their stirring performance. Already industry was creating a new set of semi-mythical figures. The factory at work in the night-time in the town of Bidwell became, to the mind of the woman sitting by the window in the farm house, not a factory but a powerful animal, a powerful beast-like thing that Hugh had tamed and made useful to his fellows. Her mind ran forward and took the taming of the beast for granted. The hunger of her generation found a voice in her. Like every one else she wanted heroes, and Hugh, to whom she had never talked and about whom she knew nothing, became a hero. Her father, Alfred Buckley, Steve Hunter and the rest were after all pigmies. Her father was a schemer; he had even schemed to get her married, perhaps to further his own plans. In reality his schemes were so ineffective that she did not need to be angry with him. There was but one man of them all who was not a schemer. Hugh was what she wanted to be. He was a creative force. In his hands dead inanimate things became creative forces. He was what she wanted not herself but perhaps a son, to be. The thought, at last definitely expressed, startled Clara, and she arose from the chair by the window and prepared to go to bed. Something within her body ached, but she did not allow herself to pursue further the thoughts she had been having.