Tom Butterworth, in many ways a shrewd, observing man, never understood the quality of his own daughter. He was an intensely possessive man and once, when he was newly married, there had been a suspicion in his mind that there was something between his wife and a young man who had worked on the farm where he then lived. The suspicion was unfounded, but he discharged the man and one evening, when his wife had gone into town to do some shopping and did not return at the accustomed time, he followed, and when he saw her on the street stepped into a store to avoid a meeting. She was in trouble. Her horse had become suddenly lame and she had to walk home. Without letting her see him the husband followed along the road. It was dark and she heard the footsteps in the road behind her and becoming frightened ran the last half mile to her own house. He waited until she had entered and then followed her in, pretending he had just come from the barns. When he heard her story of the accident to the horse and of her fright in the road he was ashamed; but as the horse, that had been left in a livery stable, seemed all right when he went for it the next day he became suspicious again.
As he stood outside the door of his daughter's room, the farmer felt as he had felt that evening long before when he followed his wife along the road. When on the porch downstairs he had looked up suddenly and had seen the gesture made by the farm hand, he had also looked quickly at his daughter. She looked confused and, he thought, guilty. “Well, it is the same thing over again,” he thought bitterly, “like mother, like daughter--they are both of the same stripe.” Getting quickly out of his chair he had followed the young man into the road and had discharged him. “Go, to-night. I don't want to see you on the place again,” he said. In the darkness before the girl's room he thought of many bitter things he wanted to say. He forgot she was a girl and talked to her as he might have talked to a mature, sophisticated, and guilty woman. “Come,” he said, “I want to know the truth. If you have been with that farm hand you are starting young. Has anything happened between you?”
Clara walked to the door and confronted her father. The hatred of him, born in that hour and that never left her, gave her strength. She did not know what he was talking about, but had a keen sense of the fact that he, like the stupid, young man in the shed, was trying to violate something very precious in her nature. “I don't know what you are talking about,” she said calmly, “but I know this. I am no longer a child. Within the last week I've become a woman. If you don't want me in your house, if you don't like me any more, say so and I'll go away.”