he said proudly, using for the first time the motor slang he had picked up
from the Cleveland mechanic.

As Tom sent the car hurling over the roads, Clara sat alone in the back
seat unimpressed by her father's new acquisition. For three years she
had been married and she felt that she did not yet know the man she had
married. Always the story had been the same, moments of light and then
darkness again. A new machine that went along roads at a startlingly
increased rate of speed might change the whole face of the world, as her
father declared it would, but it did not change certain facts of her life.
"Am I a failure as a wife, or is Hugh impossible as a husband?" she asked
herself for perhaps the thousandth time as the car, having got into a long
stretch of clear, straight road, seemed to leap and sail through the air
like a bird. "At any rate I have married me a husband and yet I have no
husband, I have been in a man's arms but I have no lover, I have taken hold
of life, but life has slipped through my fingers."

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.