torn the insane man away. All through that evening she had been hating her
husband and father, and then suddenly she loved Hugh. The seeds of a child
were already alive in her, and when the body of her man was furiously
attacked, he became also her child. Swiftly, like the passing of a shadow
over the surface of a river on a windy day, the change in her attitude
toward her husband took place. All that evening she had been hating the new
age she had thought so perfectly personified in the two men, who talked
of the making of machines while the beauty of the night was whirled away
into the darkness with the cloud of dust thrown into the air by the flying
motor. She had been hating Hugh and sympathizing with the dead past he and
other men like him were destroying, the past that was represented by the
figure of the old harness maker who wanted to do his work by hand in the
old way, by the man who had aroused the scorn and derision of her father.

And then the past rose up to strike. It struck with claws and teeth, and
the claws and teeth sank into Hugh's flesh, into the flesh of the man whose
seed was already alive within her.

At that moment the woman who had been a thinker stopped thinking. Within
her arose the mother, fierce, indomitable, strong with the strength of the
roots of a tree. To her then and forever after Hugh was no hero, remaking
the world, but a perplexed boy hurt by life. He never again escaped out of
boyhood in her consciousness of him. With the strength of a tigress she
tore the crazed harness maker away from Hugh, and with something of the
surface brutality of another Ed Hall, threw him to the floor of the car.
When Ed and the policeman, assisted by several bystanders, came running
forward, she waited almost indifferently while they forced the screaming
and kicking man through the crowd and in at the door of the police station.

For Clara the thing for which she had hungered had, she thought, happened.