ran back to the life in her father's house and its loneli- ness. For two summers she had escaped going home. At the end of her first year in school she had made an illness of her uncle's an excuse for spending the sum- mer in Columbus, and at the end of the second year she had found another excuse for not going. This year she felt she would have to go home. She would have to sit day after day at the farm table with the farm hands. Nothing would happen. Her father would remain silent in her presence. She would be- come bored and weary of the endless small talk of the town girls. If one of the town boys began to pay her special attention, her father would become suspicious and that would lead to resentment in herself. She would do something she did not want to do. In the houses along the streets through which the car passed, she saw women moving about. Babies cried and men came out of the doors and stood talking to one another on the sidewalks. She decided suddenly that she was taking the problem of her own life too seriously. " The thing to do is to get married and then work things out afterward," she told herself. She made up her mind that the puzzling, insistent antagonism that existed between men and women was altogether due to the fact that they were not married and had not the married people's way of solving such problems as Frank Metcalf had been talking about all afternoon. She wished she were with Kate Chanceller so that she could discuss with her this new viewpoint. When she and Frank Metcalf got off the car she was no longer in a hurry to go home to her uncle's house. Knowing she did not want to marry him, she thought that in her turn she would talk, that she would try to make him see
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