Poor White by Anderson, Sherwood, 1876-1941

Little lustful thoughts kept coming to Hugh and made him ashamed. He moved restlessly in the buggy seat and a lump came into his throat. Again he looked at Clara. "I'm a poor white," he thought. "It isn't fitten I should marry this woman."

From the high spot in the road Clara looked down at her father's house and below at the lights of the town, that had already spread so far over the countryside, and up through the hills toward the farm where she had spent her girlhood and where, as Jim Priest had said, "the sap had begun to run up the tree." She began to love the man who was to be her husband, but like the dreamers of the town, saw him as something a little inhuman, as a man almost gigantic in his bigness. Many things Kate Chanceller had said as the two developing women walked and talked in the streets of Columbus came back to her mind. When they had started again along the road she continually worried the horse by tapping him with the whip. Like Kate, Clara wanted to be fair and square. "A woman should be fair and square, even with a man," Kate had said. "The man I'm going to have as a husband is simple and honest," she thought. "If there are things down there in town that are not square and fair, he had nothing to do with them." Realizing a little Hugh's difficulty in expressing what he must feel, she wanted to help him, but when she turned and saw how he did not look at her but continually stared into the darkness, pride kept her silent. "I'll have to wait until he's ready. Already I've taken things too much into my own hands. I'll put through this marriage, but when it comes to anything else he'll have to begin," she told herself, and a lump came into her throat and tears to her eyes.

CHAPTER XVI