Page:Poor White.djvu/185

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ous beauty of the day, she had wanted so keenly to draw close to some one. She explained to Kate how she had been so brutally jarred out of the feeling in herself that she felt was at bottom all right. u It was like a blow in the face at the hand of God," she said. Kate Chanceller was excited as Clara told the tale and listened with a fiery light burning in her eyes. Something in her manner encouraged Clara to tell also of her experiments with the school teacher and for the first time she got a sense of justice toward men by talking to the woman who was half a man. " I know that wasn't square," she said. " I know now, when I talk to you, but I didn't know then. With the school teacher I was as unfair as John May and my father were with me. Why do men and women have to fight each other? Why does the battle between them have to go on? " Kate walked up and down before Clara and swore like a man. " Oh, hell," she exclaimed, " men are such fools and I suppose women are as bad. They are both too much one thing. I fall in between. I've got my problem too, but I'm not going to talk about it. I know what I'm going to do. I'm going to find some kind of work and do it." She began to talk of the stu- pidity of men in their approach to women. " Men hate such women as myself," she said. ' They can't use us, they think. What fools ! They should watch and study us. Many of us spend our lives loving other women, but we have skill. Being part women, we know how to approach women. We are not blunder- ing and crude. Men want a certain thing from you. It is delicate and easy to kill. Love is the most sensi-

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