His adolescence, his emotions, were no different from those of any young man of his age and character. If his ultimate ambitions followed another trajectory, he postponed the evidence of it. Hugo was in love with Anna Blake, the girl who had attracted him when he was six. The residents of Indian Creek knew it. Her family received his calls with the winking tolerance which the middle class grants to young passion. And she was warm and tender and flirtatious and shy according to the policies that she had learned from custom.

The active part of Hugo did not doubt that he would marry her after he had graduated from the college in Indian Creek, that they would settle somewhere near by, and that they would raise a number of children. His subconscious thoughts made reservations that he, in moments when he was intimate with himself, would admit frankly. It made him a little ashamed of himself to see that on one night he would sit with Anna and kiss her ardently until his body ached, and on another he would deliberately plan to desert her. His idealism at that time was very great and untried and it did not occur to him that all men are so deliberately calculating in the love they disguise as absolute.

Anna had grown into a very attractive woman. Her figure was rounded and tall. Her hair was darker than the waxy curls of her childhood, and a vital gleam had come into it. Her eyes were still as blue and her voice, shorn of its faltering youngness, was sweet and clear. She was undoubtedly the prettiest girl in high school and the logical sweet-heart for Hugo Danner. A flower ready to be plucked, at eighteen.

When Hugo reached his senior year, that readiness became almost an impatience. Girls married at an early age in Indian Creek. She looked down the corridor of time during which he would be in college, she felt the pressure of his still slumbering passion, and she sensed his superiority over most of the town boys. Only a very narrow critic would call her resultant tactics dishonourable. They were too intensely human and too clearly born of social and biological necessity.

She had let him kiss her when they were sixteen. And afterwards, before she went to sleep, she sighed rapturously at the memory of his warm, firm lips, his strong, rough arms. Hugo had gone home through the dizzily spinning dusk, through the wind-strummed trees and the fragrant fields, his breath deep in his chest, his eyes hot and somewhat understanding.