There were skating parties, too, where Henry and Clara, mittened hand in hand, swept over the ice in long, smooth flight, their skates ringing. Or it happened that Henry stood warming his hands at the bank and watched Clara skating away with some one else, and thought bitter things.
Somewhere, between farm work and courtship, he found time to keep up with his mechanics’ trade journals, for his interest in machinery was still strong, but he planned nothing new at this time. All his constructive imagination was diverted into another channel.
More than the loss of the Ford watches is chargeable to that laughing, rosy country girl who could not make up her mind to choose between her suitors. The winter passed and Henry, torn between two interests, had accomplished little with either.
Spring and the spring work came, plowing, harrowing, sowing, planting. From long before dawn until the deepening twilight hid the fields Henry was hard at work. Until the pressure of farm work was over he could see Clara only on Sundays. Then summer arrived, with picnics and the old custom of bringing a crowd of young people out from church for Sunday dinner at the Fords’. Now and then there were excursions up to Detroit for an outing on the lake.
By the end of that summer it was generally accepted among the Greenfield young folks that Henry Ford was “going with” Clara Bryant. But she must still have been elusive, for another winter passed with nothing definitely decided.
The third spring of Henry’s stay on the farm arrived. Henry went over his bank account, a respectable sum, made up of his earnings on the farm and a few ventures in cattle buying and selling.
“Well, father,” he said one day, “I guess I’ll be getting married.”
“All right,” his father said. “She’s a good, capable girl, I guess. I’ll give you that south forty, and you can have lumber enough from the timber lot to build a house when you get ready.”
Apparently Henry had made up his mind to settle the matter. No doubt, behind the ardor he showed Clara there was an unconscious feeling that he had spent enough time in courtship; he was impatient to get back to his other interests, to have again an orderly, smooth routine of life, with margins of time for machinery.
In April he and Clara went up to Detroit and were married. A couple of weeks later they returned to Greenfield, Clara with plans for the new house on the south forty already sketched in a tablet in her suitcase; Henry with a bundle of mechanics’ trade journals, and the responsibility of caring for a wife.