“I can remember the first time I ever heard you, Hanna.  You was standin” at the office window lookin’ out in the yards at Jerry Sims unloadin’ a shipment of oats; and little Old Cocker was standin’ on top of one of the sacks barkin’ his head off.  I—­”

“Yeh; I met Clara Sims on the street yesterday, back here for a visit, and she says to me, she says:  ’Hanna Burkhardt, you mean to tell me you never done nothing with your voice!  You oughta be ashamed.  If I was your husband, I’d spend my last cent trainin’ that contralto of yours.  You oughtn’t to let yourself go like this.  Women don’t do it no more.’  That, from the tackiest girl that ever walked this town.  I wished High Street had opened up and swallowed me.”

“Now, Hanna, you mustn’t—­”

“In all these years never so much as a dance or a car-ride as far as Middletown.  Church!  Church!  Church!  Till I could scream at the sight of it.  Not a year of my married life that ’ain’t been a lodestone on my neck!  Eight of’ ’em!  Eight!”

“I’m not sayin’ I’m not to blame, Hanna.  A woman like you naturally likes life.  I never wanted to hold you back.  If I’m tired nights and dead on my feet from twelve hours on ’em, I never wanted you to change your ways.”

“Yes; with a husband at home in bed, I’d be a fine one chasin’ around this town alone, wouldn’t I?  That’s the thanks a woman gets for bein’ self-respectin’.”

“I always kept hopin’, Hanna, I could get you to take more to the home.”

“The home—­you mean the tomb!”

“Why, with the right attention, we got as fine an old place here as there is in this part of town, Hanna.  If only you felt like giving it a few more touches that kinda would make a woman-place out of it!  It ’ain’t changed a whit from the way me and my old father run it together.  A little touch here and there, Hanna, would help to keep you occupied and happier if—­”

“I know.  I know what’s comin’.”

“The pergola I had built.  I used to think maybe you’d get to putter out there in the side-yard with it, trailin’ vines; the china-paintin’ outfit I had sent down from Cincinnati when I seen it advertised in the Up-State Gazette; a spaniel or two from Old Cocker’s new litter, barkin’ around; all them things, I used to think, would give our little place here a feelin’ that would change both of us for the better.  With a more home-like feelin’ things might have been different between us, Hanna.”

“Keepin” a menagerie of mangy spaniels ain’t my idea of livin’.”

“Aw, now, Hanna, what’s the use puttin’ it that way?  Take, for instance, it’s been a plan of mine to paint the house, with the shutters green and a band of green shingles runnin’ up under the eaves.  A little encouragement from you and we could perk the place up right smart.  All these years it’s kinda gone down—­even more than when I was a bachelor in it.  Sunk in, kinda, like them iron jardinieres I had put in the front yard for you to keep evergreen in.  It’s them little things, Hanna.  Then that—­that old idea of mine to take a little one from the orphanage—­a young ’un around the—­”