The coffee was ready.  The women glided sedately forward to the table.  They filled their cups, took a lump of sugar in their mouths and began to sip their boiling coffee, silently and decently, the wives of mechanics first, the scrub-women last.  But the wife did not see what was going on.  Remorse made her quite beside herself.  She had a vision.  She sat at night out in a freshly ploughed field.  Round about her sat great birds with mighty wings and pointed beaks.  They were gray, scarcely perceptible against the gray ground, but they held watch over her.  They were passing sentence upon her.  Suddenly they flew up and sank down over her head.  She saw their sharp claws, their pointed beaks, their beating wings coming nearer and nearer.  It was like a deadly rain of steel.  She bent her head and knew that she must die.  But when they came near, quite near to her, she had to look up.  Then she saw that the gray birds were all these old women.

One of them began to speak.  She knew what was proper, what was fitting in a house of mourning.  They had now been silent long enough.  But the wife started up as from a blow.  What did the woman mean to say?  “You, Matts Wik’s wife, Anna Wik, confess!  You have lied long enough before God and before us.  We are your judges.  We will judge you and rend you to pieces.”

No, the woman began to speak of husbands.  And the others chimed in, as the occasion demanded.  What was said was not in the husbands’ praise.  All the evil husbands had done was dragged forward.  It was as consolation for a deserted wife.

Injury was heaped upon injury.  Strange beings these husbands!  They beat us, they drink up our money, they pawn our furniture.  Why on earth had Our Lord created them?

The tongues became like dragons’ fangs; they spat venom, they spouted fire.  Each one added her word.  Anecdotes were piled upon anecdotes.  A wife fled from her home before a drunken husband.  Wives slaved for idle husbands.  Wives were deserted for other women.  The tongues whistled like whip lashes.  The misery of homes was laid bare.  Long litanies were read.  From the tyranny of the husband deliver us, good Lord!

Illness and poverty, the children’s death, the winter’s cold, trouble with the old people, everything was the husband’s fault.  The slaves hissed at their masters.  They turned their stings against them, before whose feet they crept.

The deserted wife felt how it cut and stabbed in her ears.  She dared to defend the incorrigible ones.  “My husband,” she said, “is good.”  The women started up, hissed and snorted.  “He has run away.  He is no better than anybody else.  He, who is an old man, ought to know better than to run away from wife and child.  Can you believe that he is better than the others?”

The wife trembled; she felt as if she was being dragged through prickly bramble-bushes.  Her husband considered a sinner!  She flushed with shame, wished to speak, but was silent.  She was afraid; she had not the power.  But why did God keep silent?  Why did God let such things be?