From Chuck, between mouthfuls:  “I guess you don’t know how good this tastes.  Camp grub’s all right, but after you’ve had a few months of it you get so you don’t believe there is such a thing as fried chicken and chocolate cake.”

“I’m glad you like it, Chuck.  Here, take this drumstick.  You ain’t eating a thing!” His fourth piece of chicken.

Down the river as far as the danger line just above the dam, with Tessie pretending fear just for the joy of having Chuck reassure her.  Then back again in the dusk, Chuck bending to the task now against the current.  And so up the hill homeward bound.  They walked very slowly, Chuck’s hand on her arm.  They were dumb with the tragic, eloquent dumbness of their kind.  If she could have spoken the words that were churning in her mind, they would have been something like this: 

“Oh, Chuck, I wish I was married to you.  I wouldn’t care if only I had you.  I wouldn’t mind babies or anything.  I’d be glad.  I want our house, with a dining-room set, and a brass bed, and a mahogany table in the parlour, and all the housework to do.  I’m scared.  I’m scared I won’t get it.  What’ll I do if I don’t?”

And he, wordlessly:  “Will you wait for me, Tessie, and keep on loving me and thinking of me?  And will you keep yourself clean in mind and body so that if I come back—­”

Aloud, she said:  “I guess you’ll get stuck on one of those French girls.  I should worry!  They say wages at the watch factory are going to be raised, workers are so scarce.  I’ll prob’ly be as rich as Angie Hatton time you get back.”

And he, miserably:  “Little old Chippewa girls are good enough for Chuck.  I ain’t counting on taking up with those Frenchies.  I don’t like their jabber, from what I know of it.  I saw some pictures of ’em, last week, a fellow in camp had who’d been over there.  Their hair is all funny, and fixed up with combs and stuff, and they look real dark like foreigners.  Nix!”

It had been reassuring enough at the time.  But that was six months ago.  Which brings us to the Tessie who sat on the back porch, evenings, surveying the sunset.  A listless, lackadaisical, brooding Tessie.  Little point to going downtown Saturday nights now.  There was no familiar, beloved figure to follow you swiftly as you turned off Elm Street, homeward bound.  If she went downtown now, she saw only those Saturday-night family groups which are familiar to every small town.  The husband, very wet as to hair and clean as to shirt, guarding the gocart outside while the woman accomplished her Saturday-night trading at Ding’s or Halpin’s.  Sometimes there were as many as half a dozen gocarts outside Halpin’s, each containing a sleeping burden, relaxed, chubby, fat-cheeked.  The waiting men smoked their pipes and conversed largely.  “Hello, Ed. Th’ woman’s inside, buyin’ the store out, I guess.”

“Tha’ so?  Mine, too.  Well, how’s everything?”

Tessie knew that presently the woman would come out, bundle laden, and that she would stow these lesser bundles in every corner left available by the more important sleeping bundle—­two yards of goods; a spool of 100, white; a banana for the baby; a new stewpan at the Five-and-Ten.