The worst was not the always recurring physical demands, the dressing and undressing the children, preparing their food and keeping them clean.  The crushing part was the moral strain; to carry their lives always with you, incalculably different from each other and from your own.  And not only their present lives, but the insoluble question of how their present lives were affecting their future.  Never for a moment from the time they are born, to be free from the thought, “Where are they?  What are they doing?  Is that the best thing for them?” till every individual thought of your own was shattered, till your intelligence was atrophied, till your sensibilities to finer things were dulled and blunted.

Paul came back.  “About ready for Henry?” he asked.  “I’ve finished the porch.”

She put the two tightly closed kettles inside the fireless cooker and shut down the lid.  “Yes, ready for Henry,” she said.

She washed her hot, moist face in cold water, drank a glass, put on a broad-brimmed garden hat, and set out for the field back of the barn.  The kitchen had been hot, but it seemed cool compared to the heat into which they stepped from the door.  It startled Marise so that she drew back for an instant.  It seemed to her like walking through molten metal.  “Mercy! what heat!” she murmured.

“Yes, ain’t it great?” said Paul, looking off, down the field, “just what the corn needs.”

“You should say ‘isn’t,’ not ‘ain’t,’” corrected his mother.

“But it’ll be cooler soon,” said Paul.  “There’s a big thunderstorm coming up.  See, around the corner of the mountain.  See how black it is now, over the Eagle Rocks” He took her hand in his bramble-scarred little fingers, and led her along, talking proudly of his own virtue.  “I’ve moved Henry’s pen today, fresh, so’s to get him on new grass, and I put it under the shade of this butternut tree.”

They were beside the pen now, looking over the fence at the grotesque animal, twitching his gross and horribly flexible snout, as he peered up at them out of his small, intelligent eyes, sunk in fat, and almost hidden by the fleshy, hairy triangles of his ear-flaps.

“Don’t you think Henry is a very handsome pig?” asked Paul.

“I think you take very good care of him,” she answered.  “Now what is the matter about the oil you can’t put on?  Doesn’t he like it?”

“He hasn’t felt it yet.  He won’t even let me try.  Look!” The child climbed over the fence and made a quick grab at the animal, which gave an alarmed, startled grunt, wheeled with astonishing nimbleness, and darted away in a short-legged gallop.

“Look there, that’s the way he always does!” said Paul in an aggrieved tone.

Marise considered the pig for a moment.  He had turned again and was once more staring at her, his quivering, fleshy snout in the air, a singularly alert expression of attention animating his heavy-jowled countenance.