All her future life, this same red-labeled bread-crate in front of the bakery, this same thimble-shaped crack in the sidewalk a quarter of a block beyond Stowbody’s granite hitching-post——­

She silently handed her purchases to the silent Oscarina.  She sat on the porch, rocking, fanning, twitchy with Hugh’s whining.

Kennicott came home, grumbled, “What the devil is the kid yapping about?”

“I guess you can stand it ten minutes if I can stand it all day!”

He came to supper in his shirt sleeves, his vest partly open, revealing discolored suspenders.

“Why don’t you put on your nice Palm Beach suit, and take off that hideous vest?” she complained.

“Too much trouble.  Too hot to go up-stairs.”

She realized that for perhaps a year she had not definitely looked at her husband.  She regarded his table-manners.  He violently chased fragments of fish about his plate with a knife and licked the knife after gobbling them.  She was slightly sick.  She asserted, “I’m ridiculous.  What do these things matter!  Don’t be so simple!” But she knew that to her they did matter, these solecisms and mixed tenses of the table.

She realized that they found little to say; that, incredibly, they were like the talked-out couples whom she had pitied at restaurants.

Bresnahan would have spouted in a lively, exciting, unreliable manner.

She realized that Kennicott’s clothes were seldom pressed.  His coat was wrinkled; his trousers would flap at the knees when he arose.  His shoes were unblacked, and they were of an elderly shapelessness.  He refused to wear soft hats; cleaved to a hard derby, as a symbol of virility and prosperity; and sometimes he forgot to take it off in the house.  She peeped at his cuffs.  They were frayed in prickles of starched linen.  She had turned them once; she clipped them every week; but when she had begged him to throw the shirt away, last Sunday morning at the crisis of the weekly bath, he had uneasily protested, “Oh, it’ll wear quite a while yet.”

He was shaved (by himself or more socially by Del Snafflin) only three times a week.  This morning had not been one of the three times.

Yet he was vain of his new turn-down collars and sleek ties; he often spoke of the “sloppy dressing” of Dr. McGanum; and he laughed at old men who wore detachable cuffs or Gladstone collars.

Carol did not care much for the creamed codfish that evening.

She noted that his nails were jagged and ill-shaped from his habit of cutting them with a pocket-knife and despising a nail-file as effeminate and urban.  That they were invariably clean, that his were the scoured fingers of the surgeon, made his stubborn untidiness the more jarring.  They were wise hands, kind hands, but they were not the hands of love.

She remembered him in the days of courtship.  He had tried to please her, then, had touched her by sheepishly wearing a colored band on his straw hat.  Was it possible that those days of fumbling for each other were gone so completely?  He had read books, to impress her; had said (she recalled it ironically) that she was to point out his every fault; had insisted once, as they sat in the secret place beneath the walls of Fort Snelling——­