She set the radishes on the kitchen table and went to the back door. One of her shoes dragged at the heel, and a piece of her skirt hung below her dress. "Jim!" she shouted, "your supper's ready. Come along and eat it,"--and stood there twisting her hair up. Pa come up on the porch in a minute. His feet were all mud from the fields, and the minute he stepped on Ma's clean floor she begun on him. He never said a word, but he tracked back and forth from the wash bench to the water pail, making his big black footprints every step. I should think she _would_ have been mad. But she said what she said about half a dozen times--not mad, only just whining and complaining and like she expected it. The trouble was, she said it so many times. "When you go on so, I don't care how I track up," says Pa, and dropped down to the table. He filled up his plate and doubled down over it, and Ma and I got ours. "What was you and Stacy talkin' about so long over the fence?" Ma says, after a while. "It's no concern of yours," says Pa. "But I'll tell ye, just to show ye what some women have to put up with. Keddie Bingy hit her over the head with a dish in the night. It's laid her up, and he's down to the Dew Drop Inn, filling himself full." "She's used to it by this time, I guess," Ma says. "Just as well take it all at once as die by inches, _I_ say." "Trot out your pie," says Pa. As soon as I could after we'd done the dishes, I took my book up to the room. Ma and I slept together. Pa had the bedroom off the dining-room. I had the bottom bureau drawer to myself for my clothes. I put my book in there, and I found a pencil in the machine drawer, and I put that by it. I'd wanted to make the book for a long time, to set down thoughts in, and keep track of the different things. But I didn't feel like making the book any more by the time I got it all ready. I went to laying out my underclothes in the drawer so's the lace edge would show on all of 'em that had it. Ma come to the side door and called me. "Cossy," she says, "is Luke comin' to-night?" "I s'pose so," I says. "Well, then, you go right straight over to Mis' Bingy's before he gets here," Ma says. I went down the stairs--they had a blotched carpet that I hated because it looked like raw meat and gristle. "Why don't you go yourself?" I says. "Because Mis' Bingy'll be ashamed before me," she says; "but she won't think you know about it. Take her this." I took the loaf of steam brown bread. "If Luke comes," I says, "have him walk along after me."