“Now I didn’t want them to know we was fightin’, and I seen that she was so mad she couldn’t control herself and didn’t care who heard or what happened. The neighbors had come in once before, but they’d got pretty well used to our fights. But I thought it had gone about far enough and the steak couldn’t be helped, so I went back into the settin’ room and picked up the paper. In a few minutes she come in and says, ‘Well, come, your old steak’s ready, you’ve made so much fuss about it you’d better come and eat it and let it shut your mouth.’ And she went on into the bedroom and got the kid. I drew up my chair and set down to the table. She put the kid into the high chair and then she set down on the other side. I cut up the steak and give each of ‘em a piece with some fried potatoes, then we had some bread and butter and some tea. She poured out the tea and handed me a cup. There wa’n’t any milk for the tea and I asked her why that was. She told me she didn’t have any money to buy tickets, and if I wanted milk I’d better leave some money to buy tickets instead of spending it all for whiskey. I didn’t make much of any answer to this but commenced eatin’ my steak. Besides bein’ boiled it was cooked almost to a crisp, and you couldn’t hardly tell whether it was beefsteak or what it was; all the taste was out of it and gone into the water and the steam. I put some of the gravy on the potatoes; this was better’n the steak and tasted more like beef. I et up the potatoes and the steak and a few pieces of bread and butter, and cut up the kid’s steak and showed him how to hold his knife so’s to eat without cuttin’ himself, and I didn’t say a word to her and she didn’t say a word to me. Of course, I could see by the way she looked that she was mad, and I presume she could see that I was, too; and probably both of us thought it was just as well not to say anything, ‘specially so long as the kid was there. All the time I was eatin’ I kept thinkin’ about the way she’d poured the water into the steak and spoilt it, and how I’d been lookin’ forward to it ever since I bought it on Thirty-fifth Street, and the more I thought of it the madder I got. If it had been the first time I don’t think I’d have minded it near so much, but I’d told her about it ev’ry time I brought home a steak, and it seemed as if always we had a row pretty near as big as this, and every time she managed to pour the water into it and spoil it in spite of all that I could do. And this time it had been just the same thing again. Anyone would have been mad if they’d been in my place; don’t you think so yourself?