“Then I said she was mighty glad to give up the job she had at the restaurant to marry me. She said I asked her to get married, that she didn’t ask me. Then I told her that, of course, she didn’t ask me, but she gave me a mighty good chance, and that I believed she just got that red waist and fixed up her hair the way she did to ketch me, and when I spoke to her about marryin’ it didn’t take her very long to throw up her job, and take me so she could get supported without doin’ anything. Then she said that if she spent any money to get that red waist to ketch me she was throwin’ it away, and that if I thought she ever worked for anyone else as hard as she did for me and my brat that I was mistaken, and it didn’t make any difference what she done, I never gave her any thanks or did anything for her. If I ever had any time I spent it with them drunken loafers and politicians and never went anywhere with her; that she wa’n’t no better’n a slave, and what was she doin’ it all for; pretty soon she’d be old long before her time. Her looks was all gone now, and she hadn’t even had a new dress for over a year. I told her that I didn’t know what she wanted of looks, she never was a prize beauty and ‘twa’n’t very like anybody’d ever be fool enough to marry her again, if anything happened to me. And she said if she ever got rid of me there wouldn’t be much danger of her marryin’ anyone else, she had men enough to last as long as she lived; that all they ever thought of was what they could get to eat and drink, that I’d made more fuss over that miser’ble beefsteak than anyone would over their soul, and she didn’t see why she ever stood it from me, and she was just as good as I ever was and knew just as much, and worked a good deal harder, and didn’t run ‘round nights and get drunk and spend all the money with a lot of loafers, and be in debt all the time and have the collector runnin’ after me. I told her I had just about enough of that kind of talk, and wouldn’t stand no more of it from her; it was bad enough for her to burn up the beefsteak and spoil it without blackguardin’ me and callin’ me names; she was mighty glad to get the clothes and the grub I bought her and to live in my house and have me work hard every day in the cold to get money while she just stayed to home and played with the kid, and if she said another word to me I’d smash her face. Then she said, ‘Yes, you miserable wife-beater, you kicked me once, didn’t you, but you needn’ think you can kick me or lay hands on me again. I ain’t afraid of you nor any of your low-lived drunken crew!’ Then she kind of reached back to the mantel and took hold of a plaster Paris lady I’d bought of a peddler, just as if she was goin’ to throw it at me, same as she throwed that dish once before. I seen what she was doin’ and I grabbed her arm and said, ‘You damned bitch, don’t try that on me’; and I gave her a kind of shove over toward a chair and she missed the chair and fell on the floor.