Tom’s step-mother came to the kitchen door and called. “Supper,” she cried in her peculiarly colorless voice. Her husband was a little angry and fretful. Perhaps for a long time he had been feeling very deeply the enmity of his son. “All right,” he called back, “we’ll come pretty soon. We got to get done picking up.” There was something very like a whine in his voice. “You can keep the things hot for a time,” he shouted. Tom and his father both worked with feverish haste, as though trying to outdo each other and every time Tom bent over to pick up a handful of the potatoes his head whirled and he thought he might fall. A kind of terrible pride had taken possession of him and with the whole strength of his being he was determined not to let his father—who, if ineffectual, was nevertheless sometimes very quick and accurate at tasks—get the better of him. They were picking up potatoes—that was the task before them at the moment—and the thing was to get all the potatoes picked up and in the bags before darkness came. Tom did not believe in his father and was he to let such an ineffectual man outdo him at any task, no matter how ill he might be? That was somewhat the nature of Tom’s thoughts and feelings at the moment. And then the darkness had come and the task was done. The filled sacks were set along a fence at the end of the field. It was to be a cold frosty night and now the moon was coming up and the filled sacks looked like grotesque human beings, standing there along the fence—standing with grey sagging bodies, such as Tom’s step-mother had—sagged bodies and dull eyes—standing and looking at the two men, so amazingly not in accord with each other. As the two walked across the field Tom let his father go ahead. He was afraid he might stagger and did not want his father to see there was anything the matter with him. In a way boyish pride was involved too. “He might think he could wear me out working,” Tom thought. The moon coming up was a huge yellow ball in the distance. It was larger than the house towards which they were walking and the figure of Tom’s father seemed to walk directly across the yellow face of the moon. When they got to the house the children Tom’s father had got—thrown in with the woman, as it were, when he made his second marriage—were standing about. After he left home Tom could never remember anything about the children except that they always had dirty faces and were clad in torn dirty dresses and that the youngest, a baby, wasn’t very well and was always crying fretfully.