The thought of going home to his wife brought no comfort with it. They had long ago ceased to be honest with each other, Gertrude and he; their attempts to make the best of a sorry situation had in the end become a barrier which held them apart. Gertrude would not admit that she was ever tired, or lonesome, or discouraged; would find no fault with their poor little house, their scanty means, her unaccustomed duties. She never spoke of the past any more, nor of the future, lest in that there might be an implied criticism of the present; she was resolutely, unvaryingly, aggressively contented. But this contentment was too constant, too uniform, like false color on a woman's cheek. He sometimes wished she would throw pretense to the winds--would put her head on his shoulder, and sob and cry, and confess that she wished she were dead--or that she would upbraid him, reproach him, call him some of the hard names he called himself. But she was insistently cheerful; and there was nothing for him to do, in the face of this, but play an awkward second to her, ignore his aching back, his sore hands, his throbbing head, and keep a resolute silence as to all that happened to vex and humiliate and perplex and hurt him. It was not always easy; to-day he was conscious that he was walking more and more slowly as he drew near the house. How poor and forlorn it looked in this glare of light! During these last weeks his thoughts had turned often to that stately house where he had lived for nineteen years--its green, close-clipped lawn glistening under a perpetual play of water, its great beds of white and green and cardinal foliage plants, its shut-in porches, its awnings, its flowering shrubs, its vines, its heavy iron fence. He looked with bitter attentiveness at the dingy frame cottage he was approaching, noticing each homely detail--the dish-towels spread on the bushes in the back yard, the mop hanging by the door, the kerosene can under the step, the lean hen scuttling away under the currant bushes, the vegetable garden lying parched and dry along the fence. There was a small artificial mound of stones at one side of the house, with a somewhat scanty growth of portulaca springing from its top. The last occupant of the house was responsible for that adornment. Allison wondered how they had happened to leave it there so long. That mound of stones--all his hopes might have been buried under it and he could not have hated it more. It stood, somehow, for all that chafed and irritated him here--the moral, mental, and physical stuntedness of the people--their petty ambitions, petty jealousies, petty quarrels, petty virtues.