It was the same everywhere with a slight difference, the slow fire of the afternoon in the snug room. At Baker’s there were no infants, but three grown girls came in with embroidery pieces and sat stitching. “Shadow-work” they called what they did. At Sayre’s there was an unborn child. Mr. Fishman would come into his house in the mid-afternoon and fumble awhile at a closet with the faint muffled sound of a bottle and a glass. Lee Cummings had counted on his fingers and marked the foaling of an animal on the calendar that hung beside the mantel. This was the world. She knew no surprise of it and no surprise for herself as being there. Red clover and orchard grass were together in the meadows, growing higher every week. Faint lines of green were crisscrossing the cornfields, going two ways in orderly processions, opening out and closing together as she went by. The men called their sayings from about the shop and the store or the women called from doorways, and she heard the noises a wagon made as it went empty along the road, the noise of wood beating on wood, of wood on iron, of iron on iron, of iron on stone, horse-iron on stone. The voices of the little children came to her as she sat to eat her food at noon under the greatest beech tree, as they were bent to their play at making farms and highroads through the moist earth, and their words, “Queen ... Mollie ... Shirley Bond ... the silo ... Betty Hawthorne ... the cut-up-corn machine,” would arise to speech in their disputes or blend again to the flow of some remote water in their purring acquiescences and contents. “Betty Hawthorne has got a calf,” one said. “Is it Betty Hawthorne’s calf, or Caleb Burns’s calf?” “It’s both of um’s together.” “Betty Hawthorne has got a silver cup, two cups. I saw Betty Hawthorne’s cups last week.” “I touched Betty Hawthorne myself.” “Where’d you touch ’er?” “I touched her on the tit. Where would I be a-touchen ’er?” “Did you ever milk Betty Hawthorne?” “Milk? A girl couldn’t milk Betty Hawthorne, or Mollie either. She gives a whole water-bucket full. Your wrist would in a manner break off in the bones. It takes Shirley Bond to milk.” * * * * *