"Ain't you ashamed to be so messy?" she cried, picking up his trousers gingerly and hanging them on the closet door-knob, putting his muddy shoes on the floor and rapidly folding the bedspread, catching the fold in her teeth but never ceasing to talk. "All right," said Joe, his mouth full of toast. He pulled a buttery and delicious central tidbit from the slice of toast and fed it to the cat. "Cigar ashes everywhere," Temperance said. "You're just driving nails in your own coffin with that filthy weed ... nicotine ... plain poison ... look at the yellow on your fingers." "All right," said Joe. "Why don't you be a man?" said Temperance. "You're big enough, the Lord knows. Why don't you get a job? Gadding about all night." "Why don't you go do your knitting?" Joe asked, wrapping his large mouth around an entire boiled egg. "Well, I like that," said Temperance Crandall, placing her hands on her hips and glaring at the man in her best bed. A pretty figure he cut: hair down in his eyes, a two-days' growth of beard on his face, a nose that went straight for an inch or two then detoured to the right, large loose lips, big even teeth stained with tobacco, heavy biceps that were somehow flabby, shoulders of a tired coal-heaver. The great toe of his large left foot which was protruding from beneath one of her best quilts twitched excruciatingly against the second toe of the same foot. The bottom of the foot was covered with yellow calluses. "You make me nervous," Joe said. He took another cup of coffee for a bracer. "After the way I've slaved for you," said Temperance; "Done all your washing free, fixed your meals at any hour of the day or night when all you should get is breakfast. You're just a filthy brute." "All right," Joe said. "No appreciation. Never a thank you." "I didn't ask you," Joe said. He ripped the center out of another slice of toast and offered it to the cat, then slowly sucked the butter from each of his fingers. "Either you pay your board and room today or else ..." she threatened as she flaunted out of the room, slamming the door behind her. She found that for the first time in months she was dangerously near to tears, and she brushed these obvious symbols of weak, womanly emotion out of her tired eyes with angry knuckles. She just wasn't herself lately, she observed. "I ... I'm going through the change of life," she thought, "and Lydia Pinkham ain't doing me a bit of good." The thought suddenly came to her, as she slumped down beside the window unnoticing of the lush summer just beyond the screen, that there would never be any children for her. And for just a moment she let herself be sentimental and think of Timothy Halleck, of sleigh-rides through the frosty starlit nights, of Virginia reels, and box sociables, of poetry she had written as a girl, and again of Timothy Halleck, who never knew, and would never know to his dying day that Temperance Crandall sat by her front window morning and night to see him pass.