Her husband's collar so intimately there on the dresser top. His shirt, awaiting studs, spread out on the bed--their bed. His suspenders straddling the chair back. The ordering of the evening beefsteak lurking back in her consciousness. He liked sirloin, stabbing it vertically (he had a way of holding his fork upright between first and third fingers) when he carved, and cutting it skillfully away from the T bone. After the first week, he liked the bone, too, gnawing it, not mussily, but with his broad white teeth predatory and his temples working. She was a veritable bundle of these petty accumulated concepts, harrowed to their quick. She knew that presently he would enter the room in his trousers and undershirt, which he did upon the very minute, the little purple circle, like a stamp mark on the rind of a bacon, showing just beneath his Adam's apple, the shag of his yellow hair wetly curly from dousing, like a spaniel's. "Certainly fine water pressure we have in the bathroom, Lilly. I am going to bring home some tubing from the store and attach a spray." She looked out of the window over the languid little patch of front lawn, more gray than green from the scourge of heat. Insect life hung midair like a curtain of buzzings. Directly opposite the dusty, unmade street, she could see her parents' home standing unprotected except for one sapling maple, the sun already pressing against the drawn shades. There was a slight breeze through this morning that turned the sapling leaves and even lifted the little twist of tendril at the nape of Lilly's neck. It was just that spot, while tugging at his collar, that Albert Penny stooped to kiss. "Little wife," he said. "Ugh!" she felt. "Poor little wife, it was ninety-four and a half at six-thirty-eight this morning." His capacity for accuracy could madden her. He computed life in the minutiae of fractions, reckoning in terms of the halfpenny, the half minute, the half degree. She sat now, laying pleats in the pink negligee where it flowed over her knees, a half smile forced out on her lips. "Well, Albert," she said, wanting to keep her voice lifted, "I guess we're in it, aren't we? Up to our necks." "In what?" "Marriage." Leaning to the mirror for the adjustment of his collar button, he paused, regarding her reflection. "Well now, what an idea! Of course we're in it, and the wonder to me is how we ever stayed out so long." She reached up to yawn, her long white arms stretched above her head. "Oh dear! oh dear! oh dear!" she said in what might have been the key of anything. "Poor little girl!" he said. "I wish I could make it cooler for you." "It isn't that." "What then is bothering your little head?" "I--oh, I don't know. I guess it's just the reaction after the excitement of the wedding." He came back to kiss the same tendril at the nape of her neck. "I'm glad it's over, too. Feels mighty good to settle down." "'Settle down.' Somehow I hate that expression."