“Now I despise for people to be so technical round me, and besides, of all the words in the English language I most abhor those words 'for instance'; but I kept my temper even if I was boiling inside and I said: 'It's to put things in that you haven't any other place to put them in.' Which was ungrammatical, I admit, but the best I could do under the prevalent conditions. And then he looked at me until I could have screamed, and he said: 'Maude, where did you get that damned thing?' And I said it wasn't a damned thing but a perfectly good box made out of wood and painted green and everything; and that I'd got it at an auction sale for a dollar and that I considered it a real bargain. I didn't feel called on to tell him about the two baskets down in the coal cellar just yet. So I didn't mention them; and anyhow, heaven knows I was sick and tired of the whole subject and ready to drop it, but he kept on looking at it and sniffing and asking questions. Some people have no idea how a great strong brute of a man can nag a weak defenseless woman to desperation when he deliberately sets out to do it. “Finally I said: 'Well, even if you don't like the box I think it's a perfectly splendid box, and look what a good strong lock it has on it--surely that's worth something.' And he said: 'Well, let's see about that--where's the key?' And, my dear, then it dawned on me that I didn't have any key! “Well, a person can stand just so much and no more. I'm a patient long-suffering woman and I've always been told that I had a wonderful disposition, but there are limits. And when he burst out laughing and wouldn't stop laughing but kept right on and laughed and laughed and leaned up against something and laughed some more until you could have heard him in the next block--why then, all of a sudden something seemed to give way inside of me and I burst out crying--I couldn't hold in another second--and I told him that I'd never speak to him again the longest day he lived and that he could go to Halifax or some other place beginning with the same initial and take the old box with him for all I cared; and just as I burst out of the room I heard him say: 'No, madam, when I married you I agreed to support you, but I didn't engage to take care of any air-tight, burglar-proof, pea-green box the size of a circus cage!' And I suppose he thought that was being funny, too. A perverted sense of humor is an awful cross to bear--in a husband!