The tall woman laughed. “I can see you coming home at night from the fields,” she said. “It might be to that white house there with the windmill. You would be a big man and would have dust in your red hair and perhaps a red beard growing on your chin. And a woman with a baby in her arms would come out of the kitchen door to stand leaning on the fence waiting for you. When you came up she would put her arm around your neck and kiss you on the lips. The beard would tickle her cheek. Your mouth is so big.” A strange new feeling shot through Beaut. He wondered why she had said that, and wanted to take hold of her hand and kiss her then and there. He got up and looked at the sun going down behind the hill far away at the other end of the valley. “We’d better be getting along back,” he said. The woman remained seated on the log. “Sit down,” she said, “I’ll tell you something--something it’s good for you to hear. You’re so big and red you tempt a girl to bother you. First, though, you tell me why you go along the street looking into the gutter when I stand in the stairway in the evening.” Beaut sat down again upon the log, and thought of what the black-haired boy had told him of her. “Then it was true--what he said about you?” he asked. “No! No!” she cried, jumping up in her turn and beginning to pin on her hat. “Let’s be going.” Beaut sat stolidly on the log. “What’s the use bothering each other,” he said. “Let’s sit here until the sun goes down. We can get home before dark.” They sat down and she began talking, boasting of herself as he had boasted of his father. “I’m too old for that boy,” she said; “I’m older than you by a good many years. I know what boys talk about and what they say about women. I do pretty well. I don’t have anyone to talk to except father, and he sits all evening reading a paper and going to sleep in his chair. If I let boys come and sit with me in the evening or stand talking with me in the stairway it’s because I’m lonesome. There isn’t a man in town I’d marry--not one.” The speech sounded discordant and harsh to Beaut. He wished his father were there rubbing his hands together and muttering rather than this pale woman who stirred him up and then talked harshly like the women at the back doors in Coal Creek. He thought again, as he had thought before, that he preferred the black-faced miners, drunk and silent, to their pale, talkative wives. On an impulse he told her that, saying it crudely, so that it hurt. Their companionship was spoiled. They got up and began to climb the hill, going toward home. Again she put her hand to her side, and again he wished to put his hand at her back and push her up the hill. Instead he walked beside her in silence, again hating the town.