Her voice rose high on the last word. “Well!” the man kicked at something in the confused grass. “Well, quarter past twelve, I guess. Got to go over to Sydney’s, you know, well, say half past twelve, that’ll give me plenty a’ time; half past twelve.” He lifted a fork full of wizened hay and began to whistle. The woman shut the door. She turned to the window, leaned out in the hot light, and pulled to the blinds. Standing up in the sudden darkness she felt a hammering in the back of her head. Pink and green lizard-like coils of nothing swam over the china-shelf. “It’s them pink plates,” she said aloud. “No sir! it’s in my eyes!” She rested her head against the warm plaster for a minute. Her eyes blinked at the incessant colored coilings in the air. Her hanging hands seemed to pull at her shoulders. Something fused into a troublous unreality the shelves, the odors, and the drone of flies. Suddenly she became aware of waking up from a swift uncomfortable dream. A shiver of air stirred through the shutters. She shrank away from it, cold. As she stepped into the dark front hall, a hot rush of blood flushed her face like air from an oven. She sat down by the back window, let her hands drop, and woke up again from rapid dreaming. The start of this shiver shook her permanently awake. Her wide eyes looked out through the shutter-slits, on a blue-green shady spot in the door-yard. “I should like,” she said slowly, “to lay down under them trees—on a shawl—and go to sleep. But I s’pose there’s bugs dropping off the trees—oh, but it looks nice!—There’s Abel’s dinner, let me see, new potatoes, dock-greens, bacon. I wonder if folks could see me from the road? oh, it would look awful silly! I got a good mind to do it, though. I’m just beat out! I don’t see how women keep up and do their work—Abel’s got to have his dinner—I got a good mind”—— She began to be agitated. She was pressed upon by tradition, by generations of women that never had slighted their work. Their transmitted canonized habits stifled her, wrapping innumerable folds about her small wrestling will. The sleepy air about her magnified her labor. She had never heard of such a thing, her mother never would have done it! and was Abel to go over to Sidney’s on an empty stomach? But her will to get dinner seemed paralyzed. There was a small swirl and soar of dust up the road, as of a strong summer wind. The trees swished outside, the new cool air billowed up the little hall. The woman looked out again at the sheltered place in the yard; then she picked up the small rug by the door and went out.