She had not mentioned him before, except casually, since the night they had talked in her room. "What does he say?" Hertha asked. They were sitting out on the stoop, for the evening was a warm one. "Oh, nothing very much," Mrs. Pickens answered, "chiefly joking about the dreadful food he gets and how glad he will be to come home." "Men do care a lot about what they have to eat." "They surely do. I suppose it's partly because after their work they're hungry, really hungry, and food tastes good to them. I work, too, but when I've been over this house, from top to bottom, and seen that Mary doesn't spoil everything she puts her hand to, I haven't the least desire for my dinner." "You take it all very hard," Hertha said. "Do I? Well, I suspect that's because I am incompetent, like Mary, and it makes me nervous and doubly anxious over everything." "That's the way I feel in class." Mrs. Pickens glanced anxiously at the young girl noting how fragile-looking she had grown in the past weeks. "You seemed so well when you came here," she said, "and now you are certainly thin. I hope it isn't my incompetence that has brought the change about." "You know it isn't," the girl answered. There was a pleasant silence in which neither felt the necessity of speech and then out of the fast approaching darkness Hertha asked: "Have you spent the most of your life in New York?" "No, I only came here after my marriage. My life has been an ordinary one. A quiet girlhood, fifteen years of perfect married life, and now, a common struggle to keep from being despondent and to make both ends meet. The best for me is done." "Fifteen years wasn't very long, was it?" "One way it seems about fifteen minutes but another way it seems an eternity. It was all my life--I'm only existing now. And do you know," speaking in a low voice into the twilight, "I've never said this before, hardly to myself, but I came very near not marrying my husband. I was young and not romantically in love. He was ten years older and that seemed frightening. If it had not been for my mother, who appreciated him better than I, I doubt if I would have accepted him. Afterward, when we had lived together for months and I had given my whole heart to him, I used to waken in the night and shake with horror at the thought of what I might have lost. When I realized what we would have missed without our life together, I would grow chill with a perfectly unreasoning fear. "I asked him once if he had ever questioned that he wanted me," Mrs. Pickens went on, "and he laughed and said not since the first May morning when I came to church in a blue gown and sat across the aisle from him. He surely knew his mind, but that's often the difference between men and women!" Another silence and then Mrs. Pickens went within.