y
he heard his name called, pronounced as if it were spelled
"Clod." His wife came up the stairs and looked out at him. He lay
motionless, with his eyes closed. She went away. When all was
quiet again he looked off at the still country, and the moon in
the dark indigo sky. His revelation still possessed him, making
his whole body sensitive, like a tightly strung bow. In the
morning he had forgotten, or was ashamed of what had seemed so
true and so entirely his own the night before. He agreed, for the
most part, that it was better not to think about such things, and
when he could he avoided thinking.

III

After the heavy work of harvest was over, Mrs. Wheeler often
persuaded her husband, when he was starting off in his buckboard,
to take her as far as Claude's new house. She was glad Enid
didn't keep her parlour dark, as Mrs. Royce kept hers. The doors
and windows were always open, the vines and the long petunias in
the window-boxes waved in the breeze, and the rooms were full of
sunlight and in perfect order. Enid wore white dresses about her
work, and white shoes and stockings. She managed a house easily
and systematically. On Monday morning Claude turned the washing
machine before he went to work, and by nine o'clock the clothes
were on the line. Enid liked to iron, and Claude had never before
in his life worn so many clean shirts, or worn them with such
satisfaction. She told him he need not economize in working
shirts; it was as easy to iron six as three.

Although within a few months Enid's car travelled more than two
thousand miles for the Prohibition cause, it could not be said
that she neglected her house for reform. Whether she neglected
her husband depended upon one's conception of what was his due.
When Mrs. Wheeler saw how well their little establishment was
conducted, how cheerful and attractive Enid looked when one
happened to drop in there, she wondered that Claude was not
happy. And Claude himself wondered. If his marriage disappointed
him in some respects, he ought to be a man, he told himself, and
make the best of what was good in it. If his wife didn't love
him, it was because love meant one thing to him and quite another
thing to her. She was proud of him, was glad to see him when he
came in from the fields, and was solicitous for his comfort.
Everything about a man's embrace was distasteful to Enid;
something inflicted upon women, like the pain of childbirth,--
for Eve's transgression, p