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Of course, by then it was long since dark. If it suits Melba, she will sometimes send one of my sons down with a sandwich at midday, but she never will bring my supper to the shed;
she’s stubbornly of the opinion I should quit my work as the night falls, whether I’ve got to a stopping place or not. So when I went up the path to the house, I discovered Stuband sitting with my children at the supper table. Melba is determined that he should have a wife, and I’m determined that it never will be me, but standing on the porch looking through the kitchen window to the sight of my sons happily plying their forks, and sweet, sad Horace Stuband sitting with them, neatly tipping a glass of milk to his mustache, I admit I was pierced with loneliness. There is something about a lighted room when you are standing outside it in the cold night.
    His hair has gone gray early, his whiskers gray, and his lean, pensive face just short of pleasing to the eye. He is indulgent of my children and kind with his cows, a man largely self-educated, and I believe he’s a bit in awe of me; in fact he seldom looks at me when he speaks, which I suppose is due to abject fear; all of which may very well be good qualities in a husband. And any woman might wish to console him for a sad life: years ago, his baby son drowned in the bath and his wife afterward fell into a long melancholia from which no one, least of all Stuband, could deliver her. When a second child died on the day of its birth, the poor woman began a habit of walking the fields and pastures all night and falling to sleep outdoors in the daylight, very often lying on the graves of her babies. One day she lay down in Hume Sandersen’s hay field, asleep or not, and the blades of Sandersen’s new reaping and binding machine passed over her. It always has struck me that the woman was careful not to lay herself down in her own husband’s hay field; and that Sandersen is well known as a man of cold feeling. People say he cleaned out his machine and went back to work the same day.
    But it’s marriage I mean to avoid, not poor Stuband.
    While I wiped my feet at the kitchen door I said, “Hello, boys, it’s gotten cold as hell,” which was true, the mud on the path having gone hard and glazed. Melba, standing at the stove with a pancake lifter held up like a scepter, clicked her teeth in irritation. She objects to my cursing, on the grounds that women should defend the purity of children’s minds. It’s my argument that a child’s happiness and well-being decreases in direct proportion to the degree of his civilization.
    â€œSnow, Ma?” This from Oscar and Jules both at once, raising their faces to me hopefully.
    We are always more likely to get rain in this quarter of the world than snow, and I have seen winters pass here with no more than a brief flurry in January, but Stuband, who is as childish in that way as any of my sons, gave back the boys’ eagerness. “I’ve seen it snow this late in the year,” he said. “Look here, boys, I’ve seen it snow in May. In ninety-two, we were skating on the sloughs and driving wagons out on the bosom of the river, it was that froze.”
    I placed myself on the bit of bench between the twins and lifted a finger of mashed potatoes from Lewis’s plate. “I believe you’ve missed the question, Stuband,” I said. “The boys want to know if there’s snow in this particular bit of cold weather, and since the sky has now gone clear as a windowpane, I should think the likeliest answer is No.”
    Stuband is used to my glibness, I suppose, or might have pitched me a crestfallen look. It was Melba, deliberately serving the boys’ coconut hermits ahead of my cold supper, who rattled the plate warningly with the edge of her spatula.
    I said to the boys, “In any case, if you’re yearning for snow, you should yearn for it on a day of the week when it