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 and monotony of home into the comparatively refreshing atmosphere of other people's kitchens and dooryards. There she would sit and string beans or peel apples and talk with the women of the house about chickens and babies and the sicknesses and deaths and scandals of the neighborhood, clutching eagerly at these tattered scraps of other people's lives, as they fluttered past her in the idle and haphazard talk.

Soon, however, it was no longer possible to go visiting every Sunday. The summer passed; and the early fall, warm and calm and caressing, the full blown flower of the year, faded quickly into late fall with its cold, driving rain, keen winds, and sodden depths of mud. After Thanksgiving there were very few days when the weather was such that she could take the baby out.

So she stayed in the house with him long gray day after long gray day and plodded through the dismal daily round of dish-washing, clothes-washing, cooking, sweeping, nursing, and diaper changing. Each day was exactly like the one before it. Each day the demands of the baby and the rest of the household were precisely the same. Even the cooking allowed of no variation; for now that winter was come, there were just four things in the pantry: coffee, corn meal, dried beans, and hog meat, with perhaps an occasional cabbage or squash that by some miracle had escaped the frost. From as far back as she could remember she had been accustomed to this winter scarcity and had never minded it much before. Now she found herself continually longing for something new, something different to eat, not so much from starvation of body as of spirit.

Through the winter months the sun rarely shone and for days together the rain dripped dismally down the window panes and filled the dreary little house with its monotonous murmur. From the window she could see nothing but twinkling tawny puddles, slick, tawny mud, the outbuildings gaunt and black in the rain and above and beyond them the unchanging lines of the hills.

She borrowed Hat's books and her copies of the "Farm