He was seeing a bent, gaunt old laborer in jeans, smoking a pipe on the doorsill; he was seeing, in the kitchen-dining-room-sitting-room-parlor, disclosed by the open door, a stout, aggressive-looking laborer's wife in faded calico, doing the few thick china dishes in dented dishpan on rickety old table.
"Yes," said he, with not a trace of sincerity in his ashamed, constrained voice, "I wish so, too." She understood; she felt sorry for him, proud of herself.

Was it not fine and noble of her thus to condescend?
"But there are your brothers and sisters," she went graciously on.

"I must meet them some time." "Yes, some time," said he, laboriously pumping a thin, watery pretense of enthusiasm into his voice.
She had done her duty by his dreadful, impossible family.

She passed glibly to other subjects.

He was glad she had had the ladylike tact not to look at him during the episode; he wouldn't have liked any human being to see the look he knew his face was wearing.
In the press of agitating events, both forgot the incident--for the time..