They were in shirt sleeves; smoking, chewing, spitting incessantly;
lowering their voices for a moment so that she did not hear what they
said and afterward giggling hoarsely; using over and over the canonical
phrases: "Three to dole," "I raise you a finif," "Come on now, ante up;
what do you think this is, a pink tea?" The cigar-smoke was acrid and
pervasive. The firmness with which the men mouthed their cigars made the
lower part of their faces expressionless, heavy, unappealing. They were
like politicians cynically dividing appointments.

How could they understand her world?

Did that faint and delicate world exist? Was she a fool? She doubted her
world, doubted herself, and was sick in the acid, smoke-stained air.

She slipped back into brooding upon the habituality of the house.

Kennicott was as fixed in routine as an isolated old man. At first
he had amorously deceived himself into liking her experiments with
food--the one medium in which she could express imagination--but now
he wanted only his round of favorite dishes: steak, roast beef, boiled
pig's-feet, oatmeal, baked apples. Because at some more flexible period
he had advanced from oranges to grape-fruit he considered himself an
epicure.

During their first autumn she had smiled over his affection for his
hunting-coat, but now that the leather had come unstitched in dribbles
of pale yellow thread, and tatters of canvas, smeared with dirt of the
fields and grease from gun-cleaning, hung in a border of rags, she hated
the thing.