bigness, eh? Well, do you want me to try it out? What about it?"

During the first part of his brother's speech, Pete had faced him,
but in the middle he had turned his back and stood in front of one
of the clumsy windows. He looked out now at a white wall of snow,
above which shone the dazzle of the midday. He whistled very softly
to himself and sank his hands deep into the pockets of his corduroys.
He did not answer the snarling question, but his wide, quiet mouth,
exquisitely shaped, ran into a smile and a dimple, deep and narrow,
cut into his thin and ruddy cheek.

Between the woman, who went on with her work as though no one had
come into the room, and the silent smiling youth, Hugh Garth prowled
the floor like a shadow thrown by a moving light.

He was a man of forty-five, gray-haired, misshapen, heavy above the
waist and light to meanness below; a man lame in one leg and with
an ill-proportioned face, malicious, lined, lead-colored; a man who
limped and leaped about the room with a fierce energy, the while his
tongue, gifted with a rich and resonant voice, poured vitriol upon
the silence.

Suddenly the woman spoke. She turned back on the threshold of the
kitchen door through which her work had been taking her to and fro
during Garth's outbreak. Her voice was monotonous and smothered; it
had its share in her unnatural self-repression.

"Why don't you tell him to be quiet, Pete? You've been chopping wood
since daybreak to make up for what he didn't do last week, and you
only came in about ten minutes before he did. Why don't you speak