He was powerless not only against exterior circumstance but to combat
what lay with Hannah. Phebe would never set her hands in hot dishwater.
He recalled their mother, fretful and impatient. He shook his head as
if to free his mind from so many vain thoughts. She stood, hard and
unrelenting.

He tried to mutter a phrase about being here if she should return, but
it perished in the conviction of its uselessness. Calvin saw her with
green-yellow hair, a cigarette in painted lips; he heard the blurred
applause of men at the spectacle of Hannah on the stage, dressed like
the women he had seen there. Then pride stiffened him into a semblance
of her own remoteness.

"It's in you," he said; "and it will have to come out. I'm what I am
too, and that doesn't make it any easier. Kind of a fool about you.
Another girl won't do. I'll say good night."

He turned and abruptly quitted the room and all his hope.

VI

When the furniture Calvin had ordered through the catalogue at Priest's
store arrived by mountain wagon he placed it in the room beside the
kitchen that was to have been Hannah's and his. Hannah had gone three
weeks before with Phebe. This done he sat for a long while on the
portico of his house, facing the rich bottom pasturage and high verdant
range beyond. It was late afternoon and the rift was filling with a
golden haze from a sun veiled in watery late-spring vapors. An old
apple tree by the road was flushed with pink blossoms and a mocking
bird was whistling with piercing sweetness.