He left his home the day after New Year's wearing a mackinaw and sheepskin mittens and without a hat. He would wear this same costume in Florida, despite his wife Cleota's reminders over the past five days that he must take some cool clothes with him. But he was too busy to hear what she was saying. So they parted when she was in an impatient humor. When he was bent over behind the wheel of the station wagon, feeling in his trouser cuffs for the ignition key which he had dropped a moment before, she came out of the house with an enormous Rumanian shawl over her head, which she had bought in that country during one of their trips abroad, and handed him a clean handkerchief through the window. Finding the key under his shoe, he started the engine, and while it warmed up he turned to her standing there in the dripping fog, and said, ``Defrost the refrigerator.''

He saw the surprise in her face, and laughed as though it were the funniest expression he had ever seen. He kept on laughing until she started laughing with him. He had a deep voice which was full of good food she had cooked, and good humor; an explosive laugh which always carried everything before it. He would settle himself into his seat to laugh. Whenever he laughed it was all he was doing. And she was made to fall in love with him again there in the rutted dirt driveway standing in the cold fog, mad as she was at his going away when he really didn't have to, mad at their both got older in a life that seemed to have taken no more than a week to go by. She was forty-nine at this time, a lanky woman of breeding with an austere, narrow face which had the distinction of a steeple or some architecture that had been designed long ago for a stubborn sort of prayer. Her eyebrows were definite and heavy and formed two lines moving upward toward a high forehead and a great head of brown hair that fell to her shoulders. There was an air of blindness in her gray eyes, the startled horse look that ultimately comes to some women who are born at the end of an ancestral line long since divorced from money-making and which, besides, has kept its estate intact. She was personally sloppy, and when she had colds would blow her nose in the same handkerchief all day and keep it, soaking wet, dangling from her waist, and when she gardened she would eat dinner with dirt on her calves. But just when she seemed to have sunk into some depravity of peasanthood she would disappear and come down bathed, brushed, and taking breaths of air, and even with her broken nails her hands would come to rest on a table or a leaf with a thoughtless delicacy, a grace of history, so to speak, and for an instant one saw how ferociously proud she was and adamant on certain questions of personal value. She even spoke differently when she was clean, and she was clean now for his departure and her voice clear and rather sharp.