He was sitting reading the evening paper and he bent it backward to look at her.

“Always the martyr, Rose,” he said, and she knew he had seen through her trick.

“Is that the only word you know!” she cried. “Martyr, martyr.”

“Wife and martyr,” he said, without interest. It was an old joke of his.

They were Mr. and Mrs. Derdon, and they had been married to each other for twenty-seven years. He was the senior by five years. They slept in the back bedroom upstairs, and their window looked over their little walled garden, not much different from the other gardens in the terrace, and beyond that over a strip, gray and corrugated, of garage roofs. Beyond the garage yard and off to one side of it were the velvety, emerald green courts of a private tennis club, that were shaded on their most distant side by a dense, irregularly placed wall of strong old trees.

Mr. and Mrs. Derdon shared a double bed made of brass and fitted with a long bolster and a heavy patchwork quilt. The quilt she had made during her school days. The foot of their bed was to the window, which had a cream-colored pull-down blind and white net curtains.

Hubert went to bed about ten every night, she a little later. She got up at seven, he at seven-thirty. On Sundays she got up and went to eight o’clock Mass, and came back and got the breakfast in time for him to be at the chapel door by ten.

In bed he wore flannel pajamas, and she wore a flannel nightgown. Their bodies were about the same length, lying down. Neither of them snored, but they both breathed heavily. He huddled himself up into his shoulders and slept on his right side, with his face to the wall. She slept on her back. He slept calmly. She slept desperately, looking as exhausted in sleep as though she had been very sick. Sometimes he would turn the blankets down off him in the night. Then her neck and shoulders would be uncovered, and she would wake up stiff in the morning and frown painfully, first thing. At bedtime she let her hair down into a loose plait. In the morning she pinned it up into its bun without ever looking in the mirror.

She liked to see the changing daytime sky. The night sky had less interest for her; she wanted no mystery, no blackness, no stars, no soft darkness, no curtains, no comfort, no promise of rest. The daytime sky, impassive gray, impassive blue, had won her. That endless offhand gaze occupied her, and when she raised her eyes and met it, it was in contention, returning stare for stare. She felt she was proud.