At the time of the planting of the corn Ellen knew that a change had come to Jasper; she knew it as she mended the fence behind the hen coops or as she hoed at the garden, as she sewed in the cabin or cooked the food; her days were full of the knowledge and all her acts went with it. Hester had had her way with Jasper. Once Nannie had said that she had seen Hester in the crab thicket at dusk, and again Ellen caught a glimpse of her there by the light of a newly risen moon. Jasper came from the field tired and sullen and if the children angered him he sent them early to bed. Often he went away after dark to return toward midnight, dull and silent, or he would cry out strange words in his sleep, lewd words and angered curses spoken out of some torment. He went often to the river with a man named Clark and there was another woman named Lena among them. When the knowledge had settled upon her, Ellen felt a curious hardness in her body, as if her life had grown solid and stiff within her flesh. She wondered why she cared who had Jasper, turning this thought over and over as she worked. When she thought of Hester in the crab thicket she wanted to go there and take her by the throat and choke the life back into her body until it turned hard and stiff like her own, until it hardened for death at last. At night, lying alone in her bed, she would want to go to the thicket with a knife in her hand, and her mind would keep remembering the knife in the kitchen beside the cups on the shelf. Joe Phillips had sharpened the knife at the grindstone. Then she would wonder why she cared who had Jasper and she would know that she would never so fall from her pride as to quarrel with Hester Shuck or to spy on the thicket or the river.