Jasper would laugh in his sleep, choking on his lewd words, drowned in his lewd dream, or he would blurt of Hester Shuck’s bottle. All day Ellen would move from labour to labour, the garden, the kitchen, the cow, the milk house, her feet feeling the tug of the path toward the Shuck cabin and her throat aching with the words that would label Hester Shuck as a foul and bestial creature. The turmoil in her mind grew until she turned about in a maze, scarcely knowing whether the season were spring or fall, scarcely knowing one day from another. Since May she had known herself to be carrying another child, but she told Jasper nothing of this. She baked Jasper’s favourite cake but he ate it without noticing what he had. Then she dressed Nannie in her bright new dress and told her to take her father for a walk on Sunday, but he lay under the locust tree and slept. She wondered why she cared where Jasper went and why she contrived to try to bring him back, surprised at each plan she made, but the plans would arise suddenly out of her listless thought. She could not find that she cared whether he came or went and her days were full of her tasks as the summer came; he might go, what to her did it matter? She had saved twenty-two dollars for the sewing machine, and she thought that the agent would leave it for her if she made so large a payment as that. He would come later and collect the rest, as she would contrive to have it, and she would have the machine in the meanwhile, and her mind turned often toward it until she could clearly see the turning wheels and the throbbing needle carrying the thread, but through the thought of the machine lay the curious hardness felt in her body, a stiffness beneath her breath. Or sewing with her fingers, letting her mind dwell pleasantly upon the speed the machine would have and feeling the wheel at her fingertips and the anticipated flow of the treadle under her foot, she would come upon a swift image of her hand reaching for the knife that lay beside the cups, sharp now as a dagger since Joe Phillips had tooled it at the grindstone.