This wife thinks Mr. Marblehall’s name is Mr. Bird. She says, “I declare I told Mr. Bird to go to bed, and look at him! I don’t understand him!” All her devotion is combustible and goes up in despair. This wife tells everything she knows. Later, after she tells the neighbors, she will tell Mr. Marblehall. Cymbal-breasted, she fills the house with wifely complaints. She calls, “After I get Mr. Bird to bed, what does he do then? He lies there stretched out with his clothes on and don’t have one word to say. Know what he does?”

And she goes on, while her husband bends over the zinnias, to tell what Mr. Marblehall (or Mr. Bird) does in bed. She does tell the truth. He reads Terror Tales and Astonishing Stories. She can’t see anything to them: they scare her to death. These stories are about horrible and fantastic things happening to nude women and scientists. In one of them, when the characters open bureau drawers, they find a woman’s leg with a stocking and garter on. Mrs. Bird had to shut the magazine. “The glutinous shadows,” these stories say, “the red-eyed, muttering old crone,” “the moonlight on her thigh,” “an ancient cult of sun worshipers,” “an altar suspiciously stained . . .” Mr. Marblehall doesn’t feel as terrified as all that, but he reads on and on. He is killing time. It is richness without taste, like some holiday food. The clock gets a fruity bursting tick, to get through midnight—then leisurely, leisurely on. When time is passing it’s like a bug in his ear. And then Mr. Bird—he doesn’t even want a shade on the light, this wife moans respectably. He reads under a bulb. She can tell you how he goes straight through a stack of magazines. “He might just as well not have a family,” she always ends, unjustly, and rolls back into the house as if she had been on a little wheel all this time.