You can’t change a man, no-ways. By the time his mammy turns him loose and he takes up with some innocent woman and marries her, he’s what he is. If it’s his nature to set by the hearthfire and scratch hisself, you just as good to let him set and scratch. If it’s his nature, like Will Dover, my man, to go to the garage in his Sunday clothes and lay down under some backwoods Cracker’s old greasy Ford and tinker with it, you just as good to let him lay and tinker. And if it’s his nature, like Uncle Benny, to prowl; if it’s his nature to cut the fool; why, it’s interfering in the ways of Providence even to stop to quarrel with him about it. Some women is born knowing that. Sometimes a woman, like the Old Hen (Uncle Benny’s wife, poor soul!), has to quarrel a lifetime before she learns it. Then when it does come to her, she’s like a cow has tried to jump a high fence and has got hung up on it—she’s hornswoggled.

The Old Hen’s a mighty fine woman—one of the finest I know. She looks just the way she did when she married Uncle Benny Mathers thirty years ago, except her hair has turned gray, like the feathers on an Irish Gray game hen. She’s plump and pretty and kind of pale from thirty years’ fretting about Uncle Benny. She has a disposition, by nature, as sweet as new cane syrup. When she settled down for a lifetime’s quarrelling at him, it was for the same reason syrup sours—the heat had just been put to her too long.

I can’t remember a time when the Old Hen wasn’t quarrelling at Uncle Benny. It begun a week after they was married. He went off prowling by hisself, to a frolic or such as that, and didn’t come home until four o’clock in the morning. She was setting up waiting for him. When she crawled him about it, he said, “Bless Katy, wife, let’s sleep now and quarrel in the morning.” So she quarrelled in the morning and just kept it up. For thirty years. Not for meanness—she just kept hoping she could change him.

Change him? When he takened notice of the way she was fussing and clucking and ruffling her feathers, he quit calling her by her given name and begun calling her the Old Hen. That’s all I could ever see she changed him.