The County Attorney asks Mrs. Hale if she had been to the Wright house much. She says she hadn’t because it “never seemed to be a cheerful place” and she suggests that John Wright was not a pleasant man. The men tell the ladies to keep their eyes open for anything that might be useful and leave the women to comment on how much they would hate people poking around and criticizing their housekeeping. As the women collect some clothes to take to Mrs. Wright in jail they remark on how she was doing things and stopped suddenly, including making bread and the women see, at this point, that these “trifles” the men overlook are keys to what happened.
Unlike the male characters in "Trifles" by Glaspell, the women begin to talk about how Minnie Wright used to be pretty and lively when she was Minnie Foster—before she married John. The women ask one another if Mrs. Wright killed him and can’t imagine why, even if she did, she went through the effort of putting a rope around his neck and killing him that way, especially since there was a gun in the house. The men come in and laugh as the women look at an unfinished quilt and wonder if she was going to “quilt it or knot it” and the women “look abashed.” They notice the sewing is perfect until a patch where it is messy and Mrs. Hale suddenly takes it and mends it. They talk about how they should have visited Minnie more often and how Minnie was like the bird and they find an empty partially birdcage and they imagine how a bird might cheer the place up.
As the women look for scissors in a box they find a bird with a string tied around its neck, obviously strangled. The women are horrified at first and upon hearing the men approaching, Mrs. Hale hides the box with the dead bird under the quilt pieces. In one of the moments of dark comedy in “Trifles” by Susan Glaspell, the county attorney asks pleasantly if they thought Minnie was “going to quilt it or knot it” which they reply, in a symbolic and metaphorical fashion that she was going to “knot it” meaning they realize that Minnie strangled her husband as he had done to her bird.
When the Attorney sees the birdcage empty they say the cat got the bird and they hide the box for good. This uneasy feeling dampens the women’s conversation. Mrs. Hale remembers a boy killing her kitten with a hatchet and how she felt and Mrs. Peters remembers when her baby died. They agree that the method of the murder was gruesome but without speaking directly, agree, via these stories and emotions, to hide their evidence. The women continue to discuss the implications of crime and punishment in “Trifles” by Susan Glaspell but at the last moment decide to withhold evidence. The men, arrogant as ever, leave unsatisfied and the play ends with the projected conclusion that Mrs. Hale will not be found guilty without a motive, even if the men think she may have decided to “knot it” indeed.