At first, the wife is mildly disappointed that he has forgotten her coffee; then she spies the broken eggs in the sack—caused by a twenty-four-yard coil of rope; the eggs will have to be used right away, and her plans for dinner are spoiled. Soon, they are arguing with a surprising vehemence, considering the trivial cause. Her passion for order is, in his view, “an insane habit of changing things around”; she, however, “had borne all the clutter she meant to bear in the flat in the town.” For the most part, her emotional outbursts are inflected with her own idiom, thinly disguised by the narrator’s mediation, but it becomes evident that the pressure of the past is on the point of overwhelming her. Deeper plunges by the narrator inside his character reveal how wide is the discrepancy...