It was a heavy afternoon for Joe. He was weary from the absolute lack of nourishment when the last of the chores was done long after dusk, and Isom announced that they would go to the house for supper.
The supper began with soup, made from the left-over beans and the hog's jaw of dinner. There it swam, that fleshless, long-toothed, salt-reddened bone, the most hateful piece of animal anatomy that Joe ever fixed his hungry eyes upon. And supper ended as it began; with soup. There was nothing else behind it, save some hard bread to soak in it, and its only savor was salt.
Isom seemed to be satisfied with, even cheered by, his liquid refreshment. His wife came to her place at the table when they were almost through, and sat stirring a bowl of the mixture of bread and thin soup, her eyes set in abstracted stare in the middle of the table, far beyond the work of her hands. She did not speak to Joe; he did not undertake any friendly approaches.
Joe never had seen Mrs. Chase before that day, neighbors though they had been for months. She appeared unusually handsome to Joe, with her fair skin, and hair colored like ripe oats straw. She wore a plait of it as big as his wrist coiled and wound around her head.
For a little while after finishing his unsatisfying meal, Joe sat watching her small hand turning the spoon in her soup. He noted the thinness of her young cheeks, in which there was no marvel, seeing the fare upon which she was forced to live. She seemed to be unconscious of him and Isom. She did not raise her eyes.
Joe got up in a little while and left them, going to the porch to look for his bundle and his book. They were gone. He came back, standing hesitatingly in the door.
"They're in your room upstairs," said Mrs. Chase without turning her head to look at him, still leaning forward over her bowl.
"I'll show you where it is," Isom offered.
He led the way up the stairs which opened from the kitchen, carrying a small lamp in his hand.
Joe's room was over the kitchen. It was bleak and bare, its black rafters hung with spiderwebs, plastered with the nests of wasps. A dormer window jutted toward the east like a hollow eye, designed, no doubt, and built by Isom Chase himself, to catch the first gleam of morning and throw it in the eyes of the sleeping hired-hand, whose bed stood under it.