"I do yet, Hanna—only you don't laugh no more. There's nothin' so fine in a woman as sunshine."
"Provided you don't have to furnish any of it."
"Because a man 'ain't got it in him to be light in his ways don't mean he don't enjoy it in others. Why, there just ain't nothin' to equal a happy woman in the house! Them first months, Hanna, showed me what I'd been missin'. It was just the way I figured it—somebody around like you, singin' and putterin'. It was that laugh in the office made me bring it here, where I could have it always by me."
"It's been knocked out of me, every bit of laugh I ever had in me; lemme tell you that."
"I can remember the first time I ever heard you, Hanna. You was standin" at the office window lookin' out in the yards at Jerry Sims unloadin' a shipment of oats; and little Old Cocker was standin' on top of one of the sacks barkin' his head off. I—"
"Yeh; I met Clara Sims on the street yesterday, back here for a visit, and she says to me, she says: 'Hanna Burkhardt, you mean to tell me you never done nothing with your voice! You oughta be ashamed. If I was your husband, I'd spend my last cent trainin' that contralto of yours. You oughtn't to let yourself go like this. Women don't do it no more.' That, from the tackiest girl that ever walked this town. I wished High Street had opened up and swallowed me."
"Now, Hanna, you mustn't—"
"In all these years never so much as a dance or a car-ride as far as
Middletown. Church! Church! Church! Till I could scream at the sight of
it. Not a year of my married life that 'ain't been a lodestone on my neck!
Eight of' 'em! Eight!"
"I'm not sayin' I'm not to blame, Hanna. A woman like you naturally likes life. I never wanted to hold you back. If I'm tired nights and dead on my feet from twelve hours on 'em, I never wanted you to change your ways."
"Yes; with a husband at home in bed, I'd be a fine one chasin' around this town alone, wouldn't I? That's the thanks a woman gets for bein' self-respectin'."