“The impudent scoundrel wouldn't relent a mite either, until I'd given him a dollar for a tip, and then he did agree to keep the baskets in the coal cellar for a couple of days but no longer. But he absolutely refused to take the box along too, so I had to have it sent upstairs to the apartment and put in the bedroom because it was too big to go in the hall. And when the men got it in the bedroom I could hardly get in myself to take off my hat. And after that I sat down and cried a little, because really I was frightfully upset, and moreover I had a feeling that when Scott came home he would be sure to try to be funny. You know how husbands are, being one yourself!
“Sure enough, when he came in the first thing he saw was that box. He couldn't very well help seeing it because he practically fell over it as he stepped in the door. He said: 'What's this?' and I said: 'It's a box'—just like that. And he said: 'What kind of a box?' And I didn't like his tone and I said: 'A green box. I should think anybody would know that much.' And he said: 'Ah, indeed,' several times in a most aggravating way and walked round it. He couldn't walk all the way round it on account of the wall being in the way; but as far round it as he could walk without bumping into the wall. And he looked at it and felt it with his hand and kicked it once or twice and then he sniffed and said: 'And what's it for?' And I said: 'To put things in.' And he said: 'For instance, what?'
“Now I despise for people to be so technical round me, and besides, of all the words in the English language I most abhor those words 'for instance'; but I kept my temper even if I was boiling inside and I said: 'It's to put things in that you haven't any other place to put them in.' Which was ungrammatical, I admit, but the best I could do under the prevalent conditions. And then he looked at me until I could have screamed, and he said: 'Maude, where did you get that damned thing?' And I said it wasn't a damned thing but a perfectly good box made out of wood and painted green and everything; and that I'd got it at an auction sale for a dollar and that I considered it a real bargain. I didn't feel called on to tell him about the two baskets down in the coal cellar just yet. So I didn't mention them; and anyhow, heaven knows I was sick and tired of the whole subject and ready to drop it, but he kept on looking at it and sniffing and asking questions. Some people have no idea how a great strong brute of a man can nag a weak defenseless woman to desperation when he deliberately sets out to do it.
“Finally I said: 'Well, even if you don't like the box I think it's a perfectly splendid box, and look what a good strong lock it has on it—surely that's worth something.' And he said: 'Well, let's see about that—where's the key?' And, my dear, then it dawned on me that I didn't have any key!
“Well, a person can stand just so much and no more. I'm a patient long-suffering woman and I've always been told that I had a wonderful disposition, but there are limits. And when he burst out laughing and wouldn't stop laughing but kept right on and laughed and laughed and leaned up against something and laughed some more until you could have heard him in the next block—why then, all of a sudden something seemed to give way inside of me and I burst out crying—I couldn't hold in another second—and I told him that I'd never speak to him again the longest day he lived and that he could go to Halifax or some other place beginning with the same initial and take the old box with him for all I cared; and just as I burst out of the room I heard him say: 'No, madam, when I married you I agreed to support you, but I didn't engage to take care of any air-tight, burglar-proof, pea-green box the size of a circus cage!' And I suppose he thought that was being funny, too. A perverted sense of humor is an awful cross to bear—in a husband!
“So I went and lay down on the living-room couch with a raging, splitting, sick headache and I didn't care whether I lived or died, but on the whole rather preferred dying. After a little he came in, trying to hold his face straight, and begged my pardon. And I told him I would forgive him if he would do just two things. And he asked me what those two things were and I told him one was to quit snickering like an idiot every few moments and the other was never to mention boxes to me again as long as he lived. And he promised on his solemn word of honor he wouldn't, but he said I must bear with him if he smiled a little bit once in a while as the evening wore on, because when he did that he would be thinking about something very funny that had happened at the office that day and not thinking about what I would probably think he was thinking about at all. And then he said how about running down to the Plaza for a nice little dinner and I said yes, and after dinner I felt braced up and strong enough to break the news to him about the two baskets.
“And he didn't laugh; in justice to him I must say that much for him. He didn't laugh. Only he choked or something, and had a very severe coughing spell. And then we went home and while he was undressing he fell over the box and barked his shins on it, and though it must have been a strain on him he behaved like a gentleman and swore only a little.
“But, my dear, the worst was yet to come! The next day I had to arrange to send the whole lot to storage because we simply couldn't go on living with that box in the only bedroom we had; and the bill for cartage came to two dollars and a quarter. After I had seen them off to the storage warehouse I tried to forget all about them. As a matter of fact they never crossed my mind again until we moved out to the country in April and then I suddenly remembered about them—getting a bill for three months' storage at two dollars a month may have had something to do with bringing them forcibly to my memory—and I telephoned in and asked the manager of the storage warehouse if he please wouldn't give them to somebody and he said he didn't know anybody who would have all that junk as a gift. So it seemed to me the best thing and the most economical thing to do would be to pay the bill to date and bring them on out to the place.
“But, as it turned out, that was a financial mistake, too. Because what with sending the truck all the way into town, thirty-eight miles and back again, and the wear and tear on the tires and the gasoline and the man's time who drove the truck and what Scott calls the overhead—though I don't see what he means by that because it is an open truck without any top to it at all—we figure, or rather Scott does, that the cost of getting them out to the country came to fourteen dollars.
“And we still have them, and if you should happen to know of anybody or should meet anybody who'd like to have two very large roomy wicker baskets and a very well-made wooden box painted in all-over design in a very good shade of green and which may contain something valuable, because I haven't been able to open it yet to find out what's inside, and with a lock that goes with it, I wish you'd tell them that they can send up to our place and get them any time that is convenient to them. Or if they don't live too far away I'd be very glad to send the things over to them. Only I'd like for them to decide as soon as possible because the gardener, who is Swedish and awfully fussy, keeps coming in every few days and complaining about them and asking why I don't have them moved out of the greenhouse, which is where we are keeping them for the present, and put some other place where they won't be forever getting in his way. Only there doesn't seem to be any other suitable place to keep them in unless we build a shed especially for that purpose. Isn't it curious that sometimes on a hundred-acre farm there should be so little spare room? I should hate to go to the added expense of building that shed, and so, as I was saying just now, if you should happen upon any one who could use those baskets and that box please don't forget to tell them about my offer.”