hey compare what their husbands have done with what their sons are
going to do.

It was an old source of peevishness with Paw Coburn, and he was moved to
say--answering only by implication what she had unconsciously implied,
and seeming to take his theme from the landscape about them:

"When my father died all he left me was this little--bungalow they'd
call it nowadays, I suppose, and a few acres 'round it. You remember,
Maw, how, when the sun first came sneakin' over that knob off to the
left, the shadow of those two oaks used to just touch the stone wall on
the western border of father's property, and when the sun was just
crawlin' into bed behind those woods off yonder the shadow of the oaks
just overlapped the rail fence on the eastern border? That's all my
father left me--that and the mortgage. That's all I brought you home to,
Maw. I'm not disparaging my father. He was a great man. When he left his
own home in the East and came out here all this was woods, woods, woods,
far as you can see. Even that pond wasn't there then. My father cleared
it all--cut down everything except those two oak-trees. He used to call
them the Twin Oaks, but they always seemed to me like man and wife. I
kind o' like to think that they're you and me. And like you and me
they're all that's left standin' of the old trees. They were big trees,
too, and those were big days."

The greatness of his thoughts rendered him mute. He was a plain man, but
he was hearing the unwritten music of the American epic of the ax and
the plow, the more than Trojan war, the more than ten years' war,
against forests and savages. His wife brought him back from
hyper-Homeric vision to the concrete.

"Thank Heaven, Susan's finished gossipin' and started home."

The mail-carrier in his little umbrellaed cart was vanishing up the
hill, and the sunbonnet was floating down the road. The sky was an
unmitigated blue, save for a few masses of cloud, like piles of new
fleece on a shearing-floor. Green woods, gray road, blue sky, pale
clouds, all were steeped in heat and silence so intense it seemed that
something must break. And something broke.

Appallingly, abruptly, came a shattering crash, a streak of blinding
fire, an unendurable noise, a searing blast of blaze as if the sun had
been dynamite exploded, splintering the very joists of heaven. The whole
air rocked like a tidal wave breaking on a reef; the house writhed in
all its timbers. Then silence--unbearable