“In Shark’s life there had been no literary romance.”

In Shark’s life there had been no literary romance. At nineteen he took Katherine Mullock to three dances because she was available.  This started the machine of precedent and he married her because her family and all of the neighbors expected it.  Katherine was not pretty, but she had the firm freshness of a new weed, and the bridling vigor of a young mare.  After her marriage she lost her vigor and her freshness as a flower does once it has received pollen.  Her face sagged, her hips broadened, and she entered into her second destiny, that of work.

In his treatment of her, Shark was neither tender nor cruel.  He governed her with the same gentle inflexibility he used on horses.  Cruelty would have seemed to him as foolish as indulgence.  He never talked to her as to human, never spoke of his hopes or thoughts or failures, of his paper wealth nor of the peach crop.  Katherine would have been puzzled and worried if he had.  Her life was sufficiently complicated without the added burden of another’s thoughts and problems.