He saw suddenly the alien side of life, and the alien side of his own self, which he would always have kept faced out towards space, away from all eyes, like the other side of the moon, and that was for the time all he could grasp.
Once or twice Mrs.Sloane volunteered a remark, but he scarcely responded, and once he heard absently her voice and Rebecca's in the other room.

Otherwise he sat in utter silence, except for the low chuckle of the hens and the taps of their beaks against the iron pots, until Barney came with the minister and the minister's wife.
Barney had taken the minister aside, and asked him, stammeringly, if he thought his wife would come.

He could not bear the thought of the Sloane woman's being a witness at his sister's wedding.

The minister and his wife were both very young, and had not lived long in Pembroke.

They looked much alike: the minister's small, pale, peaked face peered with anxious solicitude between the folds of the great green scarf which he tied over his cap, and his wife looked like him out of her great wadded green silk hood, when they got into the sleigh with Barney.
The minister had had a whispered conference with his wife, and now she never once let her eyes rest on either of the two men as they slid swiftly along over the new snow.