A woman with two young girls seats herself across from Mr. and Mrs. Glaum on the train. Mrs. Glaum smiles at the trio with "chilly courtesy," and proceeds to do her makeup and some knitting. Eventually, she deigns to speak to the woman, expressing sympathy for the plight of traveling with children.

The woman explains that — "for some fool reason" — her husband joined the Army, and she is taking her children to stay with her sister while she seeks work. Mrs. Glaum retorts with "slight severity" that the woman's husband must have "felt it his duty." The woman counters that her husband wanted to get away from his family and found an excuse in the WWII draft.

Mrs. Glaum claims — falsely, Mr. Glaum notes to himself — that she and her husband always paid for a drawing room on the train, back when they traveled with their children. She then proceeds to claim that her husband hates traveling without her. "He's the real baby in our house," she says. "Can't bear being alone."

At this moment, Mr. Glaum grows sufficiently irate to excuse himself in pursuit of a drink. He reflects, "There were places he wanted to go to, lots of things he wanted to see, by himself."

Mr. Glaum invites a stranger — a large, ruddy man around his age — to drink with him, and the two launch into conversation. The man recounts that his former wife was "beautiful and expensive" — but "felt she could be better by herself." Mr. Glaum asks if the man loved his wife, who replies that he did. He then puts the same question back to his interlocutor.

Mr. Glaum replies that he's "almost certain" he loves his wife, but confesses that he hates being with her. He continues, "I love my wife best when I'm not with her and when I'm not even thinking about her." Shortly thereafter, he excuses himself to "see to" his wife.

Mr. Glaum returns to find his wife sitting beside the woman; the two are discussing their childhoods. Mr. Glaum regrets returning, irritated by the way his wife has inflated her grandfather's wealth in the tales she tells. He returns to his drinking partner, who is now talking with a young, uniformed woman. The woman flirts with Mr. Gaum, but he ignores her and asks his new companion, "Did your wife have a tendency to exaggerate her possessions when she was talking to other women?" The man replies that she couldn't, because she had everything.

The young woman grows upset that the men are spurning her to talk about their wives, and leaves to fetch more drinks. Mr. Gaum reflects that his wife is perhaps not alone in her pathology: "Maybe it's all of them. Did you notice that young woman's expression? As if something were biting her under her blouse? It often seems to me that [my wife] has a little, sharp-toothed animal hidden in her dress."

The young woman returns and sits on the ruddy man's lap. Despite the pair across from him, Mr. Glaum's wife is "very present" in his thoughts. He again excuse himself to return to her and finds her asleep. He looks tenderly upon her relaxed, untroubled face — "the face he felt to be her own" — and reflects that the biting animal in her dress must also be slumbering.

Mr. Glaum thinks to himself that his wife "should die at night": "With a face like that, she would get such a good grade in heaven...They would never even open the book to find out what secret sins had been gnawing her breast, because her face would be testimony of the fact that she had never even been conscious of sin."