She stood by the ironing board , and lifted one of his shirts to check it for any creases she may have left in it . Apparently it needed some stitching around the collar, and she sighed to think that even after long years of advising , even begging him not to drag the shirt off by the collar without at least loosening a couple more buttons , he had never managed to learn .

Of course , he would have called it nagging . Just as he called it nagging when she asked him to hang his clothes up tidily , instead of leaving them in heaps on the bedroom floor . He couldn't even be bothered to put the dirty clothes in the dirty clothes basket in the laundry . She was forever finding long worn socks under the bed , often after she had stumbled over the shoes he had left beside it .

Still , one more try .

Look at this , she said . This isn't really an old shirt , now is it ? there's still ages of wear in it. I'll have to turn the collar on it , but I suppose you'll have the stitches pulled in next to no time . I don't know . Why can't you be just a little bit more careful ?

She glanced over to where he sat at the kitchen table , reading the sports pages of the newspaper spread out on it.

He didn't look up , just grunted , picked up the paper and swivelled around on his chair, holding the pages so that it prevented her from seeing his face . With a gesture of exasperation , she tossed the shirt aside and picked up another garment to lay on the ironing board . She felt she had to restrain herself from any outbursts of temper or even mild petulance . The occasion was too important to allow an argument to develop .

She allowed a couple of minutes to pass , the silence broken only by the thump of the iron on the board , and the slight rustle as he turned the pages of his paper . He wasn't too bad as a companion , she thought . He had provided well for her and their two daughters . Every now and then he had a few too many with his male friends , but she was pretty positive that there had never been any other women .

I don' t suppose , she thought , that he would cut much of a dash with younger women. If he ever had anything to say about them it was more critical than appreciative . Did he ever feel the temptation to have a fling ?

She considered herself critically . The sex appeal she might once have had was very much a thing of the past . Of course the babies had come too close together for her to ever regain her figure, and she never had much sense of style her daughters told her . If sexual allure was what was needed to hold a man , she frankly admitted to herself that she had none.

I'm a frump , she thought . I need something to lift my spirits.

But then , casting her eye over the balding , paunchy man absorbed in his sports page , she thought it highly unlikely that some young siren would come along and whirl him away . Whirl ! that would be the day ! He had about as much to offer to women as she had to offer to men .

Nevertheless , the time had come to lay the cards on the table , as so many of the women in her magazine reading seemed so capable of doing .

She carefully put down the iron on its heel , and moved around the board to confront the shield of the newspaper .

Now , she said . The girls are both married . We only have ourselves to worry about for a while

The paper slowly began to lower .

With them married , don't you think it's time we got married too ?

The paper dropped completely and she met a stare of incomprehension .

Good God Almighty , he said , who would want to marry either of us ?