All her clothes got torn and muddy and she had ceased to care about her appearance that first year. But the greatest change had been in Mike. He was obsessed with the farm – every spare minute was spent on it; it occupied his mind completely; nothing seemed to matter to him but the farm. Sandra had nurtured the secret hope that the whole project would collapse and they could go back to the relative civilization of Boston. But nothing seemed to deter Mike – not even the loss of their small herd at the end of the first year through foot and mouth disease. He had become strangely stoical, and shrugged off his loss, and grimly went about restocking his farm with more of the huge, ponderous black and white animals of which Sandra was deathly afraid. Mike used to tease her at first, saying that the languid Friesians wouldn't touch a fly, but he had gradually become more and more impatient with her when she refused to share his enthusiasm over them. As time went on, she lost her fear of them, and even developed sympathy for them, and she was unable to bear the mournful lowing that rent the air when the tiny furry calves were taken from their mothers so soon after birth.

Resentment had built up in her over the years as Mike became more and more immersed in farm life, and his often stated feeling that he was glad he had made the step from the city irked her considerably. Gradually, their friends from Boston stopped coming to see them, rapidly losing their idealized notions of rural life when they saw the day to day reality, and now Sandra had lost touch with them completely. Her life was empty, pointless, she felt, and her husband's involvement with the agricultural instructor last year was the last straw for his demoralized wife. Life was no longer worth living, she thought – nothing would ever change; things would go on just as they were, with herself and Mike completely estranged.