“You said yourself we could expect a storm. It isn't right to leave me here alone. Surely I'm as important as your father.”
In this passage, Ross establishes Ann's central conflict: she feels neglected by and isolated from her husband, John. John's decision to walk five miles to visit his father when a blizzard is coming draws out the antipathy Ann feels toward him. Her resentment and impulse to provoke a conflict with him are evident in the line, "Surely I'm as important as your father." While she understands John is merely concerned about his aging father's readiness for the blizzard, she nonetheless perceives the threat of abandonment in John's decision to visit the old man.
“And on my way I'll drop in at Steven's place. Maybe he'll come over tonight for a game of cards. You haven't seen anybody but me for the last two weeks.”
In his efforts to reassure his wife, John tells Ann that he will stop by their neighbor Steven's farm and invite him to come to the house that night. While he is trusting enough to leave her alone with the handsome young Steven, John is also somewhat naïve about the mutual attraction Steven and Ann share, clueless to the intimacy suggested by Ann and Steven having danced together several times in one night. The passage is significant because with this offer John unwittingly sets in motion the events that precipitate Ann cheating on him.
“When you're gone I think I'll paint the kitchen woodwork. White this time—you remember we got the paint last fall.”
In response to John's reassurances, Ann supplies reassurances of her own. Regretting that she was short with him, she says she will be okay on her own because she will wile the time away by painting the interior of the house. She imbues the paint with a symbolic significance, thinking it will brighten up the gloomy house and give a sense of renewal and freshness. However, the paint proves most significant because of the way it later sticks to John's hand. While the paint does mark a change in the state of things, Ann doesn't foresee the change being tragic.
On the palm, white even against its frozen whiteness, was a little smear of paint.
This passage—the story’s closing line—is significant because the smear of paint Ann sees on John's palm is evidence of him having come home during the night. While Ann had convinced herself that she dreamt his presence in her bedroom, the paint smear indicates John had been in the room after all. On his way out, he had touched the still-wet paint on the bedroom door.
Then she dozed a while, and the shadow was John. Interminably he advanced. The whips of light still flicked and coiled, but now suddenly they were the swift little snakes that this afternoon she had watched twist and shiver across the snow. And they too were advancing. They writhed and vanished and came again.
In this passage, Ann has just woken up after watching shadows dance on the wall. It seems to her that John has suddenly entered the room and is approaching her. Meanwhile, her guilt at having sinned against John and their marriage vows causes her to perceive the shadows from the stove as moving in a snake-like way—an allusion to the serpent tempting Eve in the Garden of Eden. While she had earlier seen the snakes in the snow, she now sees them inside the house, advancing toward her alongside a shadowy, hallucinatory version of John.
It was the silence weighing upon her—the frozen silence of the bitter fields and sun-chilled sky—lurking outside if alive, relentlessly in wait, mile-deep between her now and John.
Although Ann tries to keep herself busy in the house after John leaves to visit his father, she feels the weight of the silence outside pressing down on her. In this passage, Ann perceives the silence of the frozen landscape as personified, thinking of it as a creature "lurking" and putting itself between her and John. The passage is significant because it is in this isolating silence that Ann convinces herself of John's neglect and decides to sleep with Steven.
Suddenly looking down at him as he slept, half-smiling still, his lips relaxed in the conscienceless complacency of his achievement, she understood that thus he was revealed in his entirety—all there ever was or ever could be. John was the man. With him lay all the future. For tonight, slowly and contritely through the day and years to come, she would try to make amends.
After waking to relight the fire, Ann considers Steven's sleeping form. In this moment she has a change of heart. While she had seen in Steven a way of accessing the excitement she denies herself as a farmer's wife, she now understands that Steven means far less to her than she had assumed. Having felt the guilt of her infidelity, she understands that John is "the man" for her. She privately resolves to recommit herself to him and to make amends over time for the betrayal of this night. The passage is significant because Ann's decision to stay with John comes just before she learns of his death.
