Howard suddenly feels shy about showing her the bedrooms. He makes a joke of it, gives her a Valentine look, says, "Now, how abut you and me going upstairs?"

She giggles and brushes past him. "I haven't seen the dining room yet. Uh—what time do you think Mrs. Spencer will be back?"

Howard stands there thinking. It irks him that he can't remember who this Mrs. Spencer is, and he sees that the house is furnished and—well, a little shabby, like a house gets when a family lives there. Why did he think he was just fixing it up for Alice? There is no getting around the fact that Alice is dead, God bless her. Has been for a couple of years now. Then the question before the court, your Honor, is: who is that person in the dining room?

The kitchen door opens. "Oh, Mrs. Spencer," calls the woman in the blazer, "there you are. I can't tell you how much I love the house. You have a gem here, an absolute goldmine."

Martha stands there and stares at him. Then she turns away and answers the woman, not very politely, "You told me you were coming tomorrow."

"Well, another client cancelled, and I just couldn't wait to see your house. Just when was it built, dear - do you know?"

Howard stalks out through the front door. "Your house," that battleaxe said to Martha. We'll see whose house it is. He ought to go back and throw them both out. The trouble is, he did say yes to Martha. In a moment of weakness, he let her win. If he crossed her up now, she'd go on the warpath. But hell, a man can change his mind, can't he? He never signed a damn thing, that's for sure.

He gets back to work on the scraping. The more he works on the house, the more it belongs to him. Damn it, that's practically a legal precept. Women don't appreciate the sweat that goes into a house. Pete would understand. He'll get Pete to talk to Martha. Should have thought of that before. He was planning to go see Pete, anyway, wasn't he? Thinking about a trip—when was that? Back when he was scraping before. There's that scraped patch that looks like Georgia. This one here looks sort of like an alligator with its jaws open. Those trees with Spanish moss on them—are those in Georgia, or Florida? Those girls who do the water-skiing shows.