Mrs. Henry Armstid

With "soap-raw hands" (321), the docile and patient wife of Armstid keeps the family together through hard work and thrift. She repeatedly wears a "shapeless gray garment" with "stained tennis shoes" (348). Her eyes are "a washed gray . . ., as though they had faded like the dress and sunbonnet" she wore (322). And she speaks in a "flat, toneless and hopeless voice" (358). Aside from the domestic tasks which come to include cleaning for Mrs. Littlejohn while her husband heals his broken leg at the boarding house, she has often engaged in the manual labor of farming - as Ratliff tells the men at Varner's store after the auction (345).