"The Loved One."
A portrait of a woman, mesmerizing to all men, but unsatisfactorily married to a hopelessly unsuccessful entrepreneur. She finds herself strangely drawn to a railway signal-man whom she beckons with a "smile that was like a concentration of all the remote, tenderly captivating smiles she had ever given. It went across the track with an intimate and secret swiftness that held the man momentarily spellbound." The obsession of the husband with selling eggs is matched by the egg-raising talents in another story first published in the same year, "The Earth." In Harper's Bazaar (September 1, 1940), The Beauty of the Dead and Other Stories (1940), Thirty-One Selected Tales (1947), Selected Short Stories of H.E. Bates (1951), Selected Stories (1957), The Good Corn and Other Stories (1974).