Gretchen's Forty Winks opens on a sidewalk, not a person:
A few lines later Roger Halsey stands on his porch and "assured the dead suburban sky that he hadn't time for worrying about the weather." He has no time for the weather, so he goes inside and "shut the subject out into the cold twilight." The cold does not stay out for long. Snow is in the air on the sidewalk outside the house when they get back from dinner, December "tumbled like a dead leaf from the calendar," and the season keeps time with his deadline.
The house first reaches us as sound. Roger hears his wife, the nursemaid and the baby upstairs in a conversation made mostly of "Don't!" and "Look out, Maxy!" Then comes the match scene. He has come home to announce "the most important six weeks of my life," and Gretchen holds out her palm for matches. "Scratch! The match flared." The interruption is tiny, but it grates on Roger: in this mood "her slightest positive action irritated him beyond measure."