In this story, Susan Glaspell presents the narrator as a dear friend observing the relationship between the married couple, Katherine and Philip Hoyt, and meditating on how they navigated a growing disability. Ultimately the piece grows into a beautiful and affecting reminiscence -- a deep rumination on what makes people matter so deeply to each other and also on what gives them strength as individuals. In the process Glaspell manages to work in as an indirectly evoked setting the desolate area on Cape Cod she returned to so often, for example in her short play, The Outside. "The Hearing Ear" was originally published in Harper’s (December 1916): 234-41.