The woman takes moment to respond to each question the tax-gatherer asks her "Have you a husband?" he asked "Yes," she said, after a moment" making her seem bewildered by the official presence and seems withdrawn from the conversation. In some of the questions there is no reply at all and she stands there speechless, not moving as if mesmerised by the suited man or because he was an outsider. Martha Williamson lived out in the country and she would be unfamiliar of a gentleman who was well dressed wearing a suit and he drove a car which not everyone had especially in the country which would possibly make her wary of him. In the only answer more than a few words "we tried to put him away, but he wouldn't go", she is again very defensive in the way she speaks and notably removes responsibility of the dog by saying she tried to put him away. This may be a way to try and cover the dogs" existence but towards an official it seems unlikely and was more likely to be her honest answer. The dialogue used by the woman allows us to think that she is very helpless and scared of the tax-gatherer making her the underdog and him being the unfeeling bureaucracy.
The characterisation of the tax-gatherer is to make him appear to be the more powerful clean-cut unfeeling bureaucracy that we would expect from his title. This is however not what someone who is new to the tax-gathering job is like. The first picture we get we get of the tax-gatherer is of someone who is very anxious and irritated at what he is required to do. On the way to the house he walks very quickly thus wanting to finish the job as quickly as possible and not think about the task in hand because we already get the impression that he finds the job fairly unpleasant. The tax-gatherer is also sexist in parts of his encounters with the two women but also seems to look down on women in general. This arrogance is again witnessed when near the end of the short story he believes he was cheated by Martha Williamson over the money situation.