 Why did the narrator's wife react the way she did when she got home to see workmen at the house?
I heard my daughter's running feet in the animal rooms and her rollerskates banging at her side. "Tell your mother that I retaliate. Again in the laboratory, I entered the metabolic accelerator and withdrew the intravenous needles from my first volplas. The accelerator had forced them almost to adulthood in less than a month. It would be several hours before they would begin to move, to learn to feed and play, perhaps to learn to fly. Meanwhile, it was clear that here was no war of dominant mutations. My wife tried the door, too, but more subtly, as if casually touching the knob while calling. I kissed her until I heard rollerskates coming across the terrace from one direction and a horse galloping toward the terrace from the other direction. My wife brought me a bowl of salad and I munched the hamburger and watched the boy unsaddle the horse and slap it away to the pasture. Outside this little town, I found a litter of flat stones that had young black-snakes under each slab. I filled a pail with them and took them into town and dumped them on the walk in front of the movie just as Theda Bara's matinee let out. They were also much faster than had been their predecessors in organizing their nervous activity after the slumbrous explosion of growth in the metabolic accelerator. Except for the face, chest and belly, they were covered with a soft, almost golden down. The spars had been common to the basic colony for years and were the result of serial mutations effecting those greatly elongated fifth fingers that had first appeared in Nijinsky. As they swept out and forward, the lateral skin that had, till now, hung in resting folds was tightened in a golden plane that stretched from the tip of the spar to his waist and continued four inches wide down his legs to where it anchored at the little toe. By four o'clock that afternoon, I was feeding them solid food and, with the spars closed, they were holding little cups and drinking water from them in a most humanlike way. The shoulder girdle and pectoral muscles were heavy and out of proportion, of course, yet the females had only one pair of breasts. I was kneeling on the mattress, cuffing and roughing the male as one might a puppy dog, when one of the females playfully climbed up my back. I would teach them legends: that they had come from the stars, that they had subsequently watched the first red men and then the first white men enter these hills. There would be volpla colonies all up and down the Coast before anyone suspected.
 He had shown no sign of actually reporting on his work, and she didn't know what this change meant
 The narrator had told her that he was going to expand his workspace to investigate different mutations  She was upset that it seemed like the narrator was giving up on his work by tearing down his laboratory space  She was hoping to convert the lab space into a room for the family when he was done, and didn't want it to be torn down  He had shown no sign of actually reporting on his work, and she didn't know what this change meant