“Now, David Grayson,” she said, “quick!”

It was not that the room itself was so remarkable as that it struck me as being confusingly different from the heavily comfortable rooms of the old Starkweather house with their crowded furnishings, their overloaded mantels, their plethoric bookcases.

“I cannot think of you yet,” I stumbled, “as being here.”

“Isn’t it like me?”

“It is a beautiful room—­” I groped lamely.

“I was afraid you would say that.”

“But it is.  It really is.”

“Then I’ve failed, after all.”

She said it lightly enough, but there was an undertone of real disappointment in her voice.

“I’m in rather the predicament,” I said, “of old Abner Coates.  You probably don’t know Abner.  He sells nursery stock, and each spring when he comes around and I tell him that the peach trees or the raspberry bushes I bought of him the year before have not done well, he says, with the greatest astonishment, ’Wal, now, ye ain’t said what I hoped ye would.’  I see that I haven’t said what you hoped I would.”

It was too serious a matter, however, for Mary Starkweather to joke about.

“But, David Grayson,” she said, “isn’t it simple?”

I glanced around me with swift new comprehension.

“Why, yes, it is simple.”

I saw that my friend was undergoing some deep inner change of which this room, this renovated barn, were mere symbols.

“Tell me,” I said, “how you came to such a right-about-face.”

“It’s just that!” she returned earnestly, “It is a right-about-face.  I think I am really in earnest for the first time in my life.”

I had a moment of flashing wonder if her marriage had not been in earnest, a flashing picture of Richard Starkweather with his rather tired, good-humoured face, and I wondered if her children were not earnest realities to her, if her busy social life had meant nothing.  Then I reflected that we all have such moments, when the richest experiences of the past seem as nothing in comparison with the fervour of this glowing moment.

“Everything in my life in the past,” she was saying, “seems to have happened to me.  Life has done things for me; I have had so few chances of doing anything for myself.”

“And now you are expressing yourself.”

“Almost for the first time in my life!”

She paused.  “All my life, it seems to me, I have been smothered with things.  Just things!  Too much of everything.  All my time has been taken up in caring for things and none in enjoying them.”

“I understand!” I said with a warm sense of corroboration and sympathy.

“I had so many pictures on my walls that I never saw, really saw, any of them.  I saw the dust on them, I saw the cracks in the frames, that needed repairing, I even saw better ways of arranging them, but I very rarely saw, with the inner eye, what the artists were trying to tell me.  And how much time I have wasted on mere food and clothing—­it is appalling!  I had become nothing short of a slave to my house and my things.”