“My folks don’t care for rhubarb sauce,” Rose told the woman next door.

“It makes the worst pie in the world,” the woman confided to Rose.

Whereupon each bought a bunch of the succulent green and red stalks.  It was their offering at the season’s shrine.

Rose flung the rhubarb on the kitchen table, pulled her dust-cap more firmly about her ears, and hurried back to the disorder of Floss’s dim little bedroom.  After that it was dust-cloth, and soapsuds, and scrub-brush in a race against recurrent water bags, insistent doorbells, and the inevitable dinner hour.  It was mid-afternoon when Rose, standing a-tiptoe on a chair, came at last to the little box on the top shelf under the bedding in the hall closet.  Her hand touched the box, and closed about it.  A little electric thrill vibrated through her body.  She stepped down from the chair, heavily, listened until her acute ear caught the sound of the sick woman’s slumbrous breathing; then, box in hand, walked down the dark hall to the kitchen.  The rhubarb pie, still steaming in its pan, was cooling on the kitchen table.  The dishes from the invalid’s lunch-tray littered the sink.  But Rose, seated on the kitchen chair, her rumpled dust-cap pushed back from her flushed, perspiring face, untied the rude bit of string that bound the old candy box, removed the lid, slowly, and by that act was wafted magically out of the world of rhubarb pies, and kitchen chairs, and dirty dishes, into that place whose air is the breath of incense and myrrh, whose paths are rose-strewn, whose dwellings are temples dedicated to but one small god.  The land is known as Love, and Rose travelled back to it on the magic rug of memory.

A family of five in a six-room Chicago flat must sacrifice sentiment to necessity.  There is precious little space for those pressed flowers, time-yellowed gowns, and ribbon-bound packets that figured so prominently in the days of attics.  Into the garbage can with yesterday’s roses!  The janitor’s burlap sack yawns for this morning’s mail; last year’s gown has long ago met its end at the hands of the ol’-clo’es man or the wash-woman’s daughter.  That they had survived these fourteen years, and the strictures of their owner’s dwelling, tells more about this boxful of letters than could be conveyed by a battalion of adjectives.

Rose began at the top of the pile, in her orderly fashion, and read straight through to the last.  It took one hour.  Half of that time she was not reading.  She was staring straight ahead with what is mistakenly called an unseeing look, but which actually pierces the veil of years and beholds things far, far beyond the vision of the actual eye.  They were the letters of a commonplace man to a commonplace woman, written when they loved each other, and so they were touched with something of the divine.  They must have been, else how could they have sustained this woman through fifteen years of drudgery?  They were the only tangible foundation left of the structure of dreams she had built about this man.  All the rest of her house of love had tumbled about her ears fifteen years before, but with these few remaining bricks she had erected many times since castles and towers more exquisite and lofty and soaring than the original humble structure had ever been.