Ted and Pinky, away at school, began to bring their friends back with them for the vacations Pinky’s room had been done over in cream enamel and rose-flowered cretonne.  She said the chromos in the hall spoiled the entire second floor.  So the gold frames, glittering undimmed, the checks as rosily glowing as ever, found temporary resting-places in a nondescript back chamber known as the serving room.  Then the new sleeping porch was built for Ted, and the portraits ended their journeying in the attic.

One paragraph will cover the cellar.  Stationary tubs, laundry stove.  Behind that, bin for potatoes, bin for carrots, bins for onions, apples, cabbages.  Boxed shelves for preserves.  And behind that Hosea C. Brewster’s bete noir and plaything, tyrant and slave—­the furnace.  “She’s eating up coal this winter,” Hosea Brewster would complain.  Or:  “Give her a little more draft, Fred.”  Fred, of the furnace and lawn mower, would shake a doleful head.  “She ain’t drawin’ good.  I do’ know what’s got into her.”

By noon of this particular September day—­a blue-and-gold Wisconsin September day—­Mrs. Brewster had reached that stage in the cleaning of the attic when it looked as if it would never be clean and orderly again.  Taking into consideration Miz’ Merz (Mis’ Merz by-the-day, you understand) and Gussie, the girl, and Fred, there was very little necessity for Mrs. Brewster’s official house-cleaning uniform.  She might have unpinned her skirt, unbound her head, rolled down her sleeves and left for the day, serene in the knowledge that no corner, no chandelier, no mirror, no curlicue so hidden, so high, so glittering, so ornate that it might hope to escape the rag or brush of one or the other of this relentless and expert crew.

Every year, twice a year, as this box, that trunk or chest was opened and its contents revealed, Mis’ Merz would say “You keepin’ this, Miz’ Brewster?”

“That?  Oh, dear yes!” Or:  “Well—­I don’t know.  You can take that home with you if you want it.  It might make over for Minnie.”

Yet why, in the name of all that’s ridiculous, did she treasure the funeral wheat wreath in the walnut frame?  Nothing is more passe than a last summer’s hat, yet the leghorn and pink-cambric-rose thing in the tin trunk was the one Mrs. Brewster had worn when a bride.  Then the plaid kilted dress with the black velvet monkey jacket that Pinky had worn when she spoke her first piece at the age of seven—­well, these were things that even the rapacious eye of Miz’ Merz (by-the-day) passed by unbrightened by covetousness.

The smell of soap and water, and cedar, and moth balls, and dust, and the ghost of a perfumery that Pinky used to use pervaded the hot attic.  Mrs. Brewster, head and shoulders in a trunk, was trying not to listen and not to seem not to listen to Miz’ Merz’ recital of her husband’s relations’ latest flagrancy.