There were times when Mrs. Simon Meyerburg, who was threescore and ten years removed from the days when her bare feet had run fleet across a plushy meadow, would pause, hand on brow, when a memory, perhaps moving as it crumpled, would pass before her in faded daguerreotype.  A gallery of events—­so many pictures faded from her mental walls that the gaps seemed, as it were, to separate her from herself, making of her and that swift-footed girl back there vague strangers.  And yet the vivid canvases!  A peasant child at a churn, switching her black braids this way and that when they dangled too far over her shoulders; a linnet dead in its cage outside a thatched doorway, and the taste of her first heart tears; a hand-made crib in a dark corner and hardly ever empty of a little new-comer.

Then gaps, except here and there a faded bit.  Then again large memories close and full of color:  Simon Meyerburg, with the years folded back and youth on him, wooing her beside a stile that led off a South German country road, his peasant cap fallen back off his strong black curls, and even then a seer’s light in his strong black eyes.  Her own black eyes more diffident now and the black braids looped up and bound in a tight coronet round her head.  The voice of the mother calling her homeward through cupped hands and in the Low Dutch of the Lowlands.  A moonrise and the sweet, vivid smell of evening, and once more the youth Simon Meyerburg wooing her there beside the roadside stile.

The crowded steerage of a wooden ship, her first son suckling at her breast.  At the prow Simon Meyerburg again, his peasant cap pushed backward and his black eyes, with the seer’s light in them, gleaming ahead for the first glimpse of the land of fulfilment.  An unbelievable city sucking them immediately into its slums.  Filth.  A quick descent into squalor.  A second son.  A third.  A fourth.  A fifth.  A girl child.  Mouths too eager for black bread.  Always the struggle and the sour smell of slums.  Finally light.  White light.  The seer sees!

Then, ever green in her mind, a sun-mottled kitchen with a black iron range, and along the walls festoons of looped-up green peppers.  White bread now in abundance for small mouths not so hungry.  At evening, Simon Meyerburg, with rims of dirt under his nails, entering that kitchen door, the girl child turning from her breast to leap forward....

Sometimes in her stately halls, caught, as it were, in passing from room to room, Mrs. Simon Meyerburg would pause, assaulted by these memories of days so remote that her mind could not always run back to meet them.  Then again the glittering present studded with the jewels of fulfilment lay on her brow like the thin line of a headache, pressing out the past.

In Mrs. Meyerburg’s bedroom a great arched ceiling, after the narrative manner of Paolo Veronese, lent such vastness to the apartment that moving across it, or sitting in her great overstuffed armchair beside a window, she hardly struck a note.  Great wealth lay in canopied silence over that room.  A rug out of Persia, so large that countless extra years and countless pairs of tired eyes and tired fingers had gone to make it, let noises sink noiseless into its nap.  Brocade and tufting ate up sound.  At every window more brocade shut out the incessant song of the Avenue.