I can still remember the sombre aisles of that house, the vault-like shadows, the magnificent window curtains that blotted out the windows.  Life was too trivial for such things.  She never knew she tired of them, but she did.  That was the secret of her temper, I think; they engendered her sombre Calvinism, her perception of the trashy quality of human life.  The pretence that they were the accessories to human life was too transparent. We were the accessories; we minded them for a little while, and then we passed away.  They wore us out and cast us aside.  We were the changing scenery; they were the actors who played on through the piece.  It was even so with clothing.  We buried my other maternal aunt—­Aunt Adelaide—­and wept, and partly forgot her; but her wonderful silk dresses—­they would stand alone—­still went rustling cheerfully about an ephemeral world.

All that offended my sense of proportion, my feeling of what is due to human life, even when I was a little boy.  I want things of my own, things I can break without breaking my heart; and, since one can live but once, I want some change in my life—­to have this kind of thing and then that.  I never valued Aunt Charlotte’s good old things until I sold them.  They sold remarkably well:  those chairs like nether millstones for the grinding away of men; the fragile china—­an incessant anxiety until accident broke it, and the spell of it at the same time; those silver spoons, by virtue of which Aunt Charlotte went in fear of burglary for six-and-fifty years; the bed from which I alone of all my kindred had escaped; the wonderful old, erect, high-shouldered, silver-faced clock.

But, as I say, our ideas are changing—­mahogany has gone, and repp curtains.  Articles are made for man, nowadays, and not man, by careful early training, for articles.  I feel myself to be in many respects a link with the past.  Commodities come like the spring flowers, and vanish again.  “Who steals my watch steals trash,” as some poet has remarked; the thing is made of I know not what metal, and if I leave it on the mantel for a day or so it goes a deep blackish purple that delights me exceedingly.  My grandfather’s hat—­I understood when I was a little boy that I was to have that some day.  But now I get a hat for ten shillings, or less, two or three times a year.  In the old days buying clothes was well-nigh as irrevocable as marriage.  Our flat is furnished with glittering things—­wanton arm-chairs just strong enough not to collapse under you, books in gay covers, carpets you are free to drop lighted fusees upon; you may scratch what you like, upset your coffee, cast your cigar ash to the four quarters of heaven.  Our guests, at anyrate, are not snubbed by our furniture.  It knows its place.