“Yes, I guess I don’t.”

“Seems to me it’s dreadful queer; I guess your memory ain’t as good as mine.  I s’pose you’re beginnin’ to feel kind of wonted here, Esther?  It’s a pretty big house, but then it ain’t as if you hadn’t been here before.  I s’pose it seems kind of familiar to you, if you ain’t seen it for so long; I s’pose it all comes back to you, don’t it?”

There was a pause.  “No, I’m afraid it don’t,” said Mrs. Field her pale severe face fronting the other woman.  Although fairly started forth in the slough of deceit, she still held up her Puritan skirts arduously.

“It’s kind of queer it don’t, ain’t it?” returned Mrs. Maxwell.  “The house ain’t been altered any, an’ the furniture’s jest the same.  Thomas, he wouldn’t have a thing altered; the carpet in his bedroom is wore threadbare, but he wouldn’t get a new one nohow.  Mis’ Jay, she wanted him to get a new cookin’-stove, but he wouldn’t hear to it; much as ever he’d let her have a new broom.  And it wa’n’t because he was stingy; it was jest because he was kind of set, an’ had got into the way of thinkin’ nothin’ had ought to be changed.  It wa’n’t never my way; I never believed in hangin’ on to old shackly things because you’ve always had ’em.  There ain’t no use tryin’ to set down tables an’ chairs as solid as the everlastin’ hills.  There was Mis’ Perry, she that was buried this afternoon, Mr. Perry’s mother, when she came here to live after her husband died, she sold off every stick of her old furniture, an’ got the handsomest marble-top set that money could buy for her room.  She got some pictures in gilt frames too, and a tapestry carpet, and vases and images for her mantel-shelf.  She said folks could talk about associations all they wanted to, she hadn’t no associations with a lot of old worm-eaten furniture; she’d rather have some that was clean an’ new.  H’m, anybody to hear folks talk sometimes would think they were blood-relations to old secretaries and bureaus.”

Mrs. Maxwell screwed her face contemptuously, as if the talking folk were before her, and there was a pause.  The young man looked across at Lois, then turned to her mother, as if about to speak, but his aunt interposed.

“Esther,” said she, “I jest wanted to ask you if there wa’n’t two of them old swell-front bureaus in the north chamber upstairs.”

“I guess there is,” replied Mrs. Field.  She sat leaning forward toward her callers, with her face fairly strained into hospitable attention.

“Well, I wanted to know.  I ain’t come beggin’, an’ I’d ’nough sight rather have a good clean new one, but I’m kind of short of bureau drawers, an’ I’d kind of like to have it because ‘twas Thomas’.  I wonder if you wouldn’t jest as soon I’d have one of them bureaus?”

Mrs. Field’s face gleamed suddenly.  “You can have it jest as well as not,” said she.