"Au revoir, mater."
"But you've got plenty of time!" she protested.
"I know," said he. "I'm not going to be late. I haven't the slightest notion where Headquarters are, and supposing the taxi had a break-down!"
He divined from the way in which she kissed him good-bye that she was excessively proud of him.
"Mater," he said, "I see you're still a girl."
As he was leaving, Mr. Clayhanger halted him.
"You said something in your last letter about storing the furniture, didn't you? Have ye made any inquiries?"
"No. But I've told Orgreave. You might look into that, because—well, you'll see."
From the hall he glanced into the dining-room and up the stairs. The furniture that filled the house had been new ten years earlier; it had been anybody's furniture. The passage of ten years, marvellously swift, had given character to the furniture, charged it with associations, scarred it with the history of a family—his family, individualized it, humanized it. It was no longer anybody's furniture. With a pang he pictured it numbered and crowded into a warehouse, forlorn, thick with dust, tragic, exiled from men and women.
He drove off, waving. His stepfather waved from the door, his mother waved from the dining-room; the cook had taken the children into the drawing-room, where they shook their short, chubby arms at him, smiling. On the second floor the back of the large rectangular mirror on the dressing-table presented a flat and wooden negative to his anxious curiosity.