What a time is moving! A self-willed chaos to familiar routines and associations, an involuntary revisiting of dead hours and buried sensations. It brings an endless plowing up of forgotten once-hallowed trifles, which the fond heart would fain reject, but can not; it is a rooted and ample world fitted into packing cases, hustled and baled into temporary death. The old life was and is not, the new life is still to begin. It warns of the shaky foundations beneath rooted habitudes; and at the same time calls forth adventure and daring in the soul of man.
Such thoughts thronged Paul Judson's mind, in disjointed sequence, as his busy steps took him through the large littered rooms of the family mansion. He wore his old garden shoes, stained by grass and lime, scuffed by cinders: a pair of carefully patched brown woolen trousers, the lower half of a once prized suit; and a blue-figured shirt, turned to a V at the neck, with a green paint blotch on one side which strenuous laundryings had not been able to efface. A wall mirror gave him a passing reflection of himself; he smiled as he pictured what would have been his father's horror at such ungentlemanly garb. Boxes of books, ropes for the extra trunks, piles of straw for the china—all these must be arranged under his eyes. He packed the fragile Haviland and the shaped fish set, used only on unusual occasions, with his own hands. He knew negroes; you couldn't trust them with a thing.
He looked irritably under lumped old quilts, piles of table linen, and cloth-shielded pictures. "Mary!" he demanded, sharply.
"Yes, dear?" She dropped what she had been doing at once.
A free hand gestured nervously. "The hammer—I had it just a moment ago."
An experienced gaze interrogated the room. It was the ninth call for that hammer since breakfast had been cleared away.
Just beyond the door an empty packing-case gaped. She put her hand on the missing implement, cached within it.
The troubled line left his forehead. "We'll take the pictures next," he said curtly, bending again to his task.
Mary Judson stood watching his efficient activity. She had stayed unnoticed at his elbow nearly all the morning, to anticipate these calls. He continued hammering energetically, unconscious of her observation.
He straightened his still youthful shoulders a moment, to lift a stack of heavy books from the mantel. Paul Judson, as she loved best to remember him, furnished the food for her musings; they dwelt in haphazard inconsecutiveness upon his erect figure at the head of the Decoration Day line of his company, upon his ardent face bending over tiny Pelham's crib, upon his wry expression yesterday while she bandaged a cut wrist; then to the alien admiration her kindly brother felt for the husband's driving vitality.