“You do that!” Mattie agreed, passing a hand over her heated face. “That used you forget what they’re like altogether. Why, I found I didn’t even know the shapes and sizes of things when I came to look at them!”
“They get part of a place,—that’s what it is,” Kirkby said. “You don’t see them as if they were by themselves, but as if they were built in.”
“Ours seemed built in right enough, this morning, anyhow,—I know that! I never remember them taking such a lot of managing before. It was almost as if they knew what it was all about, and didn’t mean to budge if they could help it!”
It was warmer this morning, Kirkby said, and likely she was feeling it a bit,—looking out as he spoke at the thin, young, spring-glow lying over the gardens, and wondering again how yesterday could have been so different.
“Nay, it wasn’t that altogether, though I’m not saying it mightn’t have something to do with it....” Getting up, Mattie set an open tart, light as an autumn leaf, on the table between them. “But I can tell you I was real taken aback when I found I didn’t even know my own furniture! I made sure, for instance, as that dresser of ours would be first-class for the new house, but now that I’ve had a right good look at it, I doubt it’s over-big. Then I thought as how that corner-cupboard we bought would do nicely for our pots, but as soon as I got it down I saw it was too small. It’s a queer thing, it seems to me, when you’re so far out with your own stuff! It’s like living with folks that long you don’t even know their faces.”
“They get part of you,” Kirkby said once more, as he had said about the house. “Faces or furniture, it’s the same thing. They get that much part of you, after a while, you don’t rightly seem to notice them.”
Mattie looked about her at the disordered fittings with a mixture of affection and distaste, much as a mother might look at a host of unruly children. “Ay, they do get part of you,” she agreed reluctantly. “I never thought I should mind parting with anything in this house. I never liked the things, as you don’t need telling, even though we bought ’em together; nay, nor the house, neither. But I found, when it came to it, that I wasn’t over-keen on letting any of ’em go. It seemed sort of cruel, somehow, to go leaving them behind.”
“You’ll not think twice about ’em,” he assured her, “once they’re out of the road. There’s no need to go fretting yourself over a thing like that.”
“I’m not fretting myself, not I,—nor likely to be!...” She laughed across at him, her lips curving and her eyes shining. She had always been a woman of a fluid temperament, easily up and down, but of late years it had seemed to him that she had grown a little dry. “Dry” seemed particularly the right word, he thought, looking at her to-day, reminding him as she did of a thirsty plant that was lifting its head in the rain.
“I’d be likely to fret, wouldn’t I, on a day like this?”... She leaned towards him, laying her arms on the table, and emanating so much sheer radiance of spirit that it almost seemed as if there were an actual halo round her. “Why, I’ve been rubbing my eyes half the morning thinking it couldn’t be true! That was why I was in such a hurry to get things sorted out. It seemed as if it helped to bring it all that much nearer.”