“Yes! At last! What a lot of perfectly worthless trash accumulates around us. Not beautiful, not even useful! And it is not only the lives of the well-to-do that are choked and cluttered with things. I wish you could see the house of our Polish farmer. He's been saving money, and filling up his house with perfectly worthless ornaments—ornate clocks, gorgeous plush furniture, impossible rugs—and yet he is only doing what we are all doing on a more elaborate scale.”
I laughed.
“That reminds me of a family of squirrels that lives in an oak tree on my hill,” I said. “I am never tired of watching them. In the fall they work desperately, stealing all the hickory nuts and chestnuts on my neighbour Horace's back pastures, five times as many as they need, and then they forget, half the time, where they've hidden them. We're all more or less in the squirrel stage of civilization.”
“Yes,” she responded. “There are my books! I gathered up books for years, just squirrel fashion, until I forgot what I had or where I put them. You cannot know what joy I'm going to have in selecting just the essential books, the ones I want by me for daily companions. All the others, I see now, are temporary rubbish.”
“And you've made your selections?”
“No, but I'm making them. You'll laugh when you come next time and I show them to you. Oh, I am going to be stern with myself. I'm not going to put a single book in that case for show, nor a single one to give the impression that I'm profoundly interested in Egypt or Maeterlinck or woman suffrage, when I'm positively not.”
“It's terribly risky,” I said.
“And I'm terribly reckless,” she responded.
As I went onward toward the town I looked back from the hilltop beyond the big house for a last glimpse of the reconstructed barn, and with a curious warm sense of having been admitted to a new adventure. Here was life changing under my eyes! Here was a human being struggling with one of the deep common problems that come to all of us. The revolt from things! The struggle with superfluities!
And yet as I walked along the cool aisles of the woods with the quiet fields opening here and there to the low hill ridges, and saw the cattle feeding, and heard a thrush singing in a thicket, I found myself letting go—how can I explain it?—relaxing! I had been keyed up to a high pitch there in that extraordinary room, Yes, it was beautiful—and yet as I thought of the sharp little green gate, the new gable, the hard, clean mantel with the cloisonne vase, it wanted something....