"Well, think of it this way. Mrs. Brace-Gideon has been gone a long, long time. Long before our fathers and mothers were born, even. So now she's like someone in a book, or in history. If we were a couple of archaeologists digging up a buried palace that had belonged to an ancient queen or something, we wouldn't feel wrong about it, would we?"
"No, I suppose not."
"Well, there you are," Julian said handily, and Portia felt better.
Among the large trunks there was a very small one, a box really, covered with cowhide and bearing on its curved lid the initial D, made of brass nailheads. She lifted the lid cautiously (she had been very cautious since opening the fur trunk) and saw that the little chest was filled to the brim with yellowed paper bundles.
"Jule, come here; let's see what these are."
The paper was so old that it crumbled and powdered when she opened the first bundle; and what it had contained was a sea shell, curved and dappled as a little quail.
"Why, how pretty!"
"Look, it's got a label on it, too."
And so it had; a tiny glued-on label with the Latin name of the shell written on it in meticulous old-fashioned handwriting.
"Cypraea zebra," Julian read, pronouncing the zebra part correctly.