“Well, just you try it! And you’ll find yourself going back to school to spend your holidays with the janitor.”
In the pause that followed this awful threat Jack murmured: “Never go a-sploring any more!” and then sat as one paralyzed by an awful and unexpected blow.
Mrs. Mar replaced the handleless cup upon the table, and took up the corner of the cloth to determine the extent of a damage wrought in the last washing.
“Everything we possess seems to be giving out at once—like the different parts of the One Hoss Shay. It’s exactly”—she turned her bright, dark eyes toward the writing-table, and spoke with a sudden access of vigor—“exactly as if there was a law that allowed you for months and years to patch and tinker, to bolster up your rickety furniture, to darn your old carpets, to reseat your old chairs, to make over the clothes, to solder the saucepans, and keep things going generally, up to a given moment. But when that moment comes”—she lifted her finger Sibyl-like in the air—“every blessed belonging begins to crack, or fray, or creak with the pangs of approaching dissolution. Are you listening to what I say, Nathaniel? There isn’t a thing in this house that doesn’t need to be renewed.” She spoke with a directness that seemed pointedly to include her husband among the dilapidations. He, half-absent, half-speculative, looked round upon objects familiar to him from childhood.
“Who’d ever think,” pursued his wife, “who’d ever think that we’d been married less than eight years? But this is what comes of not furnishing new when you first set up housekeeping. If you don’t get nice things when you marry you never get them.”
“Some people,” said Mar, “seem to like old furniture.”
“Let them have it, then!” Her quick gesture presented the entire contents of the house to the first bidder. “I say for young people to begin life with the battered belongings of their fathers and mothers is a mistake.”
“Well, my dear,” returned her husband, with some dignity, “it’s a mistake you had no share in. But,” he added hastily, “we had no choice.”