"No, I'll stay here till you've done."
"Oh, I sha'n't have done all for several days," she said, pleading.
But she knew that look in his face. No use to urge. She turned away, and scattered the charred paper down on to the hearth among the journal bindings. He made the fire up again for her. Then, one by one, she took from the mantelpiece all the old photographs of her husband, and laid them on the flame—all but the one of the baby Ethan, which she thrust in her dress, keeping her face hidden from her husband. Then she went over to a pile of pictures he had not noticed before, lying by the buffet.
She took a little hammer with a claw handle out of the drawer, and bent over the frames, loosening the nails, taking out the pictures and tearing them up.
"What are those?"
"Aunt Valeria's—"
"Why do you bother with them?"
"I don't want people to be smiling at them. Oh, Ethan," she cried out with the sharpness of intolerable pain, "I—I can't bear it, if you sit there watching me! I can do it alone almost callously, thinking very little of them, thinking about you and me, till all these poor reminders are just old paper; but you—" She hid her face.
"They are just old paper, dear."
He went over to her, and she turned from him, trembling.