“Did you sleep well?” he asked.
“Fine,” I lied.
“Go right in to dinner.” He waved his hand. “It’s better than what you got here last night—beef!”
I hoped he hadn’t ordered it on my account.
“Alf,” said I, interrupting him between the Chile greens and yellows, “Is there any attic to that house of mine?”
“Nope,” he replied, “they ain’t. They never was. They don’t have ’em around here.”
That was what I wanted to find out. The room over the captain’s wing had never been heard of by the townspeople.
“They don’t build the roofs that high,” he explained, anxious to defend the architecture of the cape from ignorant criticism, “on account of the wind. It would rip ’em right off, take a big tempest.”
“What do they do with their old furniture, then?”
“Use it.”