"Why don't you like it?" (He really wanted to know.)
"Because I don't feel comfortable in it."
"Oh, I'm so sorry, dear. Perhaps—we'd better have some new things."
"I don't want any new things."
"What do you want, then?" His voice was gentleness itself.
"Just to move all the old ones—to move everything."
She spoke with an almost infantile petulance that appealed to him as pathetic. There was something terrible about Anne when armoured in the cold steel of her spirituality, taking her stand upon a lofty principle. But Anne, sitting on a high-backed chair, uttering tremulous absurdities, Anne, protected by the unconscious humour of her own ill-temper, was adorable. He loved this humanly captious and capricious, childishly unreasonable Anne. And her voice was sweet even in petulance.
"My darling," he said, "you shall turn the whole house upside down if it makes you any happier. But"—he looked round the room in quest of its deficiencies—"what's wrong with it?"
"Nothing's wrong. You don't understand."
"No, I don't." His eye fell upon the corner where the piano once stood that was now in Edith's room.