The summer had gone by and Ted Holland, who had gone West with Ruth in May, was back in Freeport "breaking up the house." The place was offered for sale; things had to be cleared out in one way or another. What none of the children wanted was being sold to anybody who did happen to want it; what nobody wanted was to be given away to such people as had to take what they could get. And there was a great deal of it not even in the class for giving away; "just truck" Ted kept callously calling it to Harriett and their Cousin Flora. He whistled vigorously over some of the "truck,"—a worn dog's collar, an old pair of the queer kind of house shoes his mother wore, a spectacle case he had used to love to hear his father snap shut, dusty, leaky sofa-pillows that had bristled with newness in the "den" which was the delight of his sixteen-year-old heart. He kept saying to Cousin Flora that there was no end to the junk—old school readers, Ruth's party slippers. Just burn it all up, he said, in a crisp voice of efficiency; what was it good for, anyhow? Certainly it had taught him a lesson. He'd never keep anything.
They had been at it for a week—sorting, destroying, disbursing, scattering what a family's life through a generation had assembled, breaking up "the Hollands." Ted, in his own room that morning, around him the things he was going to put in his trunk for taking back West, admitted to himself that it was gruesome business.
Things were over; things at home were all over. This pulling to pieces drove that home hard. Father and mother were gone and now "their stuff" was being got out of the way. After this there would not even be a place where the things they had used were. But he would be glad when they could get through with it; he was finding that there was something wrenching about things that were left, things that had been used and that now there was no longer any use for. The sight of them stabbed as no mere thinking about things could do. It was hard work throwing away "truck" that something seemed to cling to. It was hard to really get it, he was thinking; a family lived in a place—seemed really a part of that place, an important part, perhaps; then things changed—people died, moved away, and that family simply wasn't any more—and things went on just about the same. Whistling, he put some shirts in his trunk, trying to fix his mind on how many new shirts he needed.
He was going back West—to live, to work. Not right where Ruth was, in southwestern Colorado, but in the country a little to the north. He and a fellow he had made friends with out there had bought an apple orchard—the money he was to have from his father would go into it and some of Ruth's money—she wanted him to invest some of hers with his. It was that had made it possible for him to go in with this fellow. He was glad he could do it. The West had "got" him. He believed he could make things go.
And he shouldn't have liked staying on in Freeport. Too many things were different for him to want to stay there. And too many things hurt. Ruth had come to mean too much to him to let him be happy with people who felt as the people there did about her.
He heard Harriett downstairs and went down to speak to her about the price the stove man offered for the kitchen range. He remembered his mother's delight in that range as new; somehow it made him hate selling it for this pittance.
Harriett thought, however, that they had better let it go. One couldn't expect to get much for old things, and they didn't want it on their hands.
They stayed there awhile in the dining-room, considering the problem of getting out of the way various other things there was no longer any use for. Harriett was looking at the bay window. "If the Woodburys take the house," she said, "they won't want these shades."
"Oh, no," replied Ted, "they wouldn't be good enough for Mildred."
The Woodburys had been there the night before to look at the house; they thought of buying it and Mildred, just recently home from Europe with Edith Blair—they had had a hard time getting home, because of the war—had, according to his own way of putting it, made Ted tired. She was so fretful with her father and her ideas of how the place could perhaps be made presentable by being all done over had seemed to Ted "pretty airy." He'd rather strangers had the house. He heard that Mildred was going about a lot with Bob Gearing—one of the fellows in town who had money.