“Here, take this—take this—take this!” she began to say carelessly, picking one garment after another from the low row of ghostly forms dangling against the eaves. “Mr. Madison’s army coats——”
“But, Mrs. Madison, this is beautiful beaver on this suit—yards of it!”
“Take it—take it!” Merle’s equable mother said feverishly, almost irritably. “Here, I shall never wear this fur coat again, and all these hats—I suppose those plumes are worth something!”
She was an energetic, restless creature. The hard work strangely calmed her, and just before dinner she was settling down to it almost with enjoyment. The summons to the meal annoyed her.
“Suppose we come back to it and make a thorough job?” she suggested.
Merle’s heart leaped for joy.
“But you ought to be in bed, Kiddie,” her mother said, not urgently, when dinner was over.
“Oh, mother, please! It’s Christmas Eve!” Merle begged, with all the force of her agonized eight years.
So here they all were again, and the snow was still falling outside, and the electric lights on their swinging cords were sending an eerie light over the miscellaneous shapes and contours of the attic, now making the shadow of an old what-not rush across the floor with startling vitality, now plunging the gloomy eaves behind Merle into alarming darkness.
Pyramids of books were on the floor, magazines tied in sixes with pink cord, curtains, rugs, beds, heaped mattresses, trunks, boxes, the usual wheel-chair and the usual crutch—all the significant, gathered driftwood of sixty years of living was strewn and packed and heaped and hung about.