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vases, the needle-point fire bench, the heavy oak chair from the Shipley place, the china cabinet and walnut sideboard from my father’s house. There’d not be room for all of these in some cramped apartment. We’d have to put them into storage, or sell them. I don’t want that. I couldn’t leave them. If I am not somehow contained in them and in this house, something of all change caught and fixed here, eternal enough for my purposes, then I do not know where I am to be found at all.
    “Maybe you’re forgetting,” Doris says, “I’m the one who has to look after this place. It’s me that trots up and down these stairs a hundred times a day, and lugs thevacuum cleaner up twice a week. I ought to have some say.”
    “I know,” Marvin says heavily. “I know that.”
    How he hates all this, the bicker-bicker of women, the recrimination. He ought to have been a hennit or a monk and lived somewhere beyond the reach of human voices.
    Probably she is right. I no longer make even a pretense of helping in the house. For so long I did, and finally saw I was only getting in her way, with my slow feet, and my hands that have to be coaxed to perform tasks. I have lived with Marvin and Doris—or they have lived in my house, whichever way one cares to phrase it—for seventeen years. Seventeen—it weighs like centuries. How have I borne it? How have they?
    “I always swore I’d never be a burden—”
    Now I perceive, too late, how laden with self-pity my voice sounds, and how filled with reproach. But they rise like fish to the bait.
    “No—don’t think that. We never said that, did we?”
    “Marv only meant—I only meant—”
    How ashamed I am, to play that worn old tune. And yet—I am not like Marvin. I do not have his urge to keep the peace. I am unreconciled to this question of the house, my house, mine.
    “I wouldn’t want the house sold, Marvin. I wouldn’t want that.”
    “Okay,” he says. “Let’s forget it.”
    “Forget it!” Doris’s voice is like a darning needle, heavy and sharp.
    “Please,” Marvin says, and Doris and I both sense his desperation. “I can’t stand all this racket. Well see. We’ll leave it now. Right now I’m going to see what’s on.”
    And he goes to the den—an appropriate name, for it is really his dark foxy den, where he looks at his flicker pictures and forgets whatever it is that bothers him. Doris and I accept the truce.
    “I’m going to evening service, Mother. Care to come along? You’ve not been for some time now.”
    Doris is very religious. She says it is a comfort. Her minister is plump and pink, and if he met John the Baptist in tatters in the desert, stuffing dead locusts into that parched mouth for food, and blazing the New Kingdom out of those terrible eyesockets, he would faint. But so would I, likely.
    “Not tonight, thanks. Next week, perhaps.”
    “I was going to ask him to call on you. The minister, I mean, Mr. Troy.”
    “In a week or so, perhaps. I haven’t felt much like talking lately.”
    “You wouldn’t need to talk so much. He’s awfully nice. It helps me, just to talk a few minutes with him.”
    “Thank you, Doris. But not this week, if you don’t mind.”
    Tact comes the hardest of all to me now. How to say that pearly Mr. Troy would be wasting his time in offering me his murmured words? Doris believes that age increases natural piety, like a kind of insurance policy falling due. I couldn’t explain. Who would understand, even if I strained to speak? I am past ninety, and this figure seems somehow arbitrary and impossible, for when I look in my mirror and beyond the changing shell that houses me, I see the eyes of Hagar Currie, the same dark eyes as when I first began to remember and to notice myself. I have never worn glasses. My eyes are still quite strong. The eyes change least of all. John’s eyes were gray, andeven near the last they looked the same to me as the boy’s, still that hidden eagerness as though he half