as that. It's an insult to my intelligence. Do you think I don't
know my own mind?"

"I don't know _my_ mind," the girl said, so persistently, obstinately,
stubbornly, that her mother did not pursue the subject for fear of
worse.

She referred it to her husband, who said: "Perhaps it's like poets
never being able to remember their own poetry. I've heard it's because
they have several versions in their minds when they write and can't
remember which they've written. Charlotte has several choices in her
mind, and can't choose between her choices."

"Well, we ought to have broken her of her indecision. Some day it will
make her very unhappy."

"Pretty hard to break a person of her temperament," Forsyth suggested.

"I know it!" his wife admitted, with a certain pleasure in realizing
the fact. "I don't know what we _shall_ do."

III

Storage society was almost wholly feminine; in rare instances there
was a man who must have been sent in dearth of women or in an hour of
their disability. Then the man came hastily, with a porter, and either
pulled all the things out of the rooms so that he could honestly say
he had seen them, and that the thing wanted was not there; or else
merely had the doors opened, and after a glance inside resolved to
wait till his wife, or mother, or daughter could come. He agreed in
guilty eagerness with the workmen that this was the only way.

The exception to the general rule was a young man who came one bright
spring morning when all nature suggested getting one's stuff out and
going into the country, and had the room next the Forsyths' original
five-dollar room opened. As it happened, Charlotte was at the moment
visiting this room upon her mother's charge to see whether certain old
scrim sash-curtains, which they had not needed for ages but at last
simply _must_ have, were not lurking there in a chest of general
curtainings. The Forsyths now had rooms on other floors, but their
main room was at the end of the corridor branching northward from that
where the five-dollar room was. Near this main room that nice New York
family had their rooms, and Charlotte had begun the morning in their
friendly neighborhood, going through some chests that might perhaps
have the general curtainings in them and the scrim curtains among the
rest. It had not, and she had gone to what the Forsyths called their
old ancestral five-dollar room, where that New York family continued