of the verandas.

George walked by the Mansion hurriedly, and came home to his mother's
house for the last time.

Emptiness was there, too, and the closing of the door resounded through
bare rooms; for downstairs there was no furniture in the house except a
kitchen table in the dining room, which Fanny had kept "for dinner," she
said, though as she was to cook and serve that meal herself George had
his doubts about her name for it. Upstairs, she had retained her own
furniture, and George had been living in his mother's room, having sent
everything from his own to the auction. Isabel's room was still as it
had been, but the furniture would be moved with Fanny's to new quarters
in the morning. Fanny had made plans for her nephew as well as herself;
she had found a three-room "kitchenette apartment" in an apartment house
where several old friends of hers had established themselves--elderly
widows of citizens once "prominent" and other retired gentry. People
used their own "kitchenettes" for breakfast and lunch, but there was
a table-d'hote arrangement for dinner on the ground floor; and after
dinner bridge was played all evening, an attraction powerful with
Fanny. She had "made all the arrangements," she reported, and nervously
appealed for approval, asking if she hadn't shown herself "pretty
practical" in such matters. George acquiesced absent-mindedly, not
thinking of what she said and not realizing to what it committed him.

He began to realize it now, as he wandered about the dismantled house;
he was far from sure that he was willing to go and live in a "three-room
apartment" with Fanny and eat breakfast and lunch with her (prepared by
herself in the "kitchenette") and dinner at the table d'hote in "such a
pretty Colonial dining room" (so Fanny described it) at a little round
table they would have all to themselves in the midst of a dozen little
round tables which other relics of disrupted families would have all to
themselves. For the first time, now that the change was imminent, George
began to develop before his mind's eye pictures of what he was in for;
and they appalled him. He decided that such a life verged upon the
sheerly unbearable, and that after all there were some things left that
he just couldn't stand. So he made up his mind to speak to his aunt
about it at "dinner," and tell her that he preferred to ask Bronson to
let him put a sofa-bed, a trunk, and a folding rubber bathtub behind a
screen in the dar