thing? something a different home
would have embodied?

Maude and the children had gone, to the seaside.

With a vague uneasiness I turned away from the contemplation of those
walls. The companion mansions were closed, their blinds tightly drawn;
the neighbourhood was as quiet as the country, save for a slight but
persistent noise that impressed itself on my consciousness. I walked
around the house to spy in the back yard; a young girl rather stealthily
gathering laths, and fragments of joists and flooring, and loading
them into a child's express-wagon. She started when she saw me. She was
little, more than a child, and the loose calico dress she wore seemed
to emphasize her thinness. She stood stock-still, staring at me with
frightened yet defiant eyes. I, too, felt a strange timidity in her
presence.

"Why do you stop?" I asked at length.

"Say, is this your heap?" she demanded.

I acknowledged it. A hint of awe widened her eyes. Then site glanced at
the half-filled wagon.

"This stuff ain't no use to you, is it?"

"No, I'm glad to have you take it."

She shifted to the other foot, but did not continue her gathering.
An impulse seized me, I put down my walkingstick and began picking up
pieces of wood, flinging them into the wagon. I looked at her again,
rather furtively; she had not moved. Her attitude puzzled me, for it
was one neither of surprise nor of protest. The spectacle of the
"millionaire" owner of the house engaged in this menial occupation gave
her no thrills. I finished the loading.

"There!" I said, and drew a dollar bill out of my pocket and gave it to
her. Even then she did not thank me, but took up the wagon tongue and
went off, leaving on me a disheartening impression of numbness, of
life crushed out. I glanced up once more at the mansion I had built for
myself looming in the dusk, and walked hurriedly away....

One afternoon some three weeks after we had moved into the new house,
I came out of the Club, where I had been lunching in conference with
Scherer and two capitalists from New York. It was after four o'clock,
the day was fading, the street lamps were beginning to cast sickly
streaks of jade-coloured light across the slush of the pavements. It was
the sight of this slush (which for a brief half hour that morning
had been pure snow, and had sent Matthew and Moreton and Biddy into
ecstasies at the notion of a "real Christmas"), that brought to my mind
the immanence of the festival, a