Lily. Mary
remembered that those were the days when she was happy in _things_--in
the house and the look of the rooms and of the little garden from the
porch, and of the old red-cushioned rocking-chairs on the tiny "stoop."
She had loved her clothes and her little routines, and all these things
had seemed desirable and ultimate because they two were sharing them.
Then one day Mary had joined Lily and Adam there on the porch, and Lily
had been looking up with new eyes, and Mary had searched her face, and
then Adam's face; and they had all seemed in a sudden nakedness; and
Mary had known that a great place was closed against her.

Since then house and porch and garden and routines had become like those
of other places. She had always been shut outside something, and always
she had borne burdens. The death of her parents, gadflys of need, worst
of all a curious feeling that the place closed against her was somehow
herself--that, so to say, she and herself had never once met. She used
to say that to herself sometimes, "There's two of me, and we don't
meet--we don't meet."

"And now he wants me to take her boy and Adam's," she kept saying; "I'll
never do such a thing--never."

She thought that the news of Lily's death was what gave her the strange,
bodily hurt that had seized her--the news that what she was used to was
gone; that she had no sister; that the days of their being together and
all the tasks of their upbringing were finished. Then she thought that
the remembering of those days of her happiness and her pain, and the
ache of what might have been and of what never was, had come to torture
her again. But the feeling was rather the weight of some imminent thing,
the ravage of something that grew with what it fed on, the grasp upon
her of something that would not let her go....

She had never seen them after their marriage, and so she had never seen
either of the children. Lily had once sent her a picture of John, but
she had never sent one of this other little boy. Mary tried to recall
what they had ever said of him. She could not even remember his
baptismal name, but she knew that they had called him "Yes" because it
was the first word he had learned to say, and because he had said it to
everything. "The baby can say 'Yes,'" Lily had written once; "I guess
it's all he'll ever be able to say. He says it all day long. He won't
try to say anything else." And once later: "We've taken to calling the
baby 'Yes,' and no