uckster's cart. Perched on the seat was a Greek who turned his dusky
face up toward the two women leaning over the porch railings. "Rhubarb,
leddy. Fresh rhubarb!"

"My folks don't care for rhubarb sauce," Rose told the woman next door.

"It makes the worst pie in the world," the woman confided to Rose.

Whereupon each bought a bunch of the succulent green and red stalks. It
was their offering at the season's shrine.

Rose flung the rhubarb on the kitchen table, pulled her dust-cap more
firmly about her ears, and hurried back to the disorder of Floss's dim
little bedroom. After that it was dust-cloth, and soapsuds, and
scrub-brush in a race against recurrent water bags, insistent doorbells,
and the inevitable dinner hour. It was mid-afternoon when Rose, standing
a-tiptoe on a chair, came at last to the little box on the top shelf
under the bedding in the hall closet. Her hand touched the box, and
closed about it. A little electric thrill vibrated through her body. She
stepped down from the chair, heavily, listened until her acute ear
caught the sound of the sick woman's slumbrous breathing; then, box in
hand, walked down the dark hall to the kitchen. The rhubarb pie, still
steaming in its pan, was cooling on the kitchen table. The dishes from
the invalid's lunch-tray littered the sink. But Rose, seated on the
kitchen chair, her rumpled dust-cap pushed back from her flushed,
perspiring face, untied the rude bit of string that bound the old candy
box, removed the lid, slowly, and by that act was wafted magically out
of the world of rhubarb pies, and kitchen chairs, and dirty dishes, into
that place whose air is the breath of incense and myrrh, whose paths are
rose-strewn, whose dwellings are temples dedicated to but one small god.
The land is known as Love, and Rose travelled back to it on the magic
rug of memory.

A family of five in a six-room Chicago flat must sacrifice sentiment to
necessity. There is precious little space for those pressed flowers,
time-yellowed gowns, and ribbon-bound packets that figured so
prominently in the days of attics. Into the garbage can with yesterday's
roses! The janitor's burlap sack yawns for this morning's mail; last
year's gown has long ago met its end at the hands of the ol'-clo'es man
or the wash-woman's daughter. That they had survived these fourteen
years, and the strictures of their owner's dwelling, tells more about
this boxful of letters than could be conveyed by a battalio