had taught Pervus to figure and parse); a dried bunch of trilliums; a bustled and panniered wine-red cashmere dress, absurdly old-fashioned; a letter telling about the Infanta Eulalie of Spain, and signed Julie Hempel Arnold; a pair of men’s old side-boots with mud caked on them; a crude sketch, almost obliterated now, done on a torn scrap of brown paper and showing the Haymarket with the wagons vegetable-laden and the men gathered beneath the street-flares, and the patient farm horses—Roelf’s childish sketch.
Among this rubbish she rummaged periodically in the years that followed. Indeed, twenty years later Dirk, coming upon her smoothing out the wrinkled yellow creases of the I. O. U. or shaking the camphor-laden folds of the wine-red cashmere, would say, “At it again! What a sentimental generation yours was, Mother. Pressed flowers! They went out with the attic, didn’t they? If the house caught fire you’d probably run for the junk in that chest. It isn’t worth two cents, the lot of it.”
“Perhaps not,” Selina said, slowly. “‘Still, there’d be some money value, I suppose, in an early original signed sketch by Rodin.”
“Rodin! You haven’t got a”
“No, but here’s one by Pool—Roelf Pool—signed. At a sale in New York last week one of his sketches—not a finished thing at all—just a rough drawing that he’d made of some figures in a group that went into the Doughboy statue—brought one thous-”
“Oh, well, that—yes. But the rest of the stuff
