the least, nondescript as it could be, with a slate French roof. Will and I thought it would answer the purpose, however—even though the bathtub was tin—and moved into it when the brick sidewalk was sprinkled with yellow maple-leaves, and the gutter was collecting dry ones.
I didn't know a soul in the town. I didn't know the name of a single street except our own. I didn't know where to go to buy even a spool of thread. But I wasn't homesick—oh, no, I wasn't homesick. You see I had forgotten the joy of my own kitchen and pantry; I had forgotten what a collander looked like; I had forgotten how sweet a row of cups are hanging by their handles, underneath a shelf edged with scalloped paper!
I enjoyed acting as my own mistress too; though I am sure if Edith had known what I was up to, she would have left all the pleasures of Paris to set me in the right path. For I didn't even unpack some of my wedding presents. They didn't fit in very well with Will's furniture which he had freighted down from the old white-pillared house in Hilton, and every sliver of which I simply adored. It wasn't colonial furniture, understand, which is so fashionable nowadays, but black walnut of the seventies—high-backed armchairs and sofas and marble-topped bedroom tables. There were funny old steel engravings of the United States Senate, battle scenes, and Abraham Lincoln, besides some big heavy bronzes that Will told me were very valuable. The sideboard was black walnut like everything else and Edith's elaborate silver service made it look so out-of-date that I put on it instead my own mother's old coffee-pot—the one that used to be
