years, just squirrel fashion, until I forgot what I had or where I put
them. You cannot know what joy I'm going to have in selecting just the
essential books, the ones I want by me for daily companions. All the
others, I see now, are temporary rubbish."

"And you've made your selections?"

"No, but I'm making them. You'll laugh when you come next time and I
show them to you. Oh, I am going to be stern with myself. I'm not going
to put a single book in that case for show, nor a single one to give the
impression that I'm profoundly interested in Egypt or Maeterlinck or
woman suffrage, when I'm positively not."

"It's terribly risky," I said.

"And I'm terribly reckless," she responded.

As I went onward toward the town I looked back from the hilltop beyond
the big house for a last glimpse of the reconstructed barn, and with a
curious warm sense of having been admitted to a new adventure. Here was
life changing under my eyes! Here was a human being struggling with one
of the deep common problems that come to all of us. The revolt from
things! The struggle with superfluities!

And yet as I walked along the cool aisles of the woods with the quiet
fields opening here and there to the low hill ridges, and saw the cattle
feeding, and heard a thrush singing in a thicket, I found myself letting
go--how can I explain it?--relaxing! I had been keyed up to a high pitch
there in that extraordinary room, Yes, it _was_ beautiful--and yet as I
thought of the sharp little green gate, the new gable, the hard, clean