remember how they lacked moral courage to beg him to choose another
chair). The table, laid for two, was too painful to behold, and they
never enjoyed a meal, hardly could they eat, till at last it was decided
that his place should be laid for him as if he had gone away on a
journey, and might appear in the doorway and sit down with them and
share the repast as of yore--a pretty deception the folly of which they
were alive to (a little) but would not willingly be without.

His room, too, awaits him, and his clothes have not been destroyed or
given to the poor, but he folded by charitable hands in the drawers
kept safe from moth with orris-root and lavender. His hat hangs on its
accustomed peg in the hall, and they think of it among many other
things. At last the silence of these lonely meditations is broken by
sudden recollections--for dinner the cook had sent up a boiled chicken
instead of roast, and he had looked upon boiled chicken as a vulgar
insularism always. Nor were there bananas on the table. Bananas were an
acquired taste with them, they had learned to eat the fruit for love of
their friend, and since he has gone they have not eaten the chicken
roast nor the fruit, and it seems to them that they should have eaten of
these things in memory of him. In the Spring they come upon his
pruning-knife, and discourse sadly on the changes he would have advised.
Spring opens into summer, and when summer drops into the autumn
Kilcarney's black passes into grey; he appears one morning in a violet
tie, and the tie, picked out of a drawer with indifferent hand, causes
Violet to doubt her husband's constancy. It was soon after this
thoughtless act that he began, for the thousandth time, to remind her
that the world might be searched in its dimmest corners and no friend
again found like the one they had lost. . . . The reflection had become
part of their habitual thought, and, feeling a little trite and
commonplace, Violet listened, or half-listened, engulfed in retrospect.