She shivered again and, to her disgust, found that her eyes were
blurring up with tears. She was a little bit slack and edgy to-day,
anyhow.

But really there was something rather remorseless about Rodney. It
occurred to her that the woman he finally did marry would need to be
strong and courageous and rather insensitive to sentimental fancies, to
avoid a certain amount of unhappiness.

What he had just referred to in a dozen brisk words, was the final
disappearance of the home they had all grown up in. Their father, one of
Chicago's great men during the twenty great years between the Fire and
the Fair, had built it when the neighborhood included nearly all the
other big men of that robust period, and had always been proud of it.
There was hardly a stone or stick about it that hadn't some tender happy
association for her. Of course for years the neighborhood had been
impossible. Her mother had clung to it after her husband's death, as was
of course natural.

But when she had followed him, a year ago now, it was evident that the
old place would have to go. Rodney, who had lived alone with her there,
had simply stayed on, since her death, waiting for an offer for it that
suited him. Frederica had known that, of course--had worried about him,
as she said, and in her imagination, had colored his loneliness to the
same dismal hue her own would have taken on in similar circumstances.

All the same, his curt announcement that the long-looked-for change had
come, brought up quick unwelcomed tears. She squeezed them away with her
palms.