china remotely ancestral; her feather beds and her bedsteads!--they were
haunted; the births, marriages, and deaths associated with the best one
was the history of our race for three generations. There was more in her
house than the tombstone rectitude of the chair-backs to remind me of
the graveyard. I can still remember the sombre aisles of that house, the
vault-like shadows, the magnificent window curtains that blotted out the
windows. Life was too trivial for such things. She never knew she tired
of them, but she did. That was the secret of her temper, I think; they
engendered her sombre Calvinism, her perception of the trashy quality of
human life. The pretence that they were the accessories to human life
was too transparent. _We_ were the accessories; we minded them for a
little while, and then we passed away. They wore us out and cast us
aside. We were the changing scenery; they were the actors who played on
through the piece. It was even so with clothing. We buried my other
maternal aunt--Aunt Adelaide--and wept, and partly forgot her; but her
wonderful silk dresses--they would stand alone--still went rustling
cheerfully about an ephemeral world.

All that offended my sense of proportion, my feeling of what is due to
human life, even when I was a little boy. I want things of my own,
things I can break without breaking my heart; and, since one can live
but once, I want some change in my life--to have this kind of thing and
then that. I never valued Aunt Charlotte's good old things until I sold
them. They sold remarkably well: those chairs like nether millstones for
the grinding away of men; the fragile china--an incessant anxiety until
accident broke it, and the spell of it at the same time; those silver
spoons, by virtue of which Aunt Charlotte went in fear of burglary for
six-and-fifty years; the bed from which I alone of all my kindred had
escaped; the wonderful old, erect, high-shouldered, silver-faced clock.