S." in the corner--boxes and boxes of
things he wouldn't want; he'd say if he saw them now: "Throw it
away"--boxes of glass tubes he had blown when he was fifteen, boxes of
dried modelling clay....
"I must have wood," she said aloud, and picked up another useless
fragment. It mocked her, it wouldn't listen to her need of wood; it had
"P.S." in clumsy, inserted wires at the back. His home-made stamp.
Under it was a grey book called "Grammaire Allemande." "It wasn't any
use your learning German, was it, Philippe?" she said, then stood still
in a frozen conjecture as to the use and goal of all that bright
treasure in his mind--his glass-blowing, his modelling, the cast head of
a man she had found stamped with his initial, the things he had written
and read, on slates, in books. "It was as much use his learning German
as anything else," she said slowly, and her mind reeled at the edge of
difficult questions.
Coming down from the attics again she held one piece of polished
chair-back in her hand.
"How can I live in their family like this," she mused by the fire. "I am
doing more. I am living in the dreadful background to which they can't
or won't come back. I am counting the toys which they can't look at.
Your mother will never come back to pack them up, Philippe!"
She made herself chocolate and drank it from a fine white cup with his
mother's initials on it in gold.
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