She couldn't think why she had been such a fool as to take it. On a seven years' lease, too; it would feel like being in prison for seven years. That was the worst of moving about for a whole year in boats and trains, and staying at hotels; it gave you an unnatural longing to settle down, in a place of your own. Your own--Undying lust of possession. If you _had_ to have things, why a house? Why six rooms when two would have done as well and left you your freedom? After all that ecstasy of space, that succession of heavenly places with singing names: Carcassone and Vezelay; Rome and Florence and San Gimignano; Marseilles and Arles and Avignon; filling up time, stretching it out, making a long life out of one year. If you could go moving on and on while time stood still. Oh this damned house. It would be you sitting still while time tore by, as it used to tear by at Morfe before Richard came, and in the three years after he had gone, when Mamma-- II. It was rather attractive, when you turned the corner and came on it suddenly, flat-roofed and small, clean white and innocent. The spring twilight gave it that look of being somewhere in Italy, the look that made you fall in love with it at first sight. As for not getting used to it, that was precisely the effect she wanted: rooms that wouldn't look like anything in the house at Morfe, things that she would always come on with a faint, exquisite surprise: the worn magentaish rug on the dark polished floor, the oak table, the gentian blue chair, the thin magenta curtains letting the light through: the things Richard had given her because in their beginning they had been meant for her. Richard knew that you were safe from unhappiness, that you had never once "gone back on it," if you could be happy with his things. He had thought, too, that if you had a house you would settle down and work. You would have to; you would have to work like blazes, after spending all the money Aunt Charlotte left you on rushing about, and half the money Aunt Lavvy left you on settling down. It was horrible this living on other people's deaths. III. Catty couldn't bear it being so different. You could see she thought you were unfaithful not to have kept the piano when Mamma had played on it. Catty's faithfulness was unsurpassable. She had wanted to marry Blenkiron, the stonemason at Morfe, but first she wouldn't because of Mamma and then she wouldn't because of Miss Mary. When you told her to go back and marry him at once she would only laugh and say, "There's your husband, and there's your children. You're my child, Miss Mary. Master Roddy was Jenny's child and you was always mine." You were only ten years younger than Catty, but like Richard she couldn't see that you were old. You would never know whether Catty knew about Richard; or whether Dorsy knew. Whatever you did they would love you, Catty because you were her child, and Dorsy because you were Mark's sister. IV.