"Since the marriage of her daughter Clementina, Madame Proudfit had spent a good deal of time abroad, and the house had been shut up. This shutting up of people's houses always surprises me. When I shut up my house to go away for a couple of months or so, I just make sure the kitchen fire is out, and I carry the bird down to Mis' Holcomb's, and I turn the key in the front door and start off. But land, land when Proudfit House is going to be shut, the servants work days on end. Rugs up, curtains down, furniture covered and setting around out of place, pictures and ornaments wrapped up in blue paper--I always wonder _why_. Closing my house is like putting it to sleep for a little while, but closing Proudfit House is some like seeing it through a spasm and into a trance. They done that to the house most every summer, and I used to think they acted like spring was a sort of contagion, or a seventeen-year locust, or something to be fumigated for. I supposed that was the way the house looked when Alex got home to it, and of course a man must hate it worse than a woman does, because he doesn't know which end to tell them to take hold of to unravel. So I went right up there when he sent for me--and then it was a little fun, too, to be on the inside of what was happening there, that all the village was so curious about. "He'd gone off when I got there, gone off on horseback on some business, but he'd left word that he'd be back in a little while, and would I help him out in the library. I knew what that meant. The books was all out of the shelves and packed in paper, and he wanted me to see that they got back into their right places, like I'd done many and many a time for his mother. So I worked there the whole afternoon, with a couple of men to help me, and the portrait of Linda Proudfit on the wall watching me like it wanted to tell me something, maybe about the way she went off and died, away from home; and a little after four o'clock a servant let somebody into the room. "I looked up expecting to see Alex, and it surprised me some to see Insley instead. But I guessed how it was: that Alex Proudfit being a logical one to talk over Friendship Village with, Insley couldn't lose a day in bringing him his letter. "'Well, Miss Marsh,' says he, 'and do you live everywhere, like a good fairy?' "I thought afterwards that I might have said to him: 'No, Mr. Insley. And do you appear everywhere, like a god?' But at the time I didn't think of anything to say, and I just smiled. I'm like that,--if I like anybody, I can't think of a thing to say back; but to Silas Sykes I could talk back all day.