Fortunately she regarded her symptoms as a series of disconnected, unrelated phenomena. The heart was one thing, the liver another, rheumatism a third. Swollen joints were still different. That came from overdoing. For different diseases different remedies. She took her medicine very conscientiously, treating her symptoms, not her annodomini. She thought of her children as young, not of herself as old. She wasn't sixty yet, just the time when people learn at last to profit by experience--the same age as most of the people she knew, Mrs. Conway, for instance, and Mrs. Schweppe, Mrs. Keough and Mrs. Cochrane. The last two had recently been the victims of a sad and striking coincidence. They had lost their husbands within twenty-four hours of each other, in the preceding February, on the seventh and eighth of the month as Mrs. Talbot recalled it, anyway it was of a Tuesday and Wednesday. Dan Keough, to be sure, had been ailing some time, but it would have been a day's journey to find a heartier looking man than Jerry Cochrane, up to the very day he came home coughing. And a week after, they laid him out. They say a green Christmas makes a fat churchyard, and goodness knows last winter proved it. It had been very wet and sloppy, hardly any snow at all until January, and then it didn't last long. She had followed the hearse to Calvary one, two, three, four times in a twelvemonth. The climate had lately changed for the worse. She could remember when all the Christmases were white and didn't use to kill people. The first time that Georgia suggested giving up housekeeping, mama vehemently repudiated the idea. The third time she agreed to it, but on one sole condition, namely, that the change was to be only temporary. They were to take another flat as soon as she got to feeling more like herself again. The family moved to the parlor floor of a long and narrow gray block house farther north. What had been designed, in 1880, for the front parlor was now the living room of the suite. Georgia put a piano in it, and Al a rack of bulldog pipes and a row of steins, like college men. The back parlor became Mrs. Talbot's room, the dining room Georgia's, and Al took the small one in the rear, overlooking the back yard. The meals were served, 7 to 8:30, 1 to 2, 6 to 7, in the half-basement immediately under the front parlor. They were standardized--corned beef Thursday, fish Friday, roast beef Saturday, chicken Sunday. Mrs. Talbot and her children had their own private table, and they gave her the best seat with her back to the window, as titular head of the family. They had an arrangement that the young folks were never to be away from supper at the same time and leave mama alone.