Screens out, so that the windows looked like faces and not like masks! The couch under the Cooking-apple tree! We used to lie on the couch and look up in the boughs and wish that they would leave it there forever. What was the rule that made them take it in? Mattresses in the backyard to jump on and lie on and stare up from, so differently, into the blue. Rugs like rooms, opening out into an adjoining pansy bed. Chairs set about on the grass, as if at last people had come to understand, as we had always understood, that the Outdoors is a real place to be in, and not just a place to pass through to get somewhere else. If only, if only some day they had brought the piano out on the lawn! To have done one’s practising out there, just as if a piano were born, not made! But they never did that, and we were thankful enough for the things that they did do. When Saturday came, I found with relief that they had still the parlour and one bedroom left to do. I had been afraid that by then these would be restored to the usual dry and dustless order. In the open window of the empty sitting-room I was sitting negligently that morning, when I saw Mr. Britt going by. He was as old as anyone I knew in the world--Mr. Britt must have been fifty. I never thought of him as _folks_ at all. There were the other neighbours, all dark-haired and quick and busy at the usual human errands; and then there was Mr. Britt, leaving his fruit trees and his rose bushes to go down to his office in the Court House. He had white hair, a long square white beard, and he carried a stick with a crook in the handle. I watched him pityingly. His life was all done, as tidy as a sewed seam, as sure as a learned lesson. All lived out, a piece at a time, just as I planned mine. How immeasurably long it had taken him; what a slow business it must have seemed to him; how very old he was! At our gate he stopped. Mr. Britt’s face was pink, and there were pleasant wrinkles at the corners of his eyes, and when he talked, he seemed to think about you. “Moving?” he inquired. “House-cleaning,” I explained with importance. “Fine day of it,” he commented and went on. He always sighed a little when he spoke, not in sorrow; but in a certain weariness. _In forty-two years I should be as old as that._ Forty-two years--more than five life-times, as I knew them. I was still looking after him, trying to think it through--a number as vast as the sky of stars was vast--when round the corner, across the street, the Rodman girls appeared. (“Margaret and Betty Rodman?” my mother used to inquire pointedly when I said “the Rodman girls.”) In their wake was their little brother, Harold. I hailed them joyously. “Come on over! It’s house-cleaning.” “We were,” admitted Betty, as they ran. “We saw the things out in the yard, and we asked right off. We can stay a whole hour.”