"Name and address on this slip. Take a Greenfield
car. Nice old maid has lived in nice old cottage all her
life. Grandfather built it himself about a hundred
years ago. Whole family was born in it, and married in
it, and died in it, see? It's crammed full of
spinning-wheels and mahogany and stuff that'll make your
eyes stick out. See? Well, there's no one left now but
the nice old maid, all alone. She had a sister who ran
away with a scamp some years ago. Nice old maid has
never heard of her since, but she leaves the gate ajar or
the latch-string open, or a lamp in the window, or
something, so that if ever she wanders back to the old
home she'll know she's welcome, see?"
"Sounds like a moving picture play," I remarked.
"Wait a minute. Here's the point. The city wants to
build a branch library or something on her property, and
the nice old party is so pinched for money that she'll
have to take their offer. So the time has come when
she'll have to leave that old cottage, with its romance,
and its memories, and its lamp in the window, and go to
live in a cheap little flat, see? Where the old
four-poster will choke up the bedroom--"
"And the parlor will be done in red and green," I put
in, eagerly, "and where there will be an ingrowing
sideboard in the dining-room that won't fit in with the
quaint old dinner-set at all, and a kitchenette just off
that, in which the great iron pots and kettles that used
to hold the family dinners will be monstrously out of
place--"
"You're on," said Norberg.
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