one never takes
everything out; one puts more things in. Mrs. Forsyth went to the
warehouse with Tata in the fall before they sailed for another winter
in Paris, and added some old bits she had picked up at farm-houses in
their country drives, and they filled the room quite to the top. She
told her husband how Tata had entered into the spirit of putting back
her trunk of playthings with the hope of seeing it again in the
spring; and she added that she had now had to take a seven-fifty room
without consulting him, or else throw away the things they had brought
home.

During the ten or twelve years that followed, the Forsyths sometimes
spent a whole winter in a hotel; sometimes they had a flat; sometimes
they had a separate dwelling. If their housing was ample, they took
almost everything out of storage; once they got down to a two-dollar
bin, and it seemed as if they really were leaving the storage
altogether. Then, if they went into a flat that was nearly all studio,
their furniture went back in a cataclysmal wave to the warehouse,
where a ten-dollar room, a twelve-dollar room, would not dam the
overflow.

Tata, who had now outgrown her pet name, and was called Charlotte
because her mother felt she ought to be, always went with her to the
storage to help look the things over, to see the rooms emptied down to
a few boxes, or replenished to bursting. In the first years she played
about, close to her mother; as she grew older she ventured further,
and began to make friends with other little girls who had come with
their mothers. It was quite safe socially to be in the Constitutional
Storage; it gave standing; and Mrs. Forsyth fearlessly chanced
acquaintance with these mothers, who would sometimes be there whole
long mornings or afternoons, taking trunks out or putting them in.
With the trunks set into the corridors and opened for them, they would
spend the hours looking the contents over, talking to their neighbors,
or rapt in long silences when they hesitated with things held off or
up, and, after gazing absently at them, putting them back again.
Sometimes they varied the process by laying things aside for sending
home, and receipting for them at the office as "goods selected."

They were mostly hotel people or apartment people, as Mrs. Forsyth
oftenest was herself, but sometimes they were separate-house people.
Among these there was one family, not of great rank or wealth, but
distinguished, as lifelong New-Yorkers,