to project a sort of wireless chaperonage over her. But the young man
had come with a porter, and, with her own porter, Charlotte could not
feel that even a wireless chaperonage was needed, though the young man
approached with the most beaming face she thought she had ever seen,
and said he hoped he should not be in her way. She answered with a
sort of helpless reverberation of his glow, Not at all; she should
only be a moment. She wanted to say she hoped she would not be in
_his_ way, but she saved herself in time, while, with her own eyes
intent upon the facade of her room and her mind trying to lose itself
in the question which curtain-trunk the scrims might be in, she kept
the sense of his sweet eyes, the merriest eyes she had ever seen,
effulgent with good-will and apology and reverent admiration. She
blushed to think it admiration, though she liked to think it so, and
she did not snub him when the young man jumped about, neglecting his
own storage, and divining the right moments for his offers of help.
She saw that he was a little shorter than herself, that he was very
light and quick on his feet, and had a round, brown face,
clean-shaven, and a round, brown head, close shorn, from which in the
zeal of his attentions to her he had shed his straw hat onto the
window-sill. He formed a strong contrast to the contents of his
store-room, which was full, mainly, of massive white furniture picked
out in gold, and very blond. He said casually that it had been there,
off and on, since long before he could remember, and at these words an
impression, vague, inexplicable, deepened in Charlotte's mind.

"Mother," she said, for she had now disused the earlier "mamma" in
deference to modern usage, "how old was I when we first took that
five-dollar room?"

She asked this question after she had shown the scrim curtains she had
found and brought home with her.

"Why? I don't know. Two or three; three or four. I should have to
count up. What makes you ask?"

"Can a person recollect what happened when they were three or four?"

"I should say not, decidedly."

"Or recollect a face?"

"Certainly not."

"Then of course it wasn't. Mother, do you remember ever telling me
what the little boy was like who gave me all his playthings and I
couldn't decide what to give him back?"

"What a question! Of course not! He was very brown and funny, with the
beamingest little face in the world. Rather short for his age, I
should say, thou