he
average Irish bulk as he drew near. He was given instructions and
obeyed with caressing irony Mrs. Forsyth's order to pull out Tata's
trunk first, and she found the key in a large tangle of keys, and
opened it, and had the joy of seeing everything recognized by the
owner: doll by doll, cook-stove, tin dishes, small brooms, wooden
animals on feet and wheels, birds of various plumage, a toy piano, a
dust-pan, alphabet blocks, dog's-eared linen Mother Goose books, and
the rest. Tata had been allowed to put the things away herself, and
she took them out with no apparent sense of the time passed since she
saw them last. In the changing life of her parents all times and
places were alike to her. She began to play with the things in the
storage corridor as if it were yesterday when she saw them last in the
flat. Her mother and father left her to them in the distraction of
their own trunks. Mrs. Forsyth had these spread over the space toward
the window and their lids lifted and tried to decide about them. In
the end she had changed the things in them back and forth till she
candidly owned that she no longer knew where anything at all was.

As she raised herself for a moment's respite from the problem she saw
at the far end of the corridor a lady with two men, who increased in
size like her own man as they approached. The lady herself seemed to
decrease, though she remained of a magnificence to match the
furniture, and looked like it as to her dress of white picked out in
gold when she arrived at the twenty-dollar room next the Forsyths'. In
her advance she had been vividly played round by a little boy, who ran
forward and back and easily doubled the length of the corridor before
he came to a stand and remained with his brown eyes fixed on Tata.
Tata herself had blue eyes, which now hovered dreamily above the
things in her trunk.

The two mothers began politely to ignore each other. She of the
twenty-dollar room directed the men who had come with her, and in a
voice of authority and appeal at once commanded and consulted them in
the disposition of her belongings. At the sound of the mixed tones
Mrs. Forsyth signaled to her husband, and, when he came within
whispering, murmured: "Pittsburg, _or_ Chicago. Did you _ever_ hear
such a Mid-Western accent!" She pretended to be asking him about
repacking the trunk before her, but the other woman was not deceived.
She was at least aware of criticism in the air of her neighbors, and