said it lightly enough, but there was an undertone of real
disappointment in her voice.

"I'm in rather the predicament," I said, "of old Abner Coates. You
probably don't know Abner. He sells nursery stock, and each spring when
he comes around and I tell him that the peach trees or the raspberry
bushes I bought of him the year before have not done well, he says, with
the greatest astonishment, 'Wal, now, ye ain't said what I hoped ye
would.' I see that I haven't said what you hoped I would."

It was too serious a matter, however, for Mary Starkweather to joke
about.

"But, David Grayson," she said, "isn't it _simple_?"

I glanced around me with swift new comprehension.

"Why, yes, it _is_ simple."

I saw that my friend was undergoing some deep inner change of which this
room, this renovated barn, were mere symbols.

"Tell me," I said, "how you came to such a right-about-face."

"It's just that!" she returned earnestly, "It _is_ a right-about-face.
I think I am really in earnest for the first time in my life."

I had a moment of flashing wonder if her marriage had not been in
earnest, a flashing picture of Richard Starkweather with his rather
tired, good-humoured face, and I wondered if her children were not
earnest realities to her, if her busy social life had meant nothing.
Then I reflected that we all have such moments, when the richest
experiences of the past seem as nothing in comparison with the fervour
of this glowing moment.

"Everything in my life in the past," she was saying, "seems to have
happened to me. Life has done things _for_ me; I have had so few chances
of doing anything for myself."

"And now you are expressing yourself."

"Almost for the first time in my life!"

She paused. "All my life, it seems to me, I have been smothered with
things. Just things! Too much of everything. All my time has been taken
up in caring for things and none in enjoying them."

"I understand!" I said with a warm sense of corroboration and sympathy.

"I had so many pictures on my walls that I never saw, really saw, any of
them. I saw the dust on them, I saw the cracks in the frames, that
needed repairing, I even saw better ways of arranging them, but I very
rarely saw, with the inner eye, what the artists were trying to tell me.
And how much time I have wasted on mere food and clothing--it is
appalling! I had become nothing short of a slave to my house and my
things."

"I see now," I said, "why you have ju