father snap shut, dusty, leaky sofa-pillows that had bristled with
newness in the "den" which was the delight of his sixteen-year-old
heart. He kept saying to Cousin Flora that there was no end to the
junk--old school readers, Ruth's party slippers. Just burn it all up, he
said, in a crisp voice of efficiency; what was it good for, anyhow?
Certainly it had taught him a lesson. He'd never keep anything.

They had been at it for a week--sorting, destroying, disbursing,
scattering what a family's life through a generation had assembled,
breaking up "the Hollands." Ted, in his own room that morning, around
him the things he was going to put in his trunk for taking back West,
admitted to himself that it was gruesome business.

Things were over; things at home were all over. This pulling to pieces
drove that home hard. Father and mother were gone and now "their stuff"
was being got out of the way. After this there would not even be a place
where the things they had used were. But he would be glad when they
could get through with it; he was finding that there was something
wrenching about things that were left, things that had been used and
that now there was no longer any use for. The sight of them stabbed as
no mere thinking about things could do. It was hard work throwing away
"truck" that something seemed to cling to. It was hard to really _get_
it, he was thinking; a family lived in a place--seemed really a part of
that place, an important part, perhaps; then things changed--people
died, moved away, and that family simply _wasn't_ any more--and things
went on just about the same. Whistling, he put some shirts in his trunk,
trying to fix his mind on how many new shirts he needed.

He was going back West--to live, to work. Not right where Ruth was, in
southwestern Colorado, but in the country a little to the north. He and
a fellow he had made friends with out there had bought an apple
orchard--the money he was to have from his father would go into it and
some of Ruth's money--she wanted him to invest some of hers with his. It
was that had made it possible for him to go in with this fellow. He was
glad he could do it. The West had "got" him. He believed he could make
things go.

And he shouldn't have liked staying on in Freeport. Too many things were
different for him to want to stay there. And too many things hurt. Ruth
had come to mean too much to him to let him be happy with people who
felt as the people there did abou