But it would never do to stop and think. Every object in this place could bring back memories of such intensity it hurt. There was Rufus’s old hunting jacket that she could never bear to give away with the rest of his clothes, a plug of chewing tobacco dried hard as a stone in one pocket. Ellen stood with the jacket in her arms a moment, then laid it down with a sudden gesture of rejection. Rufus had done things she couldn’t forgive, even now. But there was Sarah’s old doll. Must remember to give that to little Ellen when they come—might as well take it down now. The doll stared up with her cold china-blue eyes, her faded pink dress dirty and torn, one arm akimbo, but her eyes as cold and clear as when Rufus, in a rare moment of extravagance, had brought her to console Sarah when she had the measles. The way things have of outliving people was scarifying! But Ellen was not in the mood to stop and let herself be assailed—even by Gramp’s old birch broom standing in a corner, all worn down on one side. In fact, she never did stop long in the attic. It was too much of a clutter and brought the past rushing in from too many directions all at once. So she laid the doll down on a small chest of drawers that Dr. Foster, who had built the house, had used for keeping bills in. Someone might have a good time looking over what people paid in those days when, often, a doctor was called in the middle of the night to hitch up the buggy and go ten miles or more on country roads to ease the dying or deliver a baby. But Ellen was out for something else just back of the chest, a flat metal box painted black where she had laid away (how many years ago, before she was married?) the schoolbooks she had used as a teacher. She put them on top of her grandfather’s reports to the school committee and whatever relics remained from his teaching days.