To be sure, May made a frightful racket in everything she did and at Silver Bush, where household ritual had always been performed without noise, this was something of a domestic crime. Pat, suffering too much to be just, told Rae that May made more fuss in ten minutes than anyone else could make in a year.

Judy and May had one battle royal as to who was to scrub the kitchen. Judy won. May never attempted to usurp Judy’s kitchen privileges again.

Pat found she could get used to being unhappy…and then that she could even be happy again, between the spasms of unhappiness. Of course there were changes everywhere…little irritating changes which were perhaps harder to bear than some greater dislocation. For one thing, May’s friends gave her a “shower,” after which Silver Bush was cluttered up with gimcracks. Pat’s especial hatred was a dreadful onyx-topped table. May put it in the hall under the heirloom mirror. It was a desecration. And May’s new gay cushions, which made everything else seem faded, were scattered everywhere. But May did not get her own way when it came to moving furniture about. She learned that things were to be left as they were and that a large engraving of Landseer’s stag, framed in crimson plush and gilt a foot wide, was not going to be hung in the dining room. May, after a scene, carried it off to her own room, where nobody interfered with her arrangements.

“I suppose your ladyship doesn’t object to that,” she remarked to Pat.

“Of course you can do as you like in your own room,” said Pat wearily.

Would this petty bickering go on forever? And that very afternoon May had broken the old Bristol-ware vase by stuffing a huge bouquet of ’mums into it. Of course it was cracked…always had been cracked. May said she didn’t hold with having cracked things around. She had her own room re-papered…blue roses on a bright pink ground. “So cheerful,” Mrs. Binnie said admiringly. “That gray paper in what they call the Pote’s room gives me the willies, May dearie.”

May brought her dog with her, an animal known by the time-tested name of Rover. He killed the chickens, dug up Pat’s bulbs, chewed the clothes on the line…Tillytuck had a pitched battle with May because his best shirt was mangled…and chased the cats in his spare time. Eventually Just Dog gave him a drubbing which chastened him and Rae, in May’s absences, used to spank him so soundly with a stiff, folded newspaper that he learned manners after a sort. There were even times when Pat was afraid she was learning to like him. It was hard for Pat not to like a dog if he had any decency at all.