It took Grandpa very little time to gather the situation, especially after his new daughter-in-law had hidden his pipe tobacco, thrown out his pile of the Home Weekly, and put newspapers over the floor of his room so he wouldn’t step on the parquet. Without saying a word to anyone he took his cot down to the cellar and fixed up a corner by the bowling alley for his room. Papa didn’t say a word when he came home at night and found this change made, but he rummaged around the attic for a washstand and couple of chairs to add to the cellar room. Neither did his wife mention the move, but silently set to work scrubbing and fumigating the little bedroom which Grandpa had just vacated. She did think of little things each day to remind Grandpa that a room in the cellar was no excuse for slovenliness. He must keep the windows locked so that burglars wouldn’t get in that way, and he must not go prowling in the potato bins or the preserve closet, for sometimes things would turn, just having sick old folks breathing on them. He wasn’t to smoke in there either, because what with his pipe chugging away and his pile of old dirty papers, like as not he’d set the house on fire and they’d all be burned in their sleep. Grandpa promised to step outside when he wanted to smoke, and keep his part of the cellar clean as a whistle. He got up early in the morning and went out, nobody knew where, and came home at supper time to smoke out in the yard. Marcia and Lena sat beside him, Florrie on his lap, asking for stories about when he was a drummer boy. If the occasion was opportune, they told their own stories about Her. Grandpa listened discreetly to these confidences, offering neither advice nor consolation. He wasn’t any help at all, the girls decided, any more than Grandma Reed was. Old folks were just as afraid as children were; you couldn’t count on them for anything. Marcia, reflecting on this, felt a sudden wave of fear. Supposing when she grew old—that is, providing there would ever be an end to this awful eternity of childhood—she would have a daughter just like her stepmother, and the daughter would make her sleep in the cellar like Uncle Wally and Grandpa had had to do.

“I won’t have any daughters then,” she decided. “No family at all; that’s the only safe thing.”

She spoke of this to Lena and Grandpa when they were raking the grass. It was fun raking, but they had to pretend it wasn’t or She wouldn’t ask them to do it. She already suspected that this chore was not sufficiently in the nature of punishment, for She peered out the kitchen window and called out, “For goodness sake, don’t ruin that rake, and there’s no need chopping into the turf that way! Looks like a herd of buffalo had been let loose on it.”