The state of the hidden places at Collessie Street was a fresh revelation to her of her mother’s cumbered life, and she became every hour more reckless in the work of simplification. She was sure that nine-tenths of the stuff they had housed all these years would be neither used nor missed by any member of the family. Fuller and fuller grew the old ash-pit in the back green. But Joanna had an inbred hatred of waste; and she would trudge up and down the long stairs fifty times a day with her arms full, while Mamie made her heaps into bundles and despatched them to this poor person or that charity. And at night, dazed with fatigue and satisfaction, she would stumble up to bed. When she lay down at first her thighs and the muscles of her back ached so acutely that she groaned aloud, but within five minutes she would be sleeping like a stone.

In the sacrilege of the wardrobe she would allow no one else to share.

As the great, curving, mirrored door swung heavily back upon its hinges Joanna was a child again; and the enclosure with its trays and drawers, and its middle place lined with faded blue box-pleating, appeared to her as the very ark of romance. But at the quick of her excitement was something which had nothing to do with memory or with childhood except in so far as it signified the departure from both. This, not the hour of her marriage with Mario, was the time of severance, the final breaking of the umbilical cord. Very slowly had she drawn apart from her mother. Even while she had thought herself detached she had really been held and harried. But now she was removing her entire being in an act of irreparable rebellion. And this was the symbol: this laying of her new, alien hands upon her mother’s treasures.

For here were all the little souvenirs of Juley’s lifetime, most of them valueless in themselves, but so precious to her that her children were accustomed to hold them in reverence.