When she married Cornelius Morrison and came as a very young bride to the New York house, filled with its chaotic collection of treasures picked up from all over the globe, not only by her widely traveled husband, but by his father before him, she felt little of the delight which beautiful things had given her before. On the contrary, she was possessed of an incessant desire to escape them, to get outdoors, and breathe deep, and look upon broad spaces.

Finally she asked her husband if he would object if she cleared out just one of the rooms in the house of every single thing that was in it. He told her she could clean out the whole house, for since Cornelius Morrison had obtained her, his other treasures had sunk into trivial insignificance. Therefore Helen Morrison had had the entire top floor of the house built into a single room which she called the Museum, and into which she moved the wealth of two generations of collectors.

Cloisonné no longer rubbed shoulders with Copenhagen in the Morrison drawing-room, nor futurist touched frames with early Italian. Such jarring juxtapositions gave Helen somewhat the same feeling of displeasure that a discord on the piano gives to a sensitively musical child when he is still too young to understand why. Helen Morrison could understand her recoil but imperfectly. She knew little about schools and periods and values in art in its various forms when she married Cornelius Morrison. She warned her husband that she was an expert judge concerning only the merits of table-linen, lingerie, and flat silver. But he soon discovered that if an article was really fine and genuine, the something fine and genuine in his wife recognized it and responded to it. He made her curator of the Museum without hesitation.

Underneath the Museum, Cornelius Morrison’s house was like a barn at first. At least so the aunt who had lived with Cornelius before he married told Helen, when she saw it.

Helen had exclaimed, “Isn’t it? All beautiful space and shadows, and room enough to dance a spring song in, if you feel like it.”

The house didn’t remain long like an empty barn, however, though according to the aunt it never seemed “like a really furnished house.”

Helen spent hours browsing in the Museum, assimilating it slowly, piece by piece. Gradually various treasures began appearing in the rooms below. When Helen discovered, or believed she had, an affinity between some empty niche downstairs and one of the objects of art in the Museum, she united them with delight. “Trial marriages,” she called them humorously to her husband. Many of them proved permanent, but there were certain corners, tables, old chests, and secretaries, “that enjoyed a constant state of polygamy,” she laughed, “that adjusted themselves happily to various of the temperamental objects of art in the Museum.”