He was not easy in his mind, but the deed was done now — they had the house. He listened to Rose walking about upstairs. There was linoleum in the back bedroom but none in the front. She walked across the bare boards of the front bedroom and then she stopped. She was at the windows upstairs, looking out and wondering about the neighbors. Now she was coming back, and down the stairs. Her step was dulled by the narrow red carpeting on the stairs, and she was coming slowly and being careful to keep to the center of each step. She continued on down to the kitchen. The floor in the kitchen was covered with red tiles. After a minute she left the kitchen and came into the back sitting room, which they then called the dining room.

“I love looking around like this,” she said. “I’ll never get tired of this house. I wonder how they came to pick out those colors.”

She was looking down at the linoleum, which was beige and brown and maroon in a pattern of large and small feathers.

“It’s in very good condition,” Hubert said gloomily. “I’m afraid we’ll have to get used to it.”

“Oh, it’s not that I don’t like it,” Rose said.

She looked curiously at the linoleum other people had admired and taken care of. If it hadn’t already been in the house she would never have owned it. It was like a gift brought from some foreign place. She would never have chosen that pattern or those colors. They were a part of something strange, from someone else’s life, souvenirs of a country she did not know at all and where she did not want to be, because she would find herself timid and ill at ease there, and nothing there would ever be as real to her as the linoleum they had left behind was now under her feet. She walked possessively around on it.

“I never want to leave this house,” she said.