The hall was quite narrow and was covered with linoleum, and it served its purpose very well, both as an entrance to the house and as a vantage point from which the house could be viewed and seen for what it was — a small, plain, family place that had a compartmented look now in winter because of all the doors being closed to keep whatever heat there was inside the rooms. In the hall there was a rack with hooks on it for coats, and there was an umbrella stand, and a chair nobody ever sat on. Nobody ever sat on the chair and nobody ever stood long in the hall. It was a passageway — not to fame and not to fortune but only to the common practices of family life, those practices, habits, and ordinary customs that are the only true realities most of us ever know, and that in some of us form a memory strong enough to give us something to hold on to to the end of our days. It is a matter of love, and whether the love finds daily, hourly expression in warm embraces and in the instinctive kind of attentiveness animals give to their young or whether it is largely unexpressed, as it was among the Bagots, does not really matter very much in the very long run. It is the solid existence of love that gives life and strength to memory, and if, in some cases, childhood memories lack the soft and tender colors given by demonstrativeness, the child grown old and in the dark knows only that what is under his hand is a rock that will never give way.

In the big bed in the back room upstairs, Lily Bagot lay sleeping beside her sister, and if they dreamed nobody knew about it, because they never remembered their dreams in the morning. On the morning of Christmas Day they woke very early, much earlier than usual, and it was as though the parcels piled beside their bed sent out a magic breath to bring them out of their sleep while the world was still dark. They moved very slowly at first, putting their hands down beside the bed and down at the end of the bed to feel what was there, to feel what had been left for them. They went over each parcel with their hands, getting the outline and trying to make out from the shape what was inside. Then they couldn’t wait any longer, and Lily got out of bed and put on the light so that they could see what they had been given.

The Springs of Affection

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