The Daughter of the Storage. Howells William Dean

one day she not only let the child go again, but she let her go alone. The child was now between seventeen and eighteen, rather tall, grave, pretty, with the dull brown hair that goes so well with dreaming blue eyes, and of a stiff grace. She had not come out yet, because she had always been out, handing cakes at her father's studio teas long before she could remember not doing it, and later pouring for her mother with rather a quelling air as she got toward fifteen. During these years the family had been going and coming between Europe and America; they did not know perfectly why, except that it was easier than not.

      More and more there was a peculiarity in the goods selected by Charlotte for sending home, which her mother one day noted. "How is it, Charlotte, that you always send exactly the things I want, and when you get your own things here you don't know whether they are what you wanted or not?"

      "Because I don't know when I send them. I don't choose them; I can't."

      "But you choose the right things for me?"

      "No, I don't, mother. I just take what comes first, and you always like it."

      "Now, that is nonsense, Charlotte. I can't have you telling me such a thing as that. It's an insult to my intelligence. Do you think I don't know my own mind?"

      "I don't know my mind," the girl said, so persistently, obstinately, stubbornly, that her mother did not pursue the subject for fear of worse.

      She referred it to her husband, who said: "Perhaps it's like poets never being able to remember their own poetry. I've heard it's because they have several versions in their minds when they write and can't remember which they've written. Charlotte has several choices in her mind, and can't choose between her choices."

      "Well, we ought to have broken her of her indecision. Some day it will make her very unhappy."

      "Pretty hard to break a person of her temperament," Forsyth suggested.

      "I know it!" his wife admitted, with a certain pleasure in realizing the fact. "I don't know what we shall do."

      III

      Storage society was almost wholly feminine; in rare instances there was a man who must have been sent in dearth of women or in an hour of their disability. Then the man came hastily, with a porter, and either pulled all the things out of the rooms so that he could honestly say he had seen them, and that the thing wanted was not there; or else merely had the doors opened, and after a glance inside resolved to wait till his wife, or mother, or daughter could come. He agreed in guilty eagerness with the workmen that this was the only way.

      The exception to the general rule was a young man who came one bright spring morning when all nature suggested getting one's stuff out and going into the country, and had the room next the Forsyths' original five-dollar room opened. As it happened, Charlotte was at the moment visiting this room upon her mother's charge to see whether certain old scrim sash-curtains, which they had not needed for ages but at last simply must have, were not lurking there in a chest of general curtainings. The Forsyths now had rooms on other floors, but their main room was at the end of the corridor branching northward from that where the five-dollar room was. Near this main room that nice New York family had their rooms, and Charlotte had begun the morning in their friendly neighborhood, going through some chests that might perhaps have the general curtainings in them and the scrim curtains among the rest. It had not, and she had gone to what the Forsyths called their old ancestral five-dollar room, where that New York family continued to project a sort of wireless chaperonage over her. But the young man had come with a porter, and, with her own porter, Charlotte could not feel that even a wireless chaperonage was needed, though the young man approached with the most beaming face she thought she had ever seen, and said he hoped he should not be in her way. She answered with a sort of helpless reverberation of his glow, Not at all; she should only be a moment. She wanted to say she hoped she would not be in his way, but she saved herself in time, while, with her own eyes intent upon the façade of her room and her mind trying to lose itself in the question which curtain-trunk the scrims might be in, she kept the sense of his sweet eyes, the merriest eyes she had ever seen, effulgent with good-will and apology and reverent admiration. She blushed to think it admiration, though she liked to think it so, and she did not snub him when the young man jumped about, neglecting his own storage, and divining the right moments for his offers of help. She saw that he was a little shorter than herself, that he was very light and quick on his feet, and had a round, brown face, clean-shaven, and a round, brown head, close shorn, from which in the zeal of his attentions to her he had shed his straw hat onto the window-sill. He formed a strong contrast to the contents of his store-room, which was full, mainly, of massive white furniture picked out in gold, and very blond. He said casually that it had been there, off and on, since long before he could remember, and at these words an impression, vague, inexplicable, deepened in Charlotte's mind.

      "Mother," she said, for she had now disused the earlier "mamma" in deference to modern usage, "how old was I when we first took that five-dollar room?"

      She asked this question after she had shown the scrim curtains she had found and brought home with her.

      "Why? I don't know. Two or three; three or four. I should have to count up. What makes you ask?"

      "Can a person recollect what happened when they were three or four?"

      "I should say not, decidedly."

      "Or recollect a face?"

      "Certainly not."

      "Then of course it wasn't. Mother, do you remember ever telling me what the little boy was like who gave me all his playthings and I couldn't decide what to give him back?"

      "What a question! Of course not! He was very brown and funny, with the beamingest little face in the world. Rather short for his age, I should say, though I haven't the least idea what his age was."

      "Then it was the very same little boy!" Charlotte said.

      "Who was the very same little boy?" her mother demanded.

      "The one that was there to-day; the young man, I mean," Charlotte explained, and then she told what had happened with a want of fullness which her mother's imagination supplied.

      "Did he say who he was? Is he coming back to-morrow or this afternoon? Did you inquire who he was or where?"

      "What an idea, mother!" Charlotte said, grouping the several impossibilities under one head in her answer.

      "You had a perfect right to know, if you thought he was the one."

      "But I didn't think he was the one, and I don't know that he is now; and if he was, what could I do about it?"

      "That is true," Mrs. Forsyth owned. "But it's very disappointing. I've always felt as if they ought to know it was your undecidedness and not ungenerousness."

      Charlotte laughed a little forlornly, but she only said, "Really, mother!"

      Mrs. Forsyth was still looking at the curtains. "Well, these are not the scrims I wanted. You must go back. I believe I will go with you. The sooner we have it over the better," she added, and she left the undecided Charlotte to decide whether she meant the scrim curtains or the young man's identity.

      It was very well, for one reason, that she decided to go with Charlotte that afternoon. The New-Yorkers must have completed the inspection of their trunks, for they had not come back. Their failure to do so was the more important because the young man had come back and was actively superintending the unpacking of his room. The palatial furniture had all been ranged up and down the corridor, and as fast as a trunk was got out and unlocked he went through it with the help of the storage-men, listed its contents in a note-book with a number, and then transferred the number and a synopsis of the record to a tag and fastened it to the trunk, which he had put back into the room.

      When the Forsyths arrived with the mistaken scrim curtains, he interrupted himself with apologies for possibly being in their way; and when Mrs. Forsyth said he was not at all in their way, he got white-and-gold arm-chairs for her and Charlotte and put them so conveniently near the old ancestral room that Mrs. Forsyth scarcely needed to move hand or foot in letting Charlotte restore the wrong curtains and search the chests for the right ones. His politeness made way for conversation and for the