The Forsyths were afraid that Tata might want to offer Peter some gift
in reparation the next morning, and her father was quite ready, if she
said so, to put off their leaving town, and go with her to the
Constitutional Storage, which was the only address of Mrs. Bream that
he knew. But the child had either forgotten or she was contented with
her mother's comforting, and no longer felt remorse.
One does not store the least of one's personal or household gear
without giving a hostage to storage, a pledge of allegiance impossible
to break. No matter how few things one puts in, one never takes
everything out; one puts more things in. Mrs. Forsyth went to the
warehouse with Tata in the fall before they sailed for another winter
in Paris, and added some old bits she had picked up at farm-houses in
their country drives, and they filled the room quite to the top. She
told her husband how Tata had entered into the spirit of putting back
her trunk of playthings with the hope of seeing it again in the
spring; and she added that she had now had to take a seven-fifty room
without consulting him, or else throw away the things they had brought
home.
During the ten or twelve years that followed, the Forsyths sometimes
spent a whole winter in a hotel; sometimes they had a flat; sometimes
they had a separate dwelling. If their housing was ample, they took
almost everything out of storage; once they got down to a two-dollar
bin, and it seemed as if they really were leaving the storage
altogether. Then, if they went into a flat that was nearly all studio,
their furniture went back in a cataclysmal wave to the warehouse,
where a ten-dollar room, a twelve-dollar room, would not dam the
overflow.
Tata, who had now outgrown her pet name, and was called Charlotte
because her mother felt she ought to be, always went with her to the
storage to help look the things over, to see the rooms emptied down to
a few boxes, or replenished to bursting. In the first years she played
about, close to her mother; as she grew older she ventured further,
and began to make friends with other little girls who had come with
their mothers. It was quite safe socially to be in the Constitutional
Storage; it gave standing; and Mrs. Forsyth fearlessly chanced
acquaintance with these mothers, who would sometimes be there whole
long mornings or afternoons, taking trunks out or putting them in.
With the trunks set into the corridors and opened for them, they would
spend the hours looking the contents over, talking to their neighbors,
or rapt in long silences when they hesitated with things held off or
up, and, after gazing absently at them, putting them back again.
Sometimes they varied the process by laying things aside for sending
home, and receipting for them at the office as "goods selected."
They were mostly hotel people or apartment people, as Mrs. Forsyth
oftenest was herself, but sometimes they were separate-house people.
Among these there was one family, not of great rank or wealth, but
distinguished, as lifelong New-Yorkers, in a world of comers and goers
of every origin. Mrs. Forsyth especially liked them for a certain
quality, but what this quality was she could not very well say. They
were a mother with two daughters, not quite old maids, but on the way
to it, and there was very intermittently the apparently bachelor
brother of the girls; at the office Mrs. Forsyth verified her
conjecture that he was some sort of minister. One could see they were
all gentlefolks, though the girls were not of the last cry of fashion.
They were very nice to their mother, and you could tell that they must
have been coming with her for years.
At this point in her study of them for her husband's amusement she
realized that Charlotte had been coming to the storage with her nearly
all her life, and that more and more the child had taken charge of the
uneventual inspection of the things. She was shocked to think that she
had let this happen, and now she commanded her husband to say whether
Charlotte would grow into a storage old maid like those good girls.
Forsyth said, Probably not before her time; but he allowed it was a
point to be considered.
Very well, then, Mrs. Forsyth said, the child should never go again;
that was all. She had strongly confirmed herself in this resolution
when 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."