"She has lived to tell it a great many times.She can hardly be kept from telling it yet.But it is my belief that,although she brought to the work all the anguish of a quickened conscience,under the influence of the American conditions she had returned to,she suffered far less in her encounters with either of those furnished houses than she now does with our own furniture when she shuts up our house in the summer,and opens it for the winter.But if there had been a clause in the lease,as there should have been,forbidding her to put those houses in order when she left them,life would have been simply a rapture.Why,in Europe custom almost supplies the place of statute in such cases,and you come and go so lightly in and out of furnished houses that you do not mind taking them for a month,or a few weeks.We are very far behind in this matter,but I have no doubt that if we once came to do it on any extended scale we should do it,as we do everything else we attempt,more perfectly than any other people in the world.You see what I mean?"
"I am not sure that I do.But go on."
