"It is exactly the same with them.Why should they be more to us than the floors and walls of the houses we move in and move out of with no particular pathos?And I think we ought not to care for them,certainly not to the point of letting them destroy our eternal-womanly with the anxiety she feels for them.She is really much more precious,if she could but realize it,than anything she swathes in cheese-cloth or wraps up with moth-balls.The proof of the fact that the whole thing is a piece of mere sentimentality is that we may live in a furnished house for years,amid all the accidents of birth and death,joy and sorrow,and yet not form the slightest attachment to the furniture.Why should we have tender and sacred associations with a thing we have bought,and not with a thing we have hired?"

"I confess,I don't know.And do you really think we could liberate ourselves from our belongings if they didn't belong to us?Wouldn't the eternal-womanly still keep putting them away for summer and taking them out for winter?"