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 "It doesn't bore me," said Olivia quietly. "It doesn't bore me. I understand it much too well."

"In any case, we've spoiled enough of one fine day with it." Sabine lighted another cigarette and said with an abrupt change of tone, "About this furniture, Olivia. . . . I don't want it. I've a house full of such things in Paris. I shouldn't know what to do with it and I don't think I have the right to break it up and sell it. I want you to have it here at Pentlands. . . . Horace Pentland would be satisfied if it went to you and Cousin John. And it'll be an excuse to clear out some of the Victorian junk and some of the terrible early American stuff. Plenty of people will buy the early American things. The best of them are only bad imitations of the real things Horace Pentland collected, and you might as well have the real ones."

Olivia protested, but Sabine pushed the point, sarcelyscarcely [sic] giving her time to speak. "I want you to do it. It will be a kindness to me . . . and after all, Horace Pentland's furniture ought to be here . . . in Pentlands. I'll take one or two things for Thérèse, and the rest you must keep, only nothing . . . not so much as a medallion or a snuff-box . . . is to go to Aunt Cassie. She hated him while he was alive. It would be wrong for her to possess anything belonging to him after he is dead. Besides," she added, "a little new furniture would do a great deal toward cheering up the house. It's always been rather spare and cold. It needs a little elegance and sense of luxury. There has never been any splendor in the Pentland family—or in all New England, for that matter."

At almost the same moment that Olivia and Sabine entered the old house to lunch, the figures of Sybil and Jean