Every pot, every stewpan, every knife and fork, was an old friend.

How she had worked over them! How clean she had kept them! What a pleasure it had been to invade that little brick-paved kitchen every morning, and to wash up and put to rights after breakfast, turning on the hot water at the sink, raking down the ashes in the cook-stove, going and coming over the warm bricks, her head in the air, singing at her work, proud in the sense of her proprietorship and her independence! How happy had she been the day after her marriage when she had first entered that kitchen and knew that it was all her own! And how well she remembered her raids upon the bargain counters in the house-furnishing departments of the great down-town stores! And now it was all to go.

Some one else would have it all, while she was relegated to cheap restaurants and meals cooked by hired servants.

Night after night she sobbed herself to sleep at the thought of her past happiness and her present wretchedness.

However, she was not alone in her unhappiness.
"Anyhow, I'm going to keep the steel engraving an' the stone pug dog," declared the dentist, his fist clenching.