The Finer Grain by Henry James

What he actually took up from a little old Twelfth-Street table that piously preserved the plain mahogany circle, with never a curl nor a crook nor a hint of a brazen flourish, what he paused there a moment for commerce with, his back presented to crapy Cornelia, who sat taking that view of him, during this opportunity, very protrusively and frankly and fondly, was one of the wasted mementos just mentioned, over which he both uttered and suppressed a small comprehensive cry. He stood there another minute to look at it, and when he turned about still kept it in his hand, only holding it now a litde behind him. "You _must_ have come back to stay -- with all your beautiful things. What else does it mean?"

"Beautiful'? " his old friend commented with her brow all wrinkled and her lips thrust out in expressive dispraise. They might at that rate have been scarce more beautiful than she herself. "Oh, don't talk so -- after Mrs. Worthingham's! _They're_ wonderful, if you will: such things, such things! But one's own poor relics and odds and ends are one's own at least; and one _has_ -- yes -- come back to them. They're all I have in the world to come back to. They were stored, and what I was paying -- ! " Miss Rasch wofully added.