The Temperate Zone by Edith Wharton

It was odd how, as he paced up and down the Embankment late that / evening, musing over the vision vouchsafed him, one detail continued to / detach itself with discordant sharpness from the harmonious blur.

The parlour-maid who had never heard of Mrs. Morland, and who / consequently could not know that the house had ever been hers, had / naturally enough explained it to him in terms of its new owners' habits. / French's imagination had so promptly anticipated this that he had, / almost without a shock, heard Mrs. Morland's library described as "the / gentleman's study," and marked how an upstairs sitting-room with faded / Venetian furniture and rows of old books in golden-brown calf had been / turned, by the intrusion of a large pink toilet-table, into "the lady's / dressing-room, sir. " It did not offend him that the dwelling should be / used as suited the convenience of the persons who lived in it; he was / never for expecting life to stop, and the Historic House which has been / turned into a show had always seemed to him as dead as a blown egg. He / had small patience with the kind of reverence which treats fine things / as if their fineness made them useless. Nothing, he thought, was too / fine for natural uses, nothing in life too good for life; he liked the / absent and unknown Donald Pauls the better for living naturally in this / house which had come to them naturally, and not shrinking into the mere / keepers of a shrine. But he had winced at just one thing: at seeing / there, on the writing-table which had once been Emily Morland's, and / must still, he quickly noted, be much as she had left it-at seeing / there, among pens and pencils and ink-stained paper-cutters, halfway / between a lacquer cup full of elastic bands and a blotting-book with her / initials on it, one solitary object of irrelevant newness: an immense / expensively framed photograph of Fingall's picture of his wife.