"Do you realize that anything you can do in your lifetime will be meaningless a hundred years from now?" she says. "Do you think, a century from now, that anyone will even remember the Stuarts?"

She looks from one polished surface to the next, tabletops, dressers, doors, all with her reflection floating across them.

"People die," she says. "People tear down houses. But furniture, fine, beautiful furniture, it just goes on and on, surviving everything."

She says, "Armoires are the cockroaches of our culture."

And without breaking her stride, she drags the steel point of the key across the polished walnut face of a cabinet. The sound is as quiet as anything sharp slashing something soft. The scar is deep and shows the raw cheap pine under the veneer.

She stops in front of a wardrobe with beveled-glass doors.

"Think of all the generations of women who looked in that mirror," she says. "They took it home. They aged in that mirror. They died, all those beautiful young women, but here's the wardrobe, worth more now than ever. A parasite surviving the host. A big fat predator looking for its next meal."

In this maze of antiques, she says, are the ghosts of everyone who has ever owned this furniture. Everyone rich and successful enough to prove it. All of their talent and intelligence and beauty, outlived by decorative junk. All the success and accomplishment this furniture was supposed to represent, it's all vanished.

She says, "In the vast scheme of things, does it really matter how the Stuarts died?"

I ask, how did she find out about the culling spell? Was it because her son, Patrick, died?

And she just keeps walking, trailing her fingers along the carved edges, the polished surfaces, marring the knobs and smearing the mirrors.