“Good evening, Jenny,” she said. “I swept the floor in the kitchen, but I can’t tell how you take up the carpet to shake it out. Do you move all your furniture every time?”

 

I suppressed a laugh. “No, we have a machine for that – let me show you.”

“I’ll have to look things up to see if they’re worth more than the precious metals in them,” she said. “I don’t recognize them. The minting techniques seem to be relatively modern, like eighteenth or nineteenth century, but I thought I’d recognize all the historic coins of that period, and I don’t.”