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“The first few days were painful, since we’d both left so many things in the part that had been taken over. My collection of French literature, for example, was still in the library . . . But there were advantages, too. The cleaning was so much simplified that, even when we got up late . . . by eleven we were sitting around with our arms folded.”

In the first days following the narrator and Irene’s confinement to one side of the house, they are forced to adjust to a new normal. The adjustment is difficult for the narrator since his French literature books, which largely keep him occupied, remain in the part of the house that is taken over. But his simple acceptance of his changed circumstances indicates that he believes he has no other choice. The narrator’s feelings about the change are conflicting because while he is relieved that he no longer needs to clean for hours each day, he is also bored and aimless in his new existence. Ultimately the narrator’s complete lack of resistance to the change illustrates the inevitability of change.

“I took Irene around the waist (I think she was crying) and that was how we went into the street. Before we left, I felt terrible; I locked the front door up tight and tossed the key down the sewer. It wouldn’t do to have some poor devil decide to go in and rob the house, at that hour and with the house taken over.”

At the end of the story, the siblings have ceded their entire house to the intruders, and all they have are the clothes on their backs. Both the narrator and Irene are distraught at this development as she cries and he recognizes how awful he feels. But rather than resist the intruders, the narrator fully accepts the inevitability of change as he locks the gate and throws away the key. The absurdity of people abandoning an entire house to avoid confrontation only emphasizes the supposed futility of fighting against the tides of societal change.

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