[1][2] Lincoln Briggs is spending his seasonal break from college at his family's old summer homestead in Maine at the invitation of his mother, Agnes.
She engages with her mostly female and well-to-do clientele, plying them with historical anecdotes so as to promote the colonial era provenance of the furnishings and dinner ware.
"[8] Waldeland points out the key dramatic dichotomy in Cheever's tale of domestic strife: There is an initial conflict between Mrs. Briggs's apparent satisfaction with her work and the resentment of her father and her son at turning their home into a place of business.
[10] Biographer Patrick Meanor writes: The story is a thinly veiled version of exactly what happened to John Cheever's family as his mother, after the family home was lost during the Great Depression, opened the profitable "Mary Cheever Gift Shop" in Quincy, Massachusetts.
[11]Meanor observes that "What saves the story from becoming a mere condemnation of an overly aggressive, cold woman is the ironic concluding scene, which becomes one of Cheever's earliest examples for his gift of turning a predictable story into something chillingly epiphanic…What seemed an ostensibly straightforward of a woman enjoying her newfound managerial freedom becomes, in the last paragraph, a deeply probing psychological analysis of a strong but still vulnerable woman…"[12]