1The morning light and the bruit of the family going around the upstairs hallway woke the girl. She felt at first the strangeness of the place, although there were not many places with which she was familiar any more. The air smelled of sausage and even the morning light—golden with all its blue shadows—seemed foreign in a way that pained her and she remembered waking up on her first night at camp to find that she had wet the bed. Then she remembered the accident—all that—but not in detail; it loomed up in her mind like a boulder, too big to be moved and too adamant to be broken and have its contents revealed. All that stood in her mind like a dark stone. The sheets—linen and damp—brought her back to the pain of strangeness and she wondered why a person should feel, in the world where she was meant to live, so miserable and abraded. She got up out of bed to discover that her whole body was lame and sore. In the closet she found her coat and some cigarettes in the pocket. The taste of smoke diminished the painful sense of strangeness by a little and she carried a clamshell for an ash tray to the side of her bed and lay down again. She shivered, she trembled, she tried unsuccessfully to cry.

2Now the house, or the part of it where she lay, was quiet. She heard a man calling good-by. On the wall she noticed that stuck behind the picture of a little Dutch girl were some palm fronds from Palm Sunday and she hoped that this was not the house of a priest. Then, in the downstairs hall, she heard the telephone ring and someone shouted, “Hello, Mabel. I may not be coming over today. No, she ain’t paid me yet. She don’t have any money. They get all their money from Honora. She don’t have any money. No, I can’t borrow no more money on my insurance. I told you, I told you, I did ass them, I assed them. Well, I need shoes myself the way she expects me to go upstairs and downstairs fifty times a day. They got somebody here now. Did you hear about the accident? There was an accident here last night. A car went off the road and a man was killed. Terrible. Well, he had a girl with him and they brought her in here and she’s here now. I’ll tell you later. I SAID I’LL TELL YOU LATER. They got her here now and that makes more work for me. How’s Charlie? What are you going to have for supper? Don’t have the meat loaf. You don’t have enough of it. I said, don’t have the meat loaf. Open a can of salmon and make Charlie a nice salad. There isn’t enough meat loaf. I just told you. Open a can of salmon and get some of those nice rolls from the bakery. Make him a pie for dessert. They got nice pie apples now. Is he still constipated? They got pie apples, they have so got pie apples, I saw them day before yesterday, they got pie apples at Tituses’. You go down to Tituses’ and get some pie apples and make him an apple pie. Do what I tell you. I’ll tell you about the accident when I see you. I don’t know how long she’s going to stay. I don’t know. I got to make the beds now. Good-by…”

3After this the house was quiet again and then she heard someone climbing the stairs and the pleasant noise of dishes on a tray. She put out her cigarette. “Good morning,” Mrs. Wapshot said. “Good morning, Rosalie. I’m going to call you Rosalie. We don’t stand on ceremony here.”

4“Good morning.”

5“The first thing I want you to do is to let me telephone your parents. They’ll be worried. But what am I talking about? That’s not the first thing I want you to do. The first thing I want you to do is to eat a nice breakfast. Let me fix your pillows.”

6“Oh, I’m awfully afraid that I can’t eat anything,” the girl said. “It’s awfully nice of you but I just couldn’t.”

7“Well, you don’t have to eat everything on the tray,” Mrs. Wapshot said kindly, “but you’ve got to eat something. Why don’t you try and eat the eggs? That’s all you have to eat; but you must eat the eggs.”

8Then the girl began to cry. She laid her head sidewise on the pillow and stared into the corner of the room where she seemed to see a range of high mountains her look was so faraway and heartbreaking. The tears rolled down her cheeks. “Oh, I’m sorry,” Mrs. Wapshot said. “I’m very sorry. I suppose you were engaged to him. I suppose …”

9“It isn’t that,” the girl sobbed. “It’s just about the eggs. I can’t bear eggs. When I lived at home they made me eat eggs for breakfast and if I didn’t eat my eggs for breakfast well then I had to eat them for dinner. I mean everything I was supposed to eat and couldn’t eat was always juss piled up on my dinner plate and the eggs were disgusting.”

10“Well, is there anything you would like for breakfast?” Mrs. Wapshot asked.

11“I’d love some peanut butter. If I could have a peanut-butter sandwich and a glass of milk …”

12“Well, I think that can be arranged,” Mrs. Wapshot said, and carrying the tray and smiling she went out of the room and down the stairs.

13She felt no resentment at this miscarriage of her preparations and was happy to have the girl in her house, as if she was, at bottom, a lonely woman, grateful for any company. She had wanted a daughter, longed for one; a little girl sitting at her knees, learning to sew or making sugar cookies in the kitchen on a snowy night. While she made Rosalie’s sandwich it seemed to her that she possessed a vision of life that she would enjoy introducing to the stranger. They could pick blueberries together, take long walks beside the river and sit together in the pew on Sunday. When she took the sandwich upstairs again Rosalie said that she wanted to get up. Mrs. Wapshot protested but Rosalie’s pleading made sense. “I’d just feel so much better if I could get up and walk around and sit in the sun; just feel the sun.”

14Rosalie dressed after breakfast and joined Mrs. Wapshot in the garden where the old deck chairs were. “The sun feels so good,” she said, pushing up the sleeves of her dress and shaking back her hair.

15“Now you must let me call your parents,” Sarah said.

16“I just don’t want to call them today,” the girl said. “Maybe tomorrow. You see, it always bothers them when I’m in trouble. I just don’t like to bother them when I’m in trouble. And they’ll want me to come home and everything. You see Daddy’s a priest—rector really, I mean communion seven days a week and all that.”

17“We’re low church here,” Mrs. Wapshot said, “but some people I could name would like to see a change.”

18“And he’s absolutely the most nervous man I ever knew,” Rosalie said. “Daddy is. He’s always scratching his stomach. It’s a nervous ailment. Most men’s shirts wear out at the collar, I guess, but Daddy’s shirts wear out where he scratches himself.”

19“Oh, I think you ought to telephone them,” Mrs. Wapshot said.

20“It’s just because I’m in trouble. They always think of me as making trouble. I went to this camp—Annamatapoiset—and I had this sweater with an A on it for being such a marvelous camper and when Daddy saw it he said I guess that A stands for Always in Trouble. I just don’t want to bother them.”

21“It doesn’t seem right.”

22“Please, please.” She bit her lip; she would cry and Mrs. Wapshot swiftly changed the subject. “Smell the peonies,” she said. “I love the smell of peonies and now they’re almost gone.”

23“That sun feels so good.”

24“Do you have a position in the city?” Mrs. Wapshot asked.

25“Well, I was going to this secretarial school,” Rosalie said.

26“You planned to be a secretary?”

27“Well, I didn’t want to be a secretary. I wanted to be a painter or a psychologist but first I went to Allendale School and I couldn’t bear the academic adviser so I never really made up my mind. I mean he was always touching me and fiddling with my collar and I couldn’t bear to talk with him.”

28“So then you went to secretarial school?”

29“Well, first I went to Europe, I went to Europe last summer with some other girls.”

30“Did you like it?”

31“You mean Europe?”

32“Yes.”

33“Oh I thought it was divine. I mean there were some things I was disappointed in, like Stratford. I mean it was just another small town. And I couldn’t bear London but I adored the Netherlands with all those divine little people. It was terribly quaint.”

34“Shouldn’t you telephone this secretarial school you go to and tell them where you are?”

35“Oh no,” Rosalie said. “I flunked out last month. I blew up on exams. I knew all the material and everything but I just didn’t know the words. The only words I know are words like divine and of course they don’t use those words on exams and so I never understood the questions. I wish I knew more words.”

36“I see,” Mrs. Wapshot said.

37Rosalie might have gone on to tell her the rest of it and it would have gone something like this: I mean it just seems that all I ever heard about was sex when I was growing up. I mean everyone told me it was just marvelous and the end of all my problems and loneliness and everything and so naturally I looked forward to it and then when I was at Allendale I went to this dance with this nice-looking boy and we did it and it didn’t stop me from feeling lonely because I’ve always been a very lonely person so we kept on doing it and doing it because I kept thinking it was going to keep me from being lonely and then I got pregnant, which was dreadful, of course, with Daddy being the priest and so virtuous and prominent, and they nearly died when they found out and they sent me to this place where I had this adorable little baby although they told everyone I was having an operation on my nose and afterwards they sent me to Europe with this old lady. …

38Then Coverly came down the lawn from the house. “Cousin Honora called,” he said, “and she’s coming for tea or after supper, maybe.”

39“Won’t you join us?” Mrs. Wapshot asked. “Coverly, this is Rosalie Young.”

40“How do you do,” he said.

41“Hello.” He had that spooky bass voice meant to announce that he had entered into the kingdom of manhood, but Rosalie knew that he was still outside the gates and sure enough, while he stood there smiling at her he raised his right hand to his mouth and began thoughtfully to chew on a callus that had formed at the base of his thumb.

42“Moses?”

43“He’s at Travertine.”

44“Moses has been sailing every day of his vacation,” Mrs. Wapshot said to Rosalie. “It’s just as though I didn’t have an older son.”

45“He wants to win a cup,” Coverly said. They stayed in the garden until Lulu called them into lunch.

46After lunch Rosalie went upstairs and lying down in the still house she fell asleep. When she woke the shadows on the grass were long, and downstairs she could hear men’s voices. She went down and found them all in the garden, once more, all of them. “It’s our out-of-door sitting room,” Mrs. Wapshot said. “This is Mr. Wapshot and Moses. Rosalie Young.”

47“Good evening, young lady,” Leander said, charmed by her fairness, but not at all foxy. He spoke to her with a triumphant and bright disinterestedness as if she had been the daughter of an old friend and drinking companion. It was Moses who was surly—who hardly looked at her, although he was polite enough. It made Mrs. Wapshot unhappy to see any impediment in the relationships of the young. They ate cold carp in the homely dining room, half lighted by the summer twilight, half by what seemed to be an inverted bowl of stained glass, pieced together mostly out of gloomy colors. “These napkins are more holy than righteous,” Mrs. Wapshot said, and most of her conversation at the table was made up of just such chestnuts, saws and hoary puns. She was one of those women who seemed to have learned to speak by rote. “May I please be excused,” Moses mumbled as soon as he had cleared his plate, and he was out of the dining room and had one foot in the night before his mother spoke.

48“Don’t you want any dessert, Moses?”

49“No, thank you.”

50“Where are you going?”

51“Over to Pendletons’.”

52“I want you home early. Honora is coming.”

53“Yes.”

54“I wish Honora would come,” Mrs. Wapshot said.

55Honora will not come—she is hooking a rug—but they do not know and so rather than dwell with the Chekovian delays of this family watching the night come in we might climb the stairs and pry into things of more pertinence. There is Leander’s bureau drawer, where we find a withered rose—once yellow—and a wreath of yellow hair, the butt end of a Roman candle that was fired at the turn of the century, a boiled shirt on which an explicit picture of a naked woman is drawn in red ink, a necklace made of champagne corks and a loaded revolver. Or we might look at Coverly’s book shelf—War and Peace, The Complete Poetry of Robert Frost, Madame Bovary, La Tulipe Noire. Or still better we might go to the Pocamasset Trust Company in the village where Honora’s will lies in a safe deposit box.