“But won’t your family wonder what became of you?” Joe Lovelady asked. It shocked him that I had left Dora and the turnips without so much as a goodbye.

“Sippy’s like a lot of people out here,” Billy said. “He don’t intend to be found.”

“His wife’s probably worried, though,” Joe insisted.

“Well, let her!” Billy said. “She asked him why he was still breathing.”

A little later, though, he softened a bit toward Dora. “She’s probably crying fits, all right,” he said. “Women ain’t very tough.”

I was to remember that remark the morning he lay dying. Long before then, I think he had been forced to revise his views on the toughness of women.

What did I think? Was I being missed and worried about in the big gray stone pile on Chestnut Street? Had the family noticed that old Dad was no longer moping feverishly in the study, his head in a pamphlet? Was Cook still setting my place at the table? Had anyone observed that I wasn’t turning up to sip my terrapin soup?

The questions troubled Joe Lovelady a good deal more than they troubled me. Joe had been married only a little more than a year when his wife and baby were taken—he could not conceive of leaving them over such a trifle as Mustang Merle.

How could I explain—to a man who had never seen a butler—that in Philadelphia gentlemen of my station leave their wives every day for parlormaids? Joe had never seen a parlormaid, either; perhaps he had never even seen a parlor. Among the many worldly things he had no grasp of was the fact that there are some very decent parlormaids.

There seemed no point in trying to explain to him that from Dora’s point of view it was probably better that I left her because of books. That she could simply put down to lunacy, whereas a parlormaid would have called for a rather more ticklish interpretation.

In fact, my only serious familial responsibility had been to see that our excellent servants were punctually paid, but that was not a truth easily conveyed to two young men whose only schooling had been the raw frontier.

“I had a wife, too,” Joe said. Then he stopped and asked me if I had enjoyed my sea voyage. I believe he had started to raise the question of longevity—to ask me what it was like to have a wife, not for the brief year that he had had his Nellie, but for the more than twenty years that I had had my Dora. But the question choked him. Billy Bone saw it as clearly as I did and gave me a worried look.

Joe Lovelady wanted to believe in happiness. He needed to feel that things could be the way they were supposed to be, that life would yield its ripe sweet fruits to competence and application.