Penelope received letters from Judge Truebody in which he conveyed the sentiment that Savannah’s loss was Beulah Land’s gain, and advised concerning Lauretta’s future that one must hope for the best but be prepared for the worst—and managed, in short, to remind Penelope that she was away from home, and that however well her niece took to country life, she herself had had a bate of it, that she missed Savannah—and Uncle Joshua and Clarice and yes even Ichabod, and most of all she missed her own dear house on Broughton Street.

It was now the middle of July, and they had been visiting for nearly six weeks. Penelope had long since exhausted every confidence she wished to share with Deborah. There were moments she could do nothing but despise her for her dull sense of duty and her countrified preoccupation with weather and crops. There were mornings it was all she could do to eat her breakfast cantaloupe and batter cakes with the others before escaping to the quiet of her room. She had come to abominate country air with its wretched fresh smells of fruit and bloom and animal excreta. She could not cross the kitchen yard without pressing a kerchief to her nose; yet Deborah could scrape chicken filth from the bottom of a shoe on a step as she calmly talked of rain and neighbors. The morning milk was too warm, with too intimate a taste of the inside of a cow where it had too recently been. She thought if she were asked to enjoy another ear of corn, no matter if it were boiled, baked, or roasted, she would take it and throw it at someone or something. She lodged for the close, stale smell of the indoors in Savannah. No matter how one opened windows and aired the house, there always remained a good house smell of furniture and oil and attic must. It never, thank goodness, could be mistaken for a garden or a pasture. She longed for the sour, put-upon look of Clarice, the frowning disapproval of Uncle Joshua, the cheerful, idling idiocy of lazy Ichabod.

“It is time for us to go home,” she said to Sarah one night when they had retired to their room.

Sarah looked surprised, pained, and then resigned.

“We must go home to Savannah,” together they said to Deborah and Leon and Selma the next day.

“Oh, no!” Leon said.

“Please stay!” Selma begged Sarah.

“You’ve only just come,” Deborah grumped to Penelope.

Firmly, Penelope said again, “We must go home to Savannah.”