Roman looked at his friend carefully. “You’re not coming back after you take Adam to the university, are you?”

Proctor smiled humorlessly. “To teach James how to farm?”

“There are other families in the county. Your abilities are known. If you put it about that you desired other tutoring, you could live in town and start a school of your own.”

“Eliza Truman’s letter today is only the last link in the long thinking I’ve done. She has asked me to join her in starting her school, and she asked me to persuade you to join us.”

“Me!”

“Yes.“

“Why?”

“I’ve written her about you, of course, told her about your work here. She wants you to help us.”

Roman was quiet, considering it, before his face cleared. “I am to be the first exhibit. You see, ladies and gentlemen, they do not all hang by the tail in trees and eat bananas; some can be taught. Behold! This one is even able to button his clothes and bow and say, ‘thank you.’”

“Roman—stop, stop.”

They stared at each other again, Proctor’s look imploring, Roman’s betrayed.

“You’ve decided to go,” Roman declared. “Or you wouldn’t reject automatically any idea I put forward to persuade you to stay.”

“What kind of school could I make here that would have any meaning? Do I want nothing more than to teach a lot of restless farmers’ sons to parrot Cicero?”

Roman gripped his friend’s arm. “Shh!”

“What?” Proctor looked around.

“I heard someone. I think I did.” Roman ran into the brush, and when he returned a minute later said, “It was my half-brother, Alonzo. I wonder how long he’s been watching us here? We mustn’t come here again.”

6

It would never have entered Brace’s head that he needed portraits of his daughters if they had not pressed him. But when their dearest friends—Rachel was too much younger than they to be dignified by the appellation, “dearest friend”—and deadliest rivals at the day school, the Misses Ann-Elizabeth and Margaret-Ella Clay became the subjects of separate portraits, in addition to appearing in the family portrait, thereby being provided with the insufferable advantage of being able to compare one likeness to another, why the Misses Annabel and Doreen Davis demanded of their father that he have Mr. Casey Troy paint their portraits. It was, of course, Annabel principally who led the campaign. Doreen, although she hated the Clay sisters almost as much as did Annabel, would in truth have preferred a new horse. She was bored with the dull, predictable Genesis, who swallowed wind as if it were hay and who had been old when her father made him hers five years ago.