Roman wrote to Sarah every month, sometimes oftener. The school in Philadelphia that had been founded by Miss Eliza Truman had flourished and now occupied two houses near the waterfront. Roman and Proctor lived in one and superintended the classrooms and dormitory there. Eliza and another white teacher, her protégé, a Miss Felicity Chapman, lived in the other house and supervised the girls’ dormitory. The boys and girls mingled in the classrooms of both buildings. Besides these four resident teachers, various artisans were employed by patrons of the school to teach manual trades to those pupils who might become self-supporting by such training.

Both Roman and Proctor belonged to a small orchestra, and so still enjoyed making music. Roman wrote to Sarah of performances they attended at the theatre, of public lectures, and sent her clippings from newspapers and other journals he thought might interest her. Roman also wrote to Rachel, but less often as the years went by, and finally not at all. For him, Sarah was Beulah Land. Rachel began to fade, until she was like a part of Sarah; and as her life filled with new people and other loves, she let him go too. Sometimes Roman had difficulty remembering who the people were Sarah referred to in her letters—she was apt to assume that he remembered every living soul there, and he did not, and had to say to himself, “Let me see; that must be Pecora’s child.” But he read every scrap of her news with interest. It was all part of the great ferment into which he had been born, although specially born, and of which he would always be a part.

After violets, other flowers and grass and trees grew. The fields were planted. Winter silence and closed doors gave way to spring and summer openness and noise. Nell and Penelope put their rocking chairs on the front porch, and rocked and gossiped and laughed, and now and then quarreled and despised each other. They had nothing else to do.

8

The long, columned porch was not merely a shady retreat for the old ladies that summer; it was a lively junction much trafficked by casual visitors, as well as by the residents of Beulah Land. Nell and Penelope were original settlers; their claims were held inviolate. One morning Selma set a chair carefully away from the older women, where she was presently joined by Pauline and a gangly girl of eleven, who seemed all eyes, awkward hands, long legs. Her name was Lilac. She had been so quick to learn last winter—she’d shown no signs of such quickness before—they could not bear to leave her mind idle during the summer when the school was closed; and so they had offered to give her special lessons in reading and grammar, if her parents would spare her for an hour or two a day.