Asia sees in this a beautiful, knightly chivalry. Her own Ivanhoe of the fields. Rosalie is more concerned. She loves and admires John as much as anyone. And she understands that if they ask of him the sacrifice of supporting them, then he must be left in charge, his judgment trusted. A meal with a tableful of male strangers would be a torment to her. Still she worries he’s made a mistake and would force herself to dine downstairs if the choice were hers.

The men gather at the kitchen table in the sweltering house. The women huddle in the even more sweltering bedroom upstairs, eating from plates held on their laps. The butter sweats in its bowl, the women sweat in their dresses. Eggs dry from the edges in as quickly as they can eat them. “Father would have made friends with these men,” Rosalie says in her whisper. “He would have shared a bottle and a story, played the pirate. And so they would have worked hard for him.” She’s not criticizing John. She’s only anxious that he make a success of this and for his own sake. Rosalie recently returned from town with a new saddle as a surprise for him. “When do you imagine I’ll have time to ride?” John had asked her listlessly.

The butter is now completely melted. Mother spoons it onto her bread. Asia watches as Rosalie lifts her hair, wipes her damp neck, and lets it fall again. A single drop of sweat runs along Asia’s spine, stopping at the band at her waist.

“Your father had a Northern spirit,” Mother says, red-faced in all her widow’s black. “A democratic spirit. No man in the North would ask to be called Master in his own house.”

However much he might like it, Asia thinks.

“John,” says Mother, “has a more delicate sensibility.”

Asia is a Northerner herself, which means that John must be one as well, but there is a transactional nature to Northern manners, a mercantilism that she dislikes and he finds abhorrent. It’s the Yankee way, she thinks, to value a thing only for the money it might make.

John’s own manners and opinions were formed by his classmates at St. Timothy’s Hall. Brief as his time at that school was, it marked him for the South forever. He thinks he knows a superior sort of person when he sees one and to pretend otherwise is to dissemble.

Asia hears a man singing downstairs. He has a tenor voice, a voice so beautiful, she forgets everything else and sits, spoon in the air, listening.

In the old churchyard in the valley, Ben Bolt,

In a corner obscure and alone

They have fitted a slab of granite so gray

And sweet Alice lies under the stone.