Asia would have liked to attend Mary’s funeral with her brothers and husband, but given her unrelenting animosity towards the deceased, it was unthinkable. She seems to Rosalie to be moping. Of course, it’s terribly sad, she tells Rosalie, but all things considered, Mary’s lucky to have died. Since Edwin has returned to his old wild ways, nothing but misery lies ahead. Mary’s better off out of it.

“Don’t say that to Edwin,” Rosalie says. She’s thinking of a memorable line only recently read—’Tis better to have loved and lost. She believes it.

“I’m not an idiot,” Asia tells her.

By May, Edwin has decided that Dorchester is too quiet to drown out his reproachful, mournful thoughts. He and Mother make a plan to settle in New York City. Edwin will buy a large house, one that can accommodate the whole family and be a real home for Mother, Rosalie, John, and also Joe, should they ever see him again. “Strange, wild, and ever moving,” Edwin says about his youngest brother. “He causes us all some degree of anxiety.”

While Edwin looks for a suitable place, the publisher George Putnam offers his fully furnished house as a rental. This beautiful home is on 17th Street, in the fashionable and prosperous Gramercy Park neighborhood.

Once again, Rosalie is being cast upon the winds. Just shy of forty years old and she still has no say in where or how she lives.

Probably if she’d kicked up a fuss, she could have remained with Asia. She’s grown very fond of Asia’s children—Dolly and little Eddy. But she misses Mother. And Edwin will let her go her own way without comment—that’s appealing. She thinks there will be plenty of liquor in the house. About this, she is mistaken. She packs her things.

Any resentment vanishes when she walks through the door of the Putnam home. She’s never lived anywhere half so magnificent. She has a room to herself on the second floor, a blue room with a window seat for reading, soft rugs, a high bed, and a wardrobe with forget-me-nots painted on the china knobs. She writes her letters on the very desk where Washington Irving once wrote “Rip Van Winkle.”

Edwina is a dear little thing, gay as a flicker for all the tragedy about her. And one child in the household is ever so much easier than two.

Marie, Edwina’s Parisian nurse, turns out to be good with hair. One day, she offers to do up Rosalie’s and the results are so pleasing, Rosalie asks her to do this every morning. Edwin gives Rosalie the name of one of Mary’s dressmakers and soon she has three new dresses in the same deep blues and reds that Mary favored. “You look so elegant!” Mother tells her.

A letter soon arrives. Asia is pregnant again. Rosalie has had a very narrow escape.