When Uncle Mitchell finally wakes they all join him at the table, where Ann Hall serves them bowls of bread and milk, eggs and cheese, potatoes and baked apples. Aunty Rogers, on Ann’s appeal, has sent over a Dutch oven of corn pone, which Ann tells Rosalie and June quietly not to eat until they know their guests are sated. Rosalie doesn’t begrudge it, though she loves corn pone. But she’s never gone hungry the way the Mitchells have.

Uncle Mitchell thanks them all with a forced elegance. “We’ve had as warm a welcome as we might have thought only a happy dream on those long, desperate nights of long, desperate travel.” He tucks in.

After some serious eating, Uncle Mitchell continues. “But as to the future, I’m sure you see that it won’t do. We can’t all squash together like this. We’ll need our own rooms and beds.

“We thought you lived grander,” he explains.

He helps himself to more of the corn pone, douses it with butter and sorghum. “But all this can wait until your lord and master’s return. No hurry. We’ve surely known worse.”

Rosalie has been watching the cuffs of June’s Sunday shirt, dipping into the breakfast eggs as George eats them, staining them yellow along the edge. That stain will never completely come out, though it will no doubt fall to Rosalie to try.

So Uncle Mitchell’s words take a moment to register. She turns a shocked face to Mother. She hears the little tchh Ann makes when expressing disapproval. The Mitchells are here to stay.

As they have no money, Father will now have to support them all. “Until I find my feet,” Uncle Mitchell offers, but that day will be long in coming. Since Mary Ann’s and Elizabeth’s deaths, money has been tight. Father still draws enormous crowds, but he sometimes forgets or refuses to appear or does half a play and then loses interest. Then the manager has to be fully recompensed for the ticket sales and the space. Or else he spends his earnings on drink, or spurious business ventures, or sudden charities before Mother can get her hands on it.

New sources of income are necessary. Mother will have to take produce into the city and sell from a stall. It offends June that she is forced to do this, but Rosalie suspects she won’t mind regularly leaving the farm for a day and a night.

Aunt Mitchell, who managed to walk the thirty miles from Baltimore toting her daughter, is suddenly an invalid. She takes to her bed and treats her sister-in-law as a servant. If Father had stayed in England while his star rose, she and her husband would be people of consequence. She blames Mother that this didn’t happen. “Your mother owes me,” she tells Rosalie, “the life I might have had if she hadn’t seduced my brother away from us,” and when Rosalie says nothing in response, “Stand up straight! Speak up! I suppose you think this lisping and stooping is delightfully girlish, but believe me, you’re not the girl to carry it off.”