“Shut up, you dirty bastard.” George would have knocked him down, except for Pen’s intervention.

“Come along, you two. We’re making an exhibition of ourselves,” she said firmly.

“He’ll be cited for contempt, of course,” George said when they were safely in the car, lighting cigarettes. Grace, feeling the reaction, was shaking all over and wondered if the children noticed. For them, she knew, it could not be such a moment as it had been for her.

“What does that matter?” she said, “we can hold our heads up.”

After they had quieted down a bit and were driving along the river, Pen said thoughtfully, “It’s only the beginning, of course.”

“Yes, but it has looked like the end for so long,” Grace answered quickly. “You see.”

“What I liked”—and George smiled as he said it, a sudden young happy smile—“was that it was Edward Cavan’s name that really got Damon going. And it might have been disastrous; I was scared there for a while——”

“Damon Phillips has guts,” Pen broke in.

Grace looked at the river and her eyes were shining with tears. “I think more, he’s generous. It’s a liberal trait,” she added, but only she knew what a handsome apology it was.

A Biography of May Sarton

A Biography of May Sarton

May Sarton (1912–1995) was born Eleanore Marie Sarton on May 3 in Wondelgem, Belgium, the only child of the science historian George Sarton and the English artist Mabel Eleanor Elwes. Barely two years later, Sarton’s European childhood was interrupted by the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand and the onset of the First World War.

Fleeing the advancing Germans, the family moved briefly to Ipswich, England, and then in 1915 to Boston, Massachusetts, where her father had accepted a position at Harvard University. Sarton’s love for poetry was first kindled at the progressive Shady Hill School, a period she wrote about extensively in I Knew a Phoenix, published in 1959.

At the age of twelve, Sarton traveled to Belgium for a year to live with friends of the family and study at the Institut Belge de Culture Française. There, she met the school’s founder, Marie Closset, who grew to be Sarton’s close friend and mentor, and who was the inspiration for her first novel, The Single Hound (1938).

On returning to the States, Sarton graduated from Cambridge High and Latin School in 1929. Although she was awarded a scholarship to Vassar College, Sarton joined actress Eva Le Gallienne’s Civic Repertory Theatre in New York instead, much to the dismay of her father. However, while learning the basics of theater, Sarton continued to develop her poems, and in 1930, when she was just eighteen, a series of her sonnets was published in Poetry magazine.