And I can’t imagine she will, said Aunt Tizzy. She signaled to Arthur and stood up, carrying her little purse, to slip around the cove for a cigarette. She’d promised her sister-in-law not to smoke in front of the children. Lil’s a grand girl, she said. Tommy Lattimore is merely nice.

The Lattimores are a lovely family, said Mrs. Glover. They’re just splendid people.

And they’ve had their misfortunes, said Mrs. Eliot, looking solemn.

Mrs. Glover nodded.

He didn’t even die in the trenches, Arthur said. The guy got botulism.

The women glared at him. Arthur stood up and followed his aunt.

At first, the water took her breath away, then she got used to it and it was fine. It was nowhere near as cold as the water out in the Bay. She’d not been swimming in a week, and the water seemed to have a thickness to it from all the rain. Lilian kicked her legs beneath her, feeling the pressure on her knees, the swirling against her ankles. It pushed on her arms and made her fingers feel strangely webbed. She was buoyed up, the cold water sparkled around her.

It would never do with Tommy Lattimore, she knew that. He was sweet, but there was something she was after that would never come from him. She could not have said what the something was and felt silly not being able to articulate it. Her father would say if there were no words for it, it did not exist.

She swam through a narrow between two outcroppings of white rock. To the right she saw Aunt Tizzy leaning back against a chaiselike rock and Arthur higher up, hunched over like a griffin. Smoke issued forth from both of them. They waved in a lazy way. She swam past.

At the end of an inlet she saw a house half-hidden by elms. A group of apple trees dotted the slope leading down to the shore where, out on the water, a white sloop was anchored. A man appeared on deck bare-chested and walked up to the bow. He fiddled with some cleats and ropes, unwinding a halyard from a wire stay. A woman’s head rose from the cockpit. Her hair was cut in a bob and her neck was tan. She called to the man, then stepped out on deck. She was wearing a pale Japanese robe which flapped around her knees, a sort of dressing gown. She brushed back the hair from one eye as she stood nearby watching the man. Suddenly she leapt backwards — the man had sprung up after her. He caught hold of her shoulders and the two of them wrestled against the rope railing, laughing, and after a struggle, the man’s feet were up in the air and then disappeared over the side. It was a moment before Lilian heard the muffled splash.