“Miss Grange, I am nearly engaged.”

“Ah” was all she said.

“What do you think of that?”

She smiled. “What might I think?”

“You might think it strange.”

She regarded me in silence as I lowered my cup to my lap. Then I raised it up again, looked at her, and almost desperately pronounced, “It all seems so … final.”

She put down her cup. “What is final?”

“My life,” I answered helplessly.

She thought a minute, then leaned forward. “Tell me, Maisie. What is it that you wish?”

“I wish—” Again sounded the foghorn’s soft remonstrance to the incoming weather. “For someone to point me toward a place where I may go, where I might put down all this yearning in me.”

“Toward what?” Her eyes were fixed on me.

I looked at her. What? What indeed? “I do not know. I cannot say. Papa might have told me.”

“I doubt your papa ever would have told you what to do.”

“No, but he taught me, introduced me to other minds.”

“That was good.”

“He would have shown me how to grow to be like them, to fit into the shapes they held open.”

“What shapes?”

“Shapes, shapes, Miss Grange. Shapes of possibility. For a life.”

She sat back. “Your father could never have shown you that. Never,” she finished softly.

“Because he died?”

“Because he could not show you what to be—only your longing, that precious longing, can show you.”

“No, Miss Grange,” I uttered miserably. “It seals me: I yearn and yearn and end with wordlessness.”

She put down her cup upon the table and clapped her hands as if to clear the air. I watched as she lowered her hands back onto her lap, the echo of the clap still extending past me into the long room. Then the quiet.

“There are no words,” she spoke carefully, “because this longing is your self, Maisie, your self speaking.”

“But what am I to do?”

“Grab hold,” she urged, “grab hold.”

“But of what?” I was growing still more desperate. “What shape shall I grab hold of?”

She shook her head at me. “There is no one shape for a woman to fit.”

I thought a moment, then pursued. “Papa would have said a woman should fit into her house.”

She pursed her lips. “Oh, well for that matter,” Miss Grange remarked dryly, “a woman should fit the shape of her mother.”

“Her mother!”

“Yes, you see I was wrong just now, Maisie. There are very clear shapes, as you call them, held up by the world for a woman to consider. Two of them, in fact, beckon to you always: the upright, comforting shape of a man and the eternally present shape of your mother.”

“I think you tease me now.”