For a moment, she felt herself weightless; though she stepped up into the carriage, it seemed she’d been borne up by the inclination of Gust’s arm. As he let go of her hand, she sank onto the leather seat. Her corset was like a vise around her middle, and she closed her eyes, tried to take a deep breath. She felt John settle on the seat next to her, Gust on her other side. She heard Gust click his tongue. She opened her eyes, just in time to get dust in them, as the horses jerked the carriage into motion.

She had met John her first week at Lawrence College her freshman year; he was a senior that year. He swore it was love at first sight, though she didn’t believe him. He wrote her poetry all through fall term, brought her flowers daily, and listened for hours outside the practice room in Main Hall as she played piano—Chopin, Beethoven, Liszt, Mozart, and scales, always the scales. He finally declared his love at a Christmas banquet. She held him off, giggling with her friends about his country accent, disparaging him as the son of an immigrant. But when she mentioned him offhandedly to her father that Christmas, her father raised his eyebrows and told her that John’s father, Knute Mickelson of Pine Rapids, Wisconsin, was not just any immigrant. As a young man fresh from Norway, Knute had started as a dockhand in Green Bay. With pennies he pinched from his wages, he had invested in land to the northwest, unsettled areas covered thick as the hair on a man’s arm with towering trees of such girth that a big man could not reach halfway around. He had logged his land himself until he could hire crews; he had sold the logs to be milled until he’d earned enough to build his own sawmill on the Bear Trap River north of Pine Rapids, which was hardly a town at all until then. Wilma’s father, who was himself a paper man, said with admiration that Knute was as smart and ruthless as any Yankee, and besides that he’d married a Yankee woman who’d been born and raised in New York, a farm woman who had relished conquering the land, and rising in social status as a result, just as much as her immigrant husband had.

When Wilma told them what her father had said, her friends suddenly agreed that John was just about the most handsome man they had ever seen. So when John proposed on St. Valentine’s Day, she turned him down, but hinted that he might persist. By March, they were engaged, and when he kissed her, she felt a jolt under her skin. There was no other explanation, she thought, but love.