“Well, you can’t have everything!” Miss Plummer said, and laughed. “No, they don’t, much, and that’s a fact. There’s TV, alas, in every shack, house, and trailer. You know what that means—half paying attention—half there …”

But it was time to go. Cornelius, she observed—he who had been so alert a half hour before—dozed, and she and Christina exchanged a glance. He woke as he heard them moving about and thanked Miss Plummer for coming “to cheer this old wreck.”

“Just beached for a while, Cornelius. The ship seems in fine condition once the tide rises.”

“If it ever does,” he murmured. But neither of the women heard him—they were out in the hall.

CHRISTINA’S JOURNAL—December 11

Miss Plummer’s visit did tire Cornelius, but I think he enjoyed it just the same. He had a nap before supper, and when he woke he seemed more cheerful. We had a real talk with our drink, and I got back in that half hour what I felt we were losing—the precious chance to be together and at peace, to be together and have time to let the whole inner world come to the surface and flower. When I think of the time we wasted at dull dinner parties last year and the year before, and forever it seems!

When Cornelius goes off into a doze he is not really absent, just withdrawn, hasn’t the energy to exteriorize. But as soon as I sat down beside him this evening, he began talking about Miss Plummer. She had made an impression. He found her ardors and hesitations endearing, and he ended by saying something I have to think about. “We are among extraordinary people here, Christina. What makes them so? I feel that we, in a way, are ordinary. We are full of inherited attitudes. I mean, I suppose, that there are hundreds of fairly well-off, intelligent—I must grant us a little intelligence—well-educated people who have traveled and taken part in things, who are not unlike us. But who is like Old Pete, Miss Plummer, Ellen, Nick, or Jane Tuttle—even Ed Taggart?” That is more or less what Cornelius said. And the question we tried to answer is: What makes them extraordinary? Maybe it is that whatever they are has had to be created from the inside out, and against great odds. They have had to overcome a lot to exist at all. Cornelius thought that explained also why it always looks as if the people of the past, the original settlers to start with, tower over what any of us can be now. But the most interesting thing from my point of view is that a village like this absorbs and can use failure—Old Pete, for instance. I understand better now why the children look up to him. He seems more real to them than, perhaps, we do. He is sui generis, the authentic natural man.