In one of Sophia’s letters mention was made of a terrible accident when one of the children lost a foot when the ax slipped. Sophia herself made a tourniquet and saved him from bleeding to death, for that day it took Dr. Fitz some hours to reach the house. He had been delivering a baby in the next village and had been up all night.

On these January evenings when the dark came down like a curtain before teatime, Christina and Cornelius drew in to the fire and sensed around them an imaginary town—the town of a hundred years earlier. It was the time to begin to write. While Cornelius dozed over The New York Times, which was now delivered by mail and came a day late, Christina labored over a large lined yellow pad.

“What was that long sigh all about?” Cornelius asked without opening his eyes. “It sounded like the end of time.”

“I never knew how hard it is to write!” Christina had chewed off the end of her pencil and crossed out the first paragraph three times. “It all seems so clear in my head. I know just what I want to say, and then the minute I try to set a single word down, it all goes blank.”

“Want to read me what you’ve got? Sometimes reading aloud helps. That’s what Copey used to say.”

It was absurd to be so shy of reading what she had written, but Cornelius suddenly loomed as he pulled himself upright and turned toward her, all expectancy, and she felt before him as she had before the formidable Miss Carstairs at Vassar—a perfect fool.

So her voice came out wobbly and uncertain as she read:

“Willard can be proud of its women. From pioneer days onward, the town has bred courage and character in all its residents, but often women bore the brunt, and sometimes they were the ones to make the great adventures, as did those who went to China, Turkey, and the Sandwich Islands as missionaries, or to Paris to study painting, in one case. But those who stayed home were expected to be the strong root of an arduous life for the men.”

“That’s all right. The last sentence needs a bit of thinking about, maybe—the whole thing is to plunge in, darling.”

And plunge in she did. The case would rest, she decided, on missionaries, Sophia, Erica Portland the artist, and Jane Tuttle.

“Jem would prefer that I concentrated on the early years,” she thought. “But I can stuff in a few paragraphs about that later on.”