Well, we are an odd enough group, Christina considered. Cornelius, with his cheerful, incisive mind, would have been a help, and she missed him sorely. But here we are—a pretty fair sample of what Willard was all about when you came to think of it. Few young people, but a singular range of character in the elderly. Miss Plummer might deal with the world as if it were a horde of natives she must tame and order about, to whom she must set a good example (she had been for years a missionary in Hawaii and, at one time earlier, for a few years in China), but one had to admit that she was a woman of extreme courage and good will—not so much a follower of Christ, one sometimes thought, as a captain in the army of her church. She had taken over the tiny memorial library as her headquarters, cleaned it up, organized it, and commanded all parents of small children to be there at certain hours, or else. Children loved her, recognizing at once a true Girl Scout or den mother in disguise. There was not the slightest doubt where she stood on any subject. Christina swallowed a smile as she remembered that penetrating voice only the other day saying to little Sammy Preckle, “Go out, boy, and spit as hard as you can. That word you just uttered must be gotten rid of at once!” The only trouble was that she could have no possible understanding of the extraordinary woman she would be asked to celebrate in her essay on the town library. Miss Erica Portland had been an artist of something like genius, an eccentric, and in almost every way the exact opposite (oh, that subtle charm and that sly humor!) of Miss Plummer. And Miss Portland’s symbolic vision of Willard as a phoenix, rendered in a remarkably modern painting which hung over the mantel in the library, was quite beyond Miss Plummer’s ken.

“It’s a bird, that’s all. Apparently being burned on a funeral pyre—but why that crazy old creature thought it resembled the town of Willard I cannot tell you.” So she admonished anyone who had the termerity to ask her about it.

Christina was startled out of these ruminations by a question.

“Well, Mrs. Chapman, may we have your ideas?”

“Oh … well … about the phoenix.”

“The phoenix, Mrs. Chapman?” Jem repeated, at a total loss.

“Well, you all know, Erica Portland used it as an image for Willard. I think we should resurrect her vision and perhaps find some appropriate quotations, and use it as the device for the bicentennial.”

“An interesting thought.”

Miss Tuttle raised her head from what looked like a large ornamental flower she had been drawing, and recited:

“‘Glory, like the phoenix ’midst her fires,

Exhales her odours, blazes, and expires.’—Lord Byron,”

she added with a twinkle.