“Well,” Ellen said quietly, “I think we should perhaps stick to the history at this meeting. The bicentennial is a year off, and surely we can decide about the actual celebration later on. You have given us each a subject, Jem. How long do you see these essays as being? And who, by the way, is to work on missionaries?”

“Jim Heald has volunteered for that important task.”

“Then I want to know whether we are going to try to tell the true history, or are we just going to flatter ourselves?”

Jem cleared his throat several times. He felt bewildered by the turn things were taking, as if all these old friends around the table and the great work in his care were in some strange way being taken over by a group of conspirators—of antibodies, so to speak.

While he shuffled papers over in his briefcase, trying to find something, Miss Tuttle said, “It would be most unusual if we told the truth. It has never been done on these occasions of celebration and self-congratulation, as far as I know, and that would demand a kind of genius which, I fear, with all due respect to our various talents, none of us can command. By the way, Jem, I must say that I shall be happy to make a general outline and fill in viva voce details about the flora and fauna, but to write an essay of even a few pages, worthy of the subject, is really beyond my powers.”

“Nonsense, you’ll do it splendidly, Jane!” Miss Plummer at seventy-two could not imagine that one might feel different at ninety.

“Here, here it is.” Jem looked up over his glasses, not having heard this last exchange, in his agitation. “Here we have it!” he announced triumphantly. “This is what I have chosen as epigraph for the history of Willard.”

He adjusted his glasses, waited for their complete attention and read:

“‘What can you raise on your cold and rocky hill farms?’ said a Southerner to the greatest of New England statesmen.

“‘Daniel Webster’s answer was a proud one: “We raise men.”’”

“Hear, hear!” assented Jim Heald.

Sally Webster, usually so perfect a lady, unfortunately caught Christina’s raised eyebrow and was captured by one of those irrepressible fits of the giggles that are apt to seize on children in church.

“What about the women?” Ellen asked ironically.

“What women?” Jem did not follow her thought.

“Well, didn’t the cold and rocky pastures raise women, Jem?”

“Of course,” he said, frowning, “naturally. That’s understood, that’s what is meant, surely.”

“Is it?” Christina knew it was dangerous—and time-consuming—to try to argue with Jem, whose mind had been made up before this meeting, and who might listen but would hardly change his plans, whatever anyone might say. But there was an electric current in the room now, and she responded to it.