“Sometimes when I walk in and they’re sitting by the fire, each reading a book …” Cathy hesitated, not knowing how this feeling could be said. “—Oh, I don’t know … it’s as if they had a magic circle round them. I feel I’m breaking into something. Mrs. Comstock, do you think that’s usual? I mean …” She frowned. “I never wanted to get married. Maybe you have to be very old to enjoy it.”

Ellen laughed.

“Very old or very young maybe.”

“Maybe.” Cathy considered this point. “My parents …” Ellen paused a moment and glanced up, but as Cathy seemed to have decided not to say whatever she was going to say, she bent her head over her sewing again. “Oh, I guess they love each other—but it’s not like Gram and Gramp.… You’ve known them forever, Mrs. Comstock. Was it always like this—their marriage, I mean?”

Ellen laid her sewing down and looked out the window.

“I sometimes think marriages are like plants—they have their hard years when it seems like they’ll never bear another flower, just look so puny and worn out. And then—you can’t tell why, but that bush suddenly perks up.

“Was that the way with you and Mr. Comstock?”

“Mr. Comstock and I?” Ellen looked startled. “We never understood each other, not from the start. Rufus was a hard man to understand—and I was a pretty spiky young thing. Takes two to make a marriage as they say, and when there isn’t even one really trying … well …”

“Why did you marry him then?”

Cathy was entirely unconscious of how painfully she probed, just because she was so transparently honest herself. But, much to her own surprise, Ellen found herself trying to decide how to answer this child, instead of biting off the thread as she would have done if Christina, for instance, had asked any such question—found herself trying to meet the honest wish to learn about life with an equal honesty about what she herself had learned the hard way.

“I guess I shouldn’t have asked that,” Cathy said into the silence. “You’re about the only grown-up person I know who will answer rude questions like that.”

“No, I was thinking.… I didn’t know Rufus very well. I never saw his temper till after we were married. I didn’t know he was a hard man. When a man’s in love—well, sometimes you don’t see what he’s really like.”

“That’s what scares me,” Cathy confessed. “How does one know? I think I’d rather be like Aunt Olivia than anyone—free to be myself—and trying to help poor children instead of having any.”

“Women get caught.”

“Aunt Olivia isn’t.”

“Maybe not.”