After the noon meal, Joel sat down cross-legged on the floor, his back to the stove, and had a long talk with Ellen. She may have balked at the idea of this uninvited guest but Ellen absorbed life through conversation, and she rarely had such a strange specimen to investigate as this curiously uncouth, sensitive boy. After a while she forgot about the hair and found she could talk to him, because he listened in a very intent way, as if it really mattered what she had to say. He was unlike her own grandchildren, who, she felt, never really heard anything, wild to get out and run, or go to a movie or a game. This was a new breed of critter to Ellen. When he asked about Cathy, he talked about her with surprising insight. She never felt that he was out to talk about her just as a girl, a piece of potential sex—he seemed to think about people as persons, regardless of sex. Their exchange had been brief enough, but she suspected that Cathy had sensed his interest. Well, one never knew.

So while she talked and sewed, turning the cuffs and collars of one of Cornelius’s fine shirts, she was thinking all the time, and was startled out of a thought by the question Joel now posed.

“It’s hard to be a rich girl. How will she manage to stay real?”

Ellen put down her sewing with a suddenly impatient gesture.

“I’m sick and tired of people who seem to think poverty is real and being well enough off not to worry about where your next meal is coming from is not. I never saw a realer person than Christina Chapman, Cathy’s grandmother, if you want to know.”

“Go on,” Joel said, turning over to lie on his back, full length, his arms under his head, looking at the ceiling. “Still, Cathy herself, from what you have told me, wanted to get out of that rich school and come here.”

“She’s young for her age, Joel. Maybe she imagined that here she could stay a child—a wild child—a little longer. I gather she is afraid of boys.”

“No boys in the high school?”

“Well, it’s different from Boston society. But maybe she just needed some time away from home. Grandparents are easier on a teen-ager than parents, I have a hunch.”

“What are her parents like?”

“Father’s a banker. I guess you’d call him a square.” And Ellen laughed. “Marianne, her mother, is a handsome woman. Looks like her mother, but she’s always seemed less of a person than she meant to be. Works hard at her life. I don’t envy her, having to entertain and all.”

“That’s what I’m against.”

“Against just what?”