“Oh, it’s you, Joel,” he said with evident disappointment. “Not Christina.”

“Sorry, Sir,” Joel said. “Shall I get Mrs. Chapman?”

“She’ll come, she’ll come. She just gets completely cuckoo in the garden, forgets where she is and all about time! My advice to you is to keep away from women who are gardeners, Joel. There is bound to be a conflict of interests.”

“I don’t expect I’ll ever meet many gardeners.”

“No … well …”—Cornelius scratched his eyebrow—“perhaps not.”

“Cathy wants a farm,” Joel said, realizing too late what a giveaway it was to mention Cathy in this context.

“Oh, Cathy is a poet, a chameleon. She’ll take on the color of whomever she loves—at least for a while. Women do that. But let me tell you something, Joel—that malleability is only an illusion. Women have hard centers. Cathy’s a stubborn girl.”

“She’s a genius, maybe,” Joel said quietly.

Cornelius raised his eyebrows.

“Really? What makes you think so?”

“Have you read her poems?”

“One or two. I’m afraid they seem rather formless and obscure to me, but that’s the generation gap, no doubt.”

“I think they’re cool. She has things to say. She talks about loving, for instance, in a wonderful strange way—she knows so much.”

Cornelius gave him a rather piercing look, coughed, stirred in his chair.

“Yes, I expect she does. It’s sex that throws girls her age. That’s why I regard my generation—old fogies now, of course—as lucky. We didn’t have to go the whole way the first time we took a girl out.” He coughed again. “It’s loving, old boy … I mean, as you say … Cathy …” But he felt he had already spoken far too frankly, reached down and patted Flicker’s head, and was relieved when Cathy called Joel to come along.

It’s their world, he thought, and we can’t really help them make it. He longed for Christina; he longed not to be struggling to understand absurdities like the word “genius” applied to Cathy’s clumsy, touching little poems; he longed to be safe in his own world.

Upstairs in the attic room, the world of Cathy and Joel was not the perfect bubble of joy they had carried so carefully in their hands for ten days or more. Joel was lying on the floor on his back staring at the ceiling, and Cathy was kneeling at the window to watch the sunset and the pale gold sky back of the pines.

“Joel?”

“What?”

“Do you remember the first time you came up here and we held hands for a long time, as if we had arrived at the end of a journey?”