Flicker stirred and came to have his head stroked.

“And why is it that when we remember things, evoke the past, it is always someone old we remember?” Christina asked. “I’ve only just thought of that, but it’s true, it seems to me. Why don’t we think of the young?”

“You’re always talking about you and Ellen when you were young,” Cathy said, “… sliding down the hay in the barn and getting scolded, and running away to try to see the wildcat they said was up Stone Hill.”

“Maybe it is that we remember ourselves young and everyone else as old,” Cornelius said, rubbing his hands together as he did when he was enjoying himself.

“Or maybe the old make a strong impression because they have become themselves. They have more character,” Christina said. “We’re always, it seems to me, younger than the world we live in. And it is the old that give a place its atmosphere, make it what it is—Willard and Jane Tuttle, Willard and Erica Portland.”

“By the way, I trust you have devoted some pages to Miss Portland?” Jem said.

“I did, but it was hard. You know what happens when you begin to write something—it all slips through your fingers in some queer way. I thought I knew all about Erica Portland but it took me hours just to track down where it was she studied in Paris and when she came back. I saw her so clearly—huge in old age, with her loud, happy laugh and her white hair cut like a man’s, her air of being a queen, but a happy queen who enjoyed being rich and royal and talented and all she was.”

“And that is what did not get into Christina’s essay,” Cornelius teased. “Christina was so impressed by being an historian that she developed an academic style—a Victorian academic style at that.”

“Don’t tease me,” she begged, but she was laughing. “Jem, Cornelius corrected nearly every word, and before I was through I felt like a schoolgirl who had just managed a C for the course.”

She got up, obviously feeling her knee.

“I’ll just go and get it… or …”—she looked over at Cathy gratefully—“you could run up for me, darling. The darn thing is in a folder on my desk. You can’t miss it.”