“But how many women anywhere know about those things?” Olivia asked.

Cornelius smiled, catching a look half humorous in Christina’s eyes. She herself hated abstract discussions and had suffered at innumerable dinner parties where, she thought, everyone showed off.

“Anyway, go on, Joel,” Eben said kindly. He was again standing by the fireplace.

Joel rubbed one ear thoughtfully. “I don’t know what to say. I don’t have the words like Cathy in her poems, but I guess Willard has given me a glimpse of what life might be like if success wasn’t the criterion and if the society were less competitive and cheap. There’s room for all kinds of people. I saw a lot at the store, and heard a lot, too.”

“And they didn’t talk about buying things—fishing gear, boats?” Eben teased.

“Naturally, but those things are for pleasure in themselves—I mean not just to show off—that you have a Cadillac and your neighbor just a Ford.” He looked up at Eben quizzically. “You went away and came back, Mr. Fifield. I suppose—I must suppose—that you came back for a reason.”

“Oh well,” Eben said in a casual tone that masked his feeling, “my family has lived in my house for four generations—six if you count the old farm that burned down and that this house replaced. There are roots, my boy, and when you get to be my age, their pull is stronger than one would have thought at twenty. At twenty, I can tell you, I had only one idea—to get the hell out!” He laughed his ironic laugh.

“Do you think you could come and live here now, Joel?” Olivia asked gently. “I mean before you’ve achieved what you want for your life?”

“I don’t want to achieve. I just want to be,” Joel said with perfect self-assurance.

This sentence was galvanizing. Everyone shifted in his place, and before the reaction could explode, Christina suggested to Olivia that she and Cathy might serve.

“Bring your drinks,” she said. “We can go right on in the dining room.”

Joel was placed at Cornelius’s right with Cathy beside him, Olivia on her father’s left, and Eben beside her with Christina at the end of the table, on his left.

“Somebody light the candles,” Christina said.

She had been quiet during the discussion, but now, at the foot of the table, she was the most vivid and commanding presence among them. And, quite unconsciously, she drank in the homage of Cornelius, of Eben, and of young Joel, who had stationed himself for the moment behind her chair in a sudden seizure of gallantry that she would not have expected of him, blue jeans and all.

When he sat down at his place, Cathy squeezed his hand hard under the table. Olivia was pouring the Burgundy.

“Shall we conjugate the verb ‘to be’?” Cornelius asked.