“There’s a pitcher of iced tea in the frigidaire. Pour yourself a glass and bring me one, will you?” Ellen had a box of spools of thread in front of her and was winding loose thread. “I’m in a tangle here—thought I’d tidy this box up for something to do.”

Pleased to be useful, Cathy poured carefully and brought the two glasses over and took a long swallow before she sat down again with a sigh. “Delicious …”

“Too many people for you up at the Ark?” Ellen asked.

“Not exactly.”

For a long suspended moment, they sat there, the old woman and the young girl, and neither needed to say anything. This was Ellen’s way—to hold her peace and let people talk when they were ready to. You can cage the spirit with a word too soon, she was thinking as she wound blue silk thread onto a spool.

“Don’t know why I bother,” she murmured, “it’s so knotted.”

“Is it true that men like war?” Cathy asked then.

“I expect so.” Ellen bit off a knot and wound the end back on the spool. “Or they’d find some better way to make peace.” She smiled at what was perhaps meant as a joke.

“It was nice what Eben said about Nick.” This remark was not answered, and in the silence, a two-way silence now, Cathy wound a strand of hair round one finger, then unwound it before she finally said, “I’m all mixed up.”

“About Joel?”

“I guess so … about everything … Aunt Olivia says it’s all right to fall out of love, people grow up that way … and Joel now seems to like the army. At least he doesn’t revolt. And Nick maybe is almost a saint, yet he gets into terrible rages. I just feel nothing is clear or whole. It’s all little bits and pieces of right and wrong. I’m scared.”

“You’re not the first,” Ellen said grimly.

“Who is trustable? All the time Eben was talking I was thinking what if a bomb fell out of the sky and blew us all up? That’s what happens every day in Vietnam, and we sit around complacently saying what a wonderful place Willard is!”

“Yes,” Ellen said. “Well, people would hardly have been pleased if Eben had chosen to speak against the war—the Wayland boy is over there now.”

“Oh, I know!” Cathy shook her head. “I know I am being childish. It’s awful to be fifteen.”

“Fifteen has clear eyes. You see a lot you can’t understand or do much about.”

“Sort of like Nick.”

“It isn’t saintly to my way of thinking to care more about animals than people,” Ellen said. She had been thinking about Eben’s praise of her son; she had not been convinced. “People are harder—I mean, harder to understand.”