It had been quite a day. After Cathy left it felt very still in the house. Ellen called the dog in and gave him his supper. Then she went out on the back porch. Now, in mid-August, it seemed as if the jungle crept in on all sides. There wasn’t a breath of wind either, nor a bird singing. A thick green silence. Then the grating roar of a motorcycle revving up and zooming off.

Well, Ellen thought, fanning herself with a piece of newspaper, all the bicentennial really is, is a look back on two hundred years of struggle and forward to more of it, even to wars still going on and young men dying.

Was she getting soft in her old age or was there, after all, something new under the sun? It didn’t seem as if her own children, except Nick, had ever thought much about changing things. But Cathy did, and Joel—in spite of his fancy words—did too. At least they asked questions that were hard to answer. One would like to hope.

CHRISTINA’S JOURNAL—August 10

Olivia and Cathy drove me out of the kitchen and are doing the breakfast dishes. Marianne and Bruno have gone for a walk, although it’s frightfully hot. Cornelius, dear thing, is dozing on the porch. He got through yesterday and all the excitement wonderfully well, but he’s feeling it now.

I sit looking out at the mountain against a flat blue sky, almost too explicit this morning, and there is not a single sound. The trees stand perfectly still in their layers of leaves and seem hardly to breathe. Even the jays are silent. It is one of those pauses before change—soon it will be autumn and Cornelius and I shall have been here for a full year. Out of all the things we have experienced, this silence seems most wonderful. I wonder whether I could ever live in a city again.