Cornelius is sleeping. Somehow I want to go on thinking about him. I feel Cornelius deeply these days. Haven’t I always? Yes, but these past years we have each been tired and nervy, devoured by our separate lives—all that work I did for the Civil Liberties Union, and the increased responsibility Cornelius has had at the bank. We met on the wing, and (it seems to me) in Boston went out far too much for our own good, the everlasting dinner parties with their hours of effervescent wit and intelligence that leave one starved in a queer way at the end, and tired the next morning. Of course Cornelius is passionate about his work. Deprived of it for any length of time, he would feel himself half a man. Whereas I would so gladly give up the Civil Liberties Union and everything and spend my old age gardening and reading and seeing real old friends like Ellen. Ellen? Many people, even here in Willard, must think our friendship an oddity. Maybe its very quality lies in the fact that it remains outside social life. It has never become dissipated in les politesses. We see each other always at the marrow of our lives—not even the general talk about books read or about politics enters in, or so very little. It is life itself that concerns us as friends. How wise my father was to ship me off to the Lockharts when I was eleven! Probably I might have had a breakdown, but in that wonderful year I was allowed to go my own way, and was enriched beyond words by being part of that family. As I look back over my life, the memory of that year shines with a special light. It seems as if I remembered every single thing that ever happened, from bringing in the pumpkins from the big field to sugaring off. Ellen’s mother took me in as one of her own. I miss her still—her quietness and her strength. Ellen has a little of this atmosphere, especially when she is sewing there in the window. I catch a glimpse of her mother in her hands. But Ellen is tart where her mother was sweet—sweet as a good apple. Ellen has been battered by life—bloodied. She has had to grow tough to survive. When I think of my years of college and roving around Europe as a girl, while she was trying to stick it out with her difficult, miserable Rufus, an unhappy man by nature, who “never got a break,” as he was fond of saying himself! Why did she marry him? To get away from home, even though home was a good place to be? Or did she get caught after a dance on a night of full moon?—this is one thing I could never ask. But I have wondered. So many marriages in this town take place after the event, to give a child a father. And then the best has to be made of a poor bargain for the next fifty years.