“Yes, I suppose you might put it that way. In a philosophical sense one might put it that people who live in a climate like this, in a run-down economy like this (it really ceased to function after the Civil War), people who exist on the edge of nowhere, have to live by illusions and dreams. There isn’t any present for these towns, so the people in them tend to build up an imagined great past and live in and on that. Jem is a perfect example. His notion of what life was like here in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries has about as much relation to the realities as a TV Western—the legend of the good craftsman, for instance. Look at the way people handle tools in this town—leave them out to rust, let them break down, throw them away, and then”—Eben Fifield laughed sardonically—“go out and dig in the old rubbish heaps to extract a few old drug bottles, which are sold as priceless antiques!”

“But the bottles are interesting,” Sally said. “After all, there were early factories around here. I don’t see what’s wrong with that.”

“If you begin to worship the past, every item has value, especially, perhaps, the items that show your ancestors were a going concern.” But this was off the surface of Mr. Fifield’s mind obviously, and he laughed it off. “You will think I am being unfair. I just have an idea that the real men around here got out. It’s painful to walk these woods and see the old stone walls everywhere, marking what was cleared land a hundred years ago.”

“It has a lonely sort of feeling,” Sally assented.

“Life has been too hard, you see. It has taken the juice out, generation after generation. Jem is right when he talks about self-reliance, I suppose. A hundred years ago a man, a farmer, had hundreds of skills that have gone now—from building a good chimney to breaking in a team of oxen, to making his own tools, shoes, and snowshoes.”

“Where did the men go?” Tim asked.

“West, or to the cities.” Eben smiled. “Now they go to Florida for the winter and live in trailers. All I am trying to get at in this roundabout way is that the summer people saved the economy, and without them God knows how this area could have survived. When you depend on the rich to keep you afloat—well, it can cause a certain resentment.”

“We haven’t felt any resentment, have we, Tim?”

“Oh, it doesn’t surface. It’s there, though. I don’t suppose there’s ever been a society in which the poor didn’t resent the rich, has there?”

“But surely people like the Chapmans have built themselves in,” Sally murmured. “Christina is such a warm person.”