“Oh, no,” Christina said, “for me it’s been wonderful. I know that sounds heartless. It is just that we have got to know each other again. It’s like a reprieve—this quiet time. Why am I telling you this?” She got up and stood looking down at the fire.

“God knows,” Eben answered.

Christina was, no doubt, questioning her impulse to come here. She was intensely loyal. Yet she had come, and Eben was not sure why, even now. The pause had become rather long.

“Talk about Ellen,” he said.

“Oh, Ellen’s Ellen. Just as ornery as ever, but we have been through so much together. Life here would be too strange for words without Ellen. Only the other day we went for a long walk in the woods and got lost.”

“I have always been interested in this friendship, outside the cadres.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, after all, you don’t invite her when you have guests. I bet you’ve never eaten a meal in her house.”

“We go for picnics,” Christina said, surprised to realize that what Eben said was true. There were certain barriers, and over all the years they had not been crossed. Yet she had talked with Ellen about things—John, for instance—that she would have exposed to the eyes of no other intimate—things she could hardly even discuss with Cornelius.

“Yes”—Eben looked up at her with sudden animation, leaned forward hugging one knee in his clasped hands—“it is all that, the web of relationships that we take for granted and do not examine, that has interested me lately. It is not really a very democratic town, you know—not really,” he repeated.

Christina sat down again. She had the feeling that she should not have come. She had forgotten why it seemed so imperative. But Eben was thinking aloud now, and she couldn’t simply go away without even knowing why she had come in the first place.

“What are you smiling at?”

“Myself.”

“You find yourself amusing?”

“Absurd, Eben. It’s absurd at my age to act on impulse, not think things through. Of course I should have made a beeline for Jim Heald. Instead I came up here because—” She turned on him her brilliant smile, a teasing smile. “Heavens knows why! Maybe because you, Eben, have cut through the web. You know us all from top to bottom, don’t you? I guess I came to you because you would see all sides of this silly business.”

“Most people in the town would agree with Cornelius about Nick and Old Pete. Has that fact occurred to you? There’s nothing they’d like better than a good old-fashioned feud—something to chew over on the long winter nights. I sometimes think people here live on rage. It’s at the root of everything—the grudge—the grudge that may go back a generation or two.”

“Yes, I suppose so,” Christina sighed.