“Well, she brought up a good many who were not!”

Christina badly wanted to go and put an arm around Ellen’s stooped shoulders, hug her hard. But such a physical expression of affection would have been momentous, and so, out of place. That was not the way they had ever behaved. Tenderness—it didn’t show itself often here. Instead she went on thinking aloud about Jane and what made her what she was.

“Sometimes I think old maids know more than we do. We get so absorbed in our families.”

“They either dry up or they ripen, like good apples.”

“Oh, Ellen, it’s so good to talk to you!”

“Whatever brought that on?” At last Ellen smiled.

“Just the way you say things like that. Do you know why I came down this morning?”

“I have some idea.”

“No, it wasn’t really about Nick. It wasn’t about Cornelius. It was just because I couldn’t bear not to be straight with you—in the clear. I couldn’t bear the barriers going up between us, you and me, Ellen.”

“I was angry, I don’t mind telling you.”

“But you’re not angry now?”

Ellen drew herself up and looked straight at Christina for the first time. “We’re friends, Christina, I’ll grant you that. But we’re not family. I’ll always put family first.”

“Oh, dear, I suppose we all do—and that may be what’s wrong with the world.” Christina looked around the kitchen, so warm and livable, all things here worn and used and loved—the geraniums on the window sills, a little peaky still from the change to indoors; Nick’s magazines in a pile on the table, and the dog’s bed, an old quilt, under it—and sighed. She felt that, dear as it was—homely and dear—it was in some way an inviolable world. She might be allowed just inside the threshold but never really at its hearth.

Ellen was off on another tack. Speaking at all had been hard because it released something she had never said before.

“We’ll never understand each other, not really. You don’t have your back against the wall.”

“In some ways, no …”

“You Chapmans don’t even realize what it is to be you.”

“I was going to say that in some way every human being has his back against the wall. Cornelius—it’s a terrible struggle, Ellen, for him to walk a few steps, lift a spoon to his mouth.”

“Maybe, but he thought he could master us here in the town, keep us off his land by putting up some signs. Nick went in to help Cornelius—to drive the hunters off. I don’t get over it that we have been blamed.”

There it was again, the thorn all this talk had not removed, the sore angry place. Christina felt helpless.

“Ellen, you know how I feel. I can’t say more.”