“Oh, you can imagine. He said it was a curiously uncivilized landscape—unshaped, I think he said. It does take some getting used to if your image of woods is a kind of park where every dead branch is picked up.”

“And every beer can too. You know, Jane, I think someone should organize the Boy Scouts or something to clear the roadsides of just plain junk. Last year I found arbutus in flower just about buried under rusty old cans and broken bottles.”

“Couldn’t you make a start now? There’ll be so many of you there at Thanksgiving.”

A smile was just visible through the beard, and John shrugged.

“You know the family. They are dead set against anything organized. Every one of the children has some project he is bound to get at. Besides,” he admitted, “no one pays the slightest attention to me. My children treat me like a curious old piece of junk myself.” He sat with his head bent now, his hands held loosely between his knees. The mood had quite suddenly changed. “And why not? I am not exactly a success, Jane.”

“Nonsense!” she said firmly. “John, put your mind on this natural history, or whatever it is to be. It could take so many forms, couldn’t it? Seasons, for instance … or, of course, simply divided into flora and fauna in a straightforward old-fashioned way.”

Jane went off into a long thought about this, and John swallowed down his glass of sherry and poured another, an act she read as a sign of quiet desperation.

“What I really had in mind, if we could manage it, was a walk through the woods along a brook and coming out at a lake and a view of the mountain, and just to say what was there in the four seasons.”

“How long is this thing to be?”

“Well, it’s only one chapter. I suppose at most twenty pages. Jem has no idea what he is getting into, really.”

“Who’s paying?”

“I think he expects to cover expenses with sales.”

John laughed. “Who’ll buy it? the summer people?”

“Everyone who has a relative in the cemetery,” Jane said demurely. “You know Jem and those genealogies of his. As a matter of fact, John, people are keen on this. The search for ancestors … Come back and sit down. You make me nervous.”

John in the last few minutes had begun to walk up and down in a compulsive yet absent-minded way. He had done this as a child—and then the answer was to go out for a walk, keep his mind occupied, keep him from closing into depression and what Jane called “negative thoughts.” Now there was nothing to do but talk.

So he sat down like a patient child, pretending to pay attention.