I regarded that quilt as a kind of private joke, something no one who had eyes could believe. I saw its falseness again when I came home to find Mrs. Grady sitting, skirt spread out in front of her, on the kitchen floor.

“It’s the last of it,” she said, turning out the flour sack. “The school is behind on paying for the laundry, and we’ll be short by next week.”

I flushed. “Mama sent you my share, didn’t she?”

Mrs. Grady nodded. “It’s already spent, girl.”

“But why don’t you tell Mr. Grady? I’m sure he will give you more for the household accounts.”

And at this, Mrs. Grady laughed for a long time, rolling the sack into a tighter and tighter ball as she did so.

“It’s me give him his money. Do you think we’d be eating our dinner under other women’s drawers if Grady had anything for a ‘household account’?” And then she laughed again.

But that night, at dinner, she said nothing, and when Grady looked up from his plate and asked if there was any more tea for that evening, Mrs. Grady just smiled and said she had forgotten it. And then a cloud passed over his face, a recognition, and Grady stood up and went to his study.

The Gradys may have followed the rules of that quilt, but only by a kind of willed fiction between the two of them.

Mama and Madeline Grady and Lenore insisted that men were to be babied and entertained, but not obeyed. The Graces seemed to revere obedience, at least in the abstract. Louisa and Experience, these girls I loved, who I thought held providence on their tongues, were so sure of themselves. I began to doubt myself. Perhaps the rules Mama and Lenore and Madeline Grady lived by were wrong. Or not wrong, but they seemed only to apply in the velvet waiting room and whitewashed examination room of Mama’s practice or in the humid air of Mrs. Grady’s laundry. And how good was a rule, how strong, how sensible was it to obey, if it lost all meaning as soon as you left your front door?

I wondered who Experience and Louisa would pick if they could pick their mate, since it was so important. Both were ignored by the men of Cunningham College, though they did not seem bothered by this.

“The other ones here, they call us the Graces because they think they’re clever,” Louisa told me. “Look at Experience. She’s bright, but gawky.”

I tried very hard not to look at Experience. “No, she is not,” I said.

Louisa laughed. “Yes, she is. Not naming it isn’t gonna change it.”

“I’m gawky,” Experience said, and that set Louisa to laughing.

“And I’m like you, Libertie,” Louisa said. “Pretty but dark. And fat. And this scar. Altogether helpless. They called us the Graces, and maybe it’s meant to be an insult or a tease or a joke, but I think it’s a love note.”