He set a mirror in the kitchen window and went about the business of shaving. This was the window outside which Elmer Quagger had stood, so many ages before. Time was more certainly relative than ever Bale had realized; these weeks in Gettysburg had taught him the fallacy of ordinary reckoning. Echoing years, since first he took his neighbor’s wife … Through the window, past the corner of the mirror frame, the Fanning house lifted amid its sheds and vines, an engraved landscape which he would see for years to come, and always with poignancy. He decided: she’s up and about by now. I’m glad I left, and did not wait for her to come downstairs. There is so little we can say over there; the walls come close and muffle our words, the furniture haunts us. Mr. Fanning is recovered from his attack of illness, thank fortune. I did not need to stay.

He cooked a skillet full of bacon, and brought out a jar of preserves. He sat at the kitchen table with the food before him, and a novel he had bought in Chicago as he came east. Now he opened it for the first time. An author named Melville … the story was of remote islands, and two young seamen who fled their ship. Typee. It sounded like a word in the Pottawattomie language. The woman kept coming between him and this narrow print. She was saturated in the agony which she had suffered in his dreams … Most evil circumstance, most disheartening subterfuge, and we have enmeshed ourselves accordingly. I wonder, she cried to him, if ever we’ll be free of ourselves.

There were soldiers at the well pumping intermittently, trudging with their splashing buckets, but no hordes such as had come the evening before. Their conversation heckled through the open door. The old man sold her after that. Pshaw, she wa’nt no good for work in the field. No, I guess she wouldn’t be. And liable to run away if the women-folks drove her … one of the trimmest shapes you ever say. Nice, round little boobies, and no feller had ever touched her before … couple of brass guns whacking away, but we come in under them. They started to limber up and retreat when they saw we meant business. Yah, I remember. Goodrich was there. Was he? Yah, just after he joined the calvary … in a valley beyond, in a secret place far from the harbor, men could hide forever in the flowery shade. But the valley of Typee was a place of danger. They must find another valley …