Jane caught my eye and shook her head subtly to indicate that the asking of questions was frowned upon. The rest of the day I sat at my desk and fumed. I knew how to read, how to write. I had taught myself addition, taught my sisters, even Henry. There would be no learning in this place to add to my own. Every day, if like this one, would be agony.

“Father lets me come so that I might be in the company of girls,” said Jane, when she took my arm gently after school as we walked. “But my education happens elsewhere.”

“What sort of education?”

“The world of knowledge according to John Arden, I suppose. Philosophy, history, belles lettres, every sort of science—”

“French?”

“And German he thinks important.”

“The globes?”

“The celestial world entire.”

“Then how can you tolerate this—this nothing of an education at all?”

“For the sake of friendship, Mary. Frankly, the tedium is a welcome relief. To be the singular focus of my father’s intellectual fervor is, at times, exhausting.” She stopped just then and put a firm hand on my forearm. “Why don’t you come one day?” Jane said, more polite command than question. “Father would welcome a hungry mind.”

I kissed her cheek, impetuous. And so began my education by other means.

The Arden household welcomed me wholeheartedly, down to the servant who greeted me with a brisk bonjour and took my coat. The parlor was better than I’d imagined, without affectation, only sincerity and taste: portraits of people who looked worth knowing, or being related to; one above the hearth that I took to be Jane’s mother, the same regal neck as her daughter. There were Turkish carpets mellowed by years of afternoon sun; cut blooms of all colors spilled from a cloisonné vase. And the wood-paneled library, where our lessons would be held, sported tiers, like towers of endless books with rich leather spines the colors of autumn, softened by human hands, and smelling, the whole room, of wood smoke. I had a yearning to belong there as I’d never felt for any place, save Nature.

John Arden’s tutorials, twice a week after school, were a lesson in everything, but enthusiasm most of all. Jane seemed relieved to share her father’s attention, and he seemed glad to have a second pupil. He treated us as he would young men, without limits on what we were capable of understanding. And while Jane was first with answers, eager to be released to her “social swirl,” I was first with questions. He stacked my arms with books, gave me a swan feather quill, “for its excellent toughness,” and showed me how to sharpen it myself. He told me to write—write anything—because it was capturing from the ether ideas and thoughts and putting them to paper that willed them into the world. This above all.