Henrietta offered again to help with the morning’s collections; Daphne refused again, more firmly, and then pushed back her chair and left. Outside, the three girls in their blue dresses formed a triangle on the rocks, and Henrietta, among the last to leave the dining room, fetched Mason’s hat and, after tying the muslin strips under her chin, walked in their direction and for half an hour watched the children at their sailing lessons in the cove. It was lovely, actually, to have a free day. When she went back upstairs she opened her windows wide, spread her books and papers on the desk, and settled into her own work, no hardship at all. Sailing lessons ended, bathers filled the pool, and she worked through Darwin’s Insectivorous Plants, making notes for a set of experiments. Drosera, like the dew: the dew being the glistening, sticky droplets tipping the fine red hairs on the disks of the lollipop-shaped leaves. The chapters about what stimulated the hairs—tentacles, really, Darwin said—to bend and draw a possible bit of food into the cupped disk, and how the plant’s secretions digested the bits, were the place to start. Each experiment offered a question posed correctly, to which an answer might be found.

Dead flies, bits of raw meat or boiled egg, specks of paper and wood and dried moss and cinders about the same weight as the flies, maybe some quills: that’s all she’d need for her students to test a leaf’s responses. After that, the problems weren’t scientific but logistical—a huge part of teaching, as she’d slowly learned: in part from Daphne, and not just from the way she organized her scientific work. When Daphne tested recipes for her other work, substituting commonly found ingredients for tricky or uncommon ones, ordering the steps sensibly, and then scaling the result for a family dinner or a party for twenty or a wedding for eighty while working within a fixed budget, she was engaged in just the same sort of task.

They’d laughed over that many times, which Henrietta remembered when she sat down, Daphne-less, to a lunch of croquettes so nicely shaped and crisply fried, with such a savory sauce and garnish, that no one would have suspected Monday’s roast turkey as their source. She ate alone, still thinking about the sequence of experiments, and then went to the lobby, where one of Mrs. Thaxter’s brothers was swiftly sorting the letters and packages brought in the morning boat from Portsmouth. Among the crowd at the end of the long counter she waited for a view of her letter box: empty, nothing. Why did she feel relieved? Sebby Quint, who was right behind her and bending to view his own box, bumped into her when she turned and then continued to stand so close that she couldn’t avoid talking with him.