Daphne, who wrote under two different names, is harder to classify, but she had her day as well and people in the village noticed her: a woman, visiting repeatedly, traveling on her own. At the drugstore, at the theater. Walking along the lake with her friend, pale hair improbably thick above her sharp features and delicate neck. Or skating—she had tiny feet but was very fast—in a costume showing more leg than was usual in this part of upstate New York. Some were annoyed by her manners. After one visit, the Crooked Lake Gazette reported:

Among those arriving last week by train from Bath was Miss Daphne Bannister, here for one of her frequent stays with our esteemed biology teacher, Miss Henrietta Atkins. A well-known authoress, Miss Bannister has written guides to the insect pests, the wildflowers of Massachusetts (where she makes her home), and the birds of the fields and farms. She traveled from the Cornell campus, where she presented a talk on parasitic nematodes.

That one, the gossips said. Henrietta’s friend. All around Crooked Lake, people were aware of Henrietta. Mention of her in the Gazette goes back as far as grade school: “Winner of the Spelling Bee.” “Student Fossil Collection Impresses Visitors.” “Sisters Show Off Lake Trout Caught in Fishing Derby.” Later articles note her departure for Oswego, where she went for her teacher training, and the grant she received when she finished. She met Daphne after she graduated, at a summer school for the study of natural history run by Louis Agassiz. After that she came back home to teach biology at the high school. She established the Natural History Club, the Young Lepidopterists Club, an ice-skating group, a reading group. Several times she won teaching awards. Each year she pulled a few promising students into her investigations, which ranged from aiding the local farmers’ experiments with breeding cows and corn, to studies of fish, the development of other uses for wine grapes during Prohibition, and a new method for producing the membrane used to make balloons and rigid airships impermeable to gas.

All of this is noted in the Gazette. Henrietta, so firmly rooted wherever she stands that she looks tall unless she’s next to someone else, ages silently in the photographs; her skirts narrow, then rise, then give way to voluminous slacks. Her sleeves are always pushed back from her sturdy wrists and blunt-fingered hands, lines appearing as her hair grays and metamorphoses from a mass pinned at the back of her head to a neat crop just below her ears. Grateful students mention her as they in turn appear in the newspaper for one thing or another. Appreciative colleagues thank her as they retire. The tone is invariably kind—except for the notes about Daphne’s visits, which are colored by something that wouldn’t be there if either of the women had married. Now they seem to point at something. They might not have read that way then.