At first Henrietta kept those creatures in plain glass tumblers, as she’d learned from a book that Daphne gave her: Put your caterpillar upon a white paper, which you have first placed on an old book or other firm substance, and cover him with the glass. If you have several kinds at once, it is well to label the glasses. Write “Grape,” or “Apple,” or “Poplar” upon a slip of paper, and paste it upon the tumbler which covers that caterpillar you found upon the grape, apple, or other leaf. This will avoid confusion, as they one by one go into chrysalides. You can study each one separately, and you will know, as they come out of the chrysalides (which you have seen them make), just which is the moth of the grape, apple, or whatever your label indicates. You will thus know, also, at a moment’s glance, how to feed them. They know what they want, which is more than can be said of some people.

Henrietta, who in those days knew exactly what she wanted, quickly found this too simplistic, but she retained the obvious ideas, which she’d used in other areas, of labeling everything and keeping track of the caterpillars’ food plants. Soon she corralled her friend Mason Perrotte into helping her build breeding cages, a foot square and eighteen inches tall, along two walls. Mason cut the glass and the wood, tacked the wire screening over the tops, sifted the dirt for the bases and cleaned out jars to hold the leafy branches. He made a display stand to entice the first members of Henrietta’s Young Lepidopterists Club and later built smaller cases for her classroom. He left to Henrietta the preparation of the killing jars and the pinning of the specimens, but he kept good notes and his neat handwriting appeared on some of the labels. Until 1885, the year she shed Mason like an outgrown skin, he was an excellent helper.

THE YEARS IMMEDIATELY following Mason’s departure were surprisingly calm, despite the unpleasant way in which they’d parted. Surprisingly happy. Hester startled Henrietta by marrying Ambrose Cummings, who owned the shoe and boot store in the village and was so quiet that Henrietta had hardly noticed him. At first things didn’t change too much; they moved into a modest white house with red steps, a wide porch, a view of the Pleasant Valley through a frame of sturdy lilacs and trellised roses. Henrietta particularly liked that Hester’s new place was barely a mile from their family home and an easy walk from the high school. She was helping out with a new kitchen cupboard one day, a few months after the wedding, when Hester announced that she was pregnant.