Some of this visit she describes in her next letter to Mason, noting especially the densely cluttered parlor. Chairs, tables, lamps, easels, every surface covered and the walls obscured by paintings and sketches touching each other and rising from chair rail to ceiling. The mantels and windowsills packed with Mrs. Thaxter’s famous flowers: poppies arranged by color and tea roses in matching bowls; sweet peas, wild cucumber, hop and morning-glory vines spilling from suspended shells and baskets; larkspurs and lilies in tall vases and stalks of timothy and other grasses rising above a massive vessel with a few red poppies interspersed.

She describes the olive-green upholstery on the sofas and chairs, the polished floor designed to enhance the sound of the piano being played by a man in a linen jacket, the loosely draped shawls on the women. But not the feeling she had after Daphne was pulled away by their hostess and introduced to a circle of literary men, which closed and left her partnered with a bookshelf. The linen man played Chopin, stroked his thin brown beard and played Mozart; she studied white water lilies floating in white bowls. Daphne’s face pinked with pleasure as their hostess, who was very stout, said that her book on the insect pests had been of great use to her, really enormous use.

Then Mrs. Thaxter rested a plump hand on Daphne’s arm and ranted about the island’s dreadful slugs, her bolstered, comfortably bulging self making Daphne, short and even slimmer than she’d been a dozen years ago, look like a sea oat. Where Henrietta had softened and, she would have admitted, slowed, Daphne was still furiously energetic, her small hands scored by her determined work. She nodded vigorously as Mrs. Thaxter described waging war on the slugs each morning between four and five, when the dew still lay heavy in the garden. And the grubs, the vicious grubs destroying the carnations! Mrs. Thaxter stabbed with her free hand, emulating the long pin with which she dug the grubs from the stems. Daphne suggested importing toads to eat the slugs, answered questions about the grubs, acted the part of expert regarding all aspects of insect life, which in this context Henrietta supposed she was, and yet—