CAROLINE WAS BORN that November: as difficult, from the moment she entered the world upside down, as Marion had been easy. For a night and a day Hester struggled to deliver her, so exhausted when Caroline’s head finally followed her feet that she fainted. Hester had trouble feeding her; Caroline had trouble eating; she cried and cried and didn’t gain weight and Henrietta feared she wouldn’t survive. She seemed never to sleep. Hester developed mastitis and wept while she nursed. Caroline screamed and squirmed and tossed herself about so violently that Ambrose dropped her, twice, and after that refused to hold her. After six months she still weighed less than she should have but she was intensely alert, seeming to pay attention to everything. Often Henrietta could quiet her when no one else could, but even in Henrietta’s arms she never snuggled the way Marion had. Always she was busy, always looking around.

Hester, confined to her bed for two months, wasn’t herself even after she rose. The weight she’d gained carrying Caroline sat slackly, heavily, pooling around her hips and thighs without ever diminishing, and she now had trouble rising from a low chair or a stool. In the late afternoons, as soon as she could free herself from school, Henrietta began caring for Marion, either bringing her to the caterpillar room and entertaining her there, or taking her for walks in the woods, hoping that Hester might nap quietly with Caroline. Soon, though, Caroline stopped napping entirely.

What a temper she had! And what energy, pushing Marion away from Hester and, as she began to walk, darting off, breaking things, sometimes hurting her quieter sister. She grew like rhubarb, so quickly that at her grandmother’s funeral in 1899, a stranger seeing the two little girls thought they were the same age. Marion, holding one of Henrietta’s hands, walked quietly, but Caroline pulled so violently at Henrietta’s other hand that she couldn’t steady Hester, who during their mother’s last days had miscarried yet again.

Writing to her friend Daphne, who by then had met Hester several times, Henrietta described how Hester had tottered through the funeral. How many times does she have to go through this? she wrote. Why don’t she and Ambrose just stop? Ambrose is useless and every year she gets less like herself, less like the girl I grew up with—although I guess this new person is also her “self.” I don’t feel like you and I have changed that violently, though. Is it just having children? Then she took another sheet of paper and, as if that gave her a clean new life, wrote to the naturalist Anna Comstock without saying a single word about her family.