Daphne came to visit that August, when Elaine was still nursing. After an uncomfortable supper at Hester’s house, Henrietta was reminded of how her sister’s life might look through other eyes: loud, messy, difficult, exhausting. Caroline chasing Marion up the stairs—was Caroline holding a fork? Marion hiding Caroline’s favorite toy, while Caroline shrieked. Elaine crying to be fed and then, after spitting up, crying again as her two older sisters quarreled in dangerously quiet tones. Caroline knocking over a coffee cup, stepping into the dark puddle, and then claiming it was an accident.

To Daphne, later, Henrietta apologized for the chaotic evening but then, thinking how Daphne’s presence had diverted her own attention, which might have caused some of the girls’ misbehavior, said, “I love being around my nieces, though. Even when they’re difficult.”

She couldn’t say to Daphne (she couldn’t admit it to herself) that what she felt for her nieces was largely the overflow of her fierce love for Hester. The girls were splinters of Hester, offshoots of Hester. It would take a few years before she’d learn to love them (some more than others) for themselves.

“It’s not my business,” Daphne said coolly: always solitary, never involved with her family more than superficially. Henrietta hadn’t met a single one of Daphne’s relatives and did not, she realized, even know most of their names.

SPRING AGAIN—AND STILL, as Daphne pointed out, the caterpillar booklet wasn’t done. Still, Hester wasn’t back to her old self, which meant that now Henrietta spent most late afternoons and early evenings at her sister’s house, helping make supper and feed her nieces, doing housework that Hester could no longer manage and that Ambrose, caught up now in some attempts by his friends to motorize a bicycle, ignored. Often she brought Marion, who at nine was the same age as some of the younger pupils, to meetings of her young lepidopterists. She was not, Henrietta had to acknowledge, particularly interested in moths or other small creatures—bugs were crawly, frogs were slimy, snakes slithered, mice jumped. But as she liked being around her school friends and also liked flowering plants, Henrietta put her in charge of determining the names and growing habits of the plants the other children’s caterpillars ate.