Yet still it was exasperating to be so thoroughly abandoned, to see her friend showing off so flamboyantly, and to know that Daphne would never reveal to this artistic crowd that in fact she made much of her income writing cookery books under a different name. As Dorrie Bennett she had a separate and even more successful professional life, so absorbing that in the dining room she had to be careful not to draw her neighbors’ attention to her judicious comments about the lobster or the biscuits. Here in Mrs. Thaxter’s parlor, she might never have whipped egg whites and Cox’s gelatin for her famous snow pudding, noting the time it took to raise the frothy white mass. Might never have worried over a bill or stayed up all night to meet a deadline.

At home, where Henrietta kept Daphne’s cookbooks shelved next to her more serious works, she told Mason the truth about that juxtaposition when he asked: she’d wanted her two friends to understand each other. But their relationship was different now—and perhaps because of that, she hid from him her hurt feelings after that first visit, and also much about her second visit. She wrote:

A smaller crowd last evening, four painters and a singer and a pianist, two writers from Boston, a doctor from Springfield, one of Mrs. Thaxter’s brothers and one grown son (her husband passed away last year). Mrs. Thaxter sat in her gray dress next to a table covered with roses and directed the conversation and the entertainments, which included Daphne’s demonstration of mounting seaweed specimens. I brought over the metal trays, filled them with seawater, stood by with the sheets as Daphne floated the samples and teased apart the finest branches with a hatpin. A beautiful piece of Cystoclonium purpurascens mounted perfectly, after which all the gentlemen wanted to try their hands. Mrs. Thaxter, as one of the younger painters observed to me, likes being surrounded by men; women are sparser, which makes Daphne even more pleased about our invitations there.

What the younger painter, whose name was Sebby Quint, actually said was more cutting than that; and he said it to Henrietta not in the parlor but outside, on the cottage’s porch, beneath the shelter of the vines with their overlapping leaves. None of this, nor what followed from it, reached Mason.

IV.

We have to do, however, in this volume, not with the history of the past, nor with the action of physical forces, but with the life of the present, and to find this, in its abundance, one must go down near the margin of the water, where the sands are wet. There is no solitude here; the place is teeming with living things.