Anyway, there they were, the halcyon end of summer of the halcyon final year of the Roaring Twenties. They’d been out cruising in Long Island Sound for a few hours, all the way down to Orient Point and back again. Ruth was an enthusiastic sailor—absolutely fearless. She shimmied up the mainmast and leaned out over the side as they heeled; she managed sheets confidently and relished the shivering of the sails as they changed tack. Her hair whipped in the wind; her bare skin glowed in the sunshine. As they approached the harbor, the breeze picked up, stronger and stronger until it was almost a gale. The boat tore through the water at a steep angle, foam flying from the bow, and Ruth screamed with delight. Iris sat paralyzed in the stern and prayed they wouldn’t capsize. Next to her, Daddy held the tiller with a firm, delicate touch and told her not to worry.

Sure enough, they cruised right into the calm of the harbor a half hour later and moored without incident. But while they were loading up the car to drive back to Stoneywild—this was the name the Walkers had given to their infant estate—Iris happened to pass by Grandpa Walker just as he said to her father, “That’s some girl, that Ruth of yours. Hope you’ve got yourself a good baseball bat.”

Daddy had laughed. “She’s a beauty, all right. Poor little Iris.”

Iris hadn’t stuck around to hear what Grandpa Walker thought of that, or maybe she just didn’t remember. But she did remember those words poor little Iris. They had whacked her like an electric shock. True, she’d heard that kind of observation plenty of times before—pretty much everybody was dazzled by Ruth and felt only pity for Iris, if they noticed her at all. But she’d never before heard Daddy call her poor little Iris. Until now, Daddy had always treated the two of them with strict evenhandedness. Everyone else might exclaim over Ruth’s beauty and brains and spirit and then turn politely to Iris and squint up his face with the effort of conjuring a compliment, but Daddy never failed to dole out his admiration in equal shares. So it shocked Iris to learn the truth. What he really thought of his two daughters.

As it turned out, of course, those were among the last words she ever heard from her father, so they echoed in Iris’s head ever after—poor little Iris, the diminutive to Ruth’s superlative.