Franny was an outgoing, gregarious child, something Duff had never been. He had his music and his books and he didn’t seem to want anything else. He was a good swimmer and tennis player and a half dozen strokes better than his father at golf, but he just wasn’t very interested in competitive or social activities.

“Do you think you’d like it out there in the sticks away from your friends?” I asked Franny. I wasn’t taking the matter seriously at that point.

“I haven’t any friends,” she said. She was suffering from not being invited to a fifth grade end-­of-­term party, apparently the fault of the post office and not the party giver’s mother.

“Maggie, it isn’t exactly wilderness country anymore,” Jack said to me irritably.

He hadn’t seen the farm for years, except for the time last fall when he went there for his Aunt Hannah’s funeral. She was his great aunt, his grandfather’s sister, a spinster who had lived alone on the place for many years. After a crippling stroke, she had employed a housekeeper-­nurse who stayed with her until she died.

Jack had inherited the property, but he was unwilling to sell it because it had been in his family for so many years. A real estate company in the area had tried to rent it for him, but with no success.

“It may not be wilderness,” I said now, “but it must lack something, if no one wants to live there.”

“It’s out of the way,” Jack said. “It’s a good distance from any large city and there aren’t many jobs around there. Anyway we’re not all that attached to this place, are we?”

“I’m not,” said Franny.

“What about you, Mozart?”

Duff looked up from his score and considered it. “I guess I’m not,” he said.

“What about his music?” I wanted to know.

“There must be music teachers around there somewhere. And the Cleveland Orchestra isn’t too far away.”

“What about schools?”

“I’m sure the schools in Ashland and Cainesville are as good as those in Scarsdale.”

“You don’t believe that any more than I do. And Duff’s in his last year here.”

“But he has credits enough to graduate now, hasn’t he? And he’s already practically accepted at Yale for the year after next.”

“We’d need quality medical care too, a good hospital and good doctors. Also, that house is probably a wreck.”

“It isn’t,” Jack said. “At least it wasn’t last fall. And the furnishings are pretty good too. What will I tell the man? I said I’d call back.”

“I’ll never agree to sell this house until we’ve made definite arrangements for another place,” I said firmly. “And I won’t commit myself to a farm in Ohio until I’ve seen it and the facilities around it.”