So she said shoo to both of her suitors, put a notice in the Darling Dispatch (“Room and board for older ladies of refinement”), and within a few weeks all of her bedrooms were full. Magnolia Manor was not a hugely profitable business—she cleared only five or six dollars a month on each of her boarders. But that was enough to pay the taxes and buy coal and electricity and food and household supplies, and her own living expenses were negligible. Lots of people, she told herself, were in much worse straits, and they had jobs.

At the present time, there were four boarders—the Magnolia Ladies, they called themselves, all of straitened means. Dorothy Rogers, the town’s part-time librarian, had lost all her money on one awful day in the stock market. Leticia Wiggens was a retired teacher who lived on a very small pension. Mrs. Sedalius had a son who was a doctor in Mobile and sent her a check once a month, although he almost never came to see her. Maxine Bechdel was slightly better off than the others. She owned two rental houses whose tenants were able to pay their rent about half the time.

Bessie managed the place with the help of Roseanne, a live-in colored lady who cooked and did the laundry. But the Magnolia Ladies did their part, too. Leticia and Maxine washed the dishes and cleaned the kitchen and dining room. Mrs. Sedalius swept and dusted upstairs, and Miss Rogers swept and dusted downstairs, and of course each boarder kept her room neat. In addition, they all worked in the Manor’s flower beds and the impressive vegetable garden and tended the half-dozen hens that lived in the coop against the back fence and delivered three or four fresh-laid eggs every morning, just in time for breakfast.

And Bessie discovered, to her surprise, that managing the Magnolia Manor was decidedly preferable to managing her father’s household, and that her new life was a great deal more interesting and livelier than the old—and a great deal livelier and less stressful than life with either Mr. Hopper or Mr. Churchill would have been. Her beloved fiancé was a long-ago dream, the Magnolia Ladies were the sisters she had never had, and her family history was by now just that: history.