A high school yearbook from the 1930s now caught her eye, and she flicked through it, smiling at the pictures of youngsters, boys with jug ears, girls with bobbed hair or skinny pigtails, bundled up to ski in the winter, rowing on the river in the summer, their crowds of happily unformed faces squinting merrily into the camera, possibly, or possibly not, including that of a family member. Beneath the yearbook was a large envelope, addressed to Mrs. Josephine Bhaer in a tidy hand that Lulu by now recognized to be that of Grandma Jo’s sister Meg. Lulu screwed her nose a little—Meg’s letters, she had discovered, tended to the domestic and paid particular attention to the topic of children’s diets—but decided to open it anyway. Maybe Emma would be interested when she started to have children of her own.

Inside the envelope were five smaller envelopes, all addressed in the now familiar scribbling hand of Grandma Jo. The accompanying note from Meg was simple and short.

Plumfield, september 1892.

Dear Jo,

I’ve sent you a package with your letters as you requested for Mr. Chauncey. I know Amy hopes very much that you’ll look favorably on his request for publication. But I know, too, how very little you care for being lionized, so I fear her hopes will be dashed. Nevertheless, I am sending you these letters separately, for, whatever you decide about the book, I cannot think you will want them made public. What a very long time ago all of that was, to be sure.

Ever your loving sister,

Meg.

The five envelopes were smaller than those Grandma Jo generally used, and made of thinner paper: they were addressed to Meg and bore, not the usual Concord postmark, but that of New York. Her curiosity now piqued, Lulu opened the first one and read.

New York, December 1867.

Dearest Meg,

Thank you most heartily for the poems. They are perfectly beautiful and you were an angel to translate them for me—one day, I shall be able to read Schiller in the original, as my accomplished sister can. I’m still grubbing away at my German lessons, although the tongue don’t come easy to me, and even though my kindly old professor friend who is teaching me says that I’m making progress, I fear he is letting his good nature, which is considerable, cloud his better judgment. I am a sore trial to him, I know; he has a trick of pulling upon his beard when he is distracted and by the time our lessons are concluded, it stands out in strands like a great towzled brown bush. But I will master the tongue; I am determined upon it. It is the native tongue of the divine Herr B., and as such the tongue of seraphim, not men—however badly I mangle it!

Oh, Meg, herr B. Is such a handsome man! His hair is as thick as a haystack and as yellow as a field of corn in the highest day of summer, his eyes are as blue as the heavens, and when we pass each other in the hallway and he gives me that queer little bow that Germans give, then my heart goes all into a flurry and I know not where to look, just like the foolish girls in the novels. He comes from Cologne, he’s in New York to study philosophy at the university, and I know (for I couldn’t help it, I peeped at his mail on the hall table) that his first name is Friedrich. Isn’t that a heavenly name? Is this love, Meg? I can’t think what else it can be, so fancy it must. Here’s a merry how-d’ye-do—your thorny old sister takes work as a governess, and goes and falls in love like a sentimental damsel in a story!