She came down from the pens knowing that all her beauties, assembled, standing around her, serene and proud, were standing about a great hollow inner space. In her body, in her breast, there was gathering a void, and it was spreading past her power to hold it. She knew this while she walked along the summer path beside the stepping stones, and she knew it again and more completely as she moved up the gentle slope from the pond.

Dorine held her in slight contempt because she had not been able to keep Jonas, or so it seemed to her, and she strove to hide her disgrace from Maggie and the others. She thought that she would go to see Sallie Lou. There were eggs to take to the store and she would come back through Robinson’s place and stop at Seay’s house. For a day or two she thought of this plan, and then one afternoon she put on her new dark cotton dress, her newest garment, planning the journey. She argued between the blue sunbonnet and the hat, for if she wore the hat the call would seem formal, almost as if she had come on purpose, dressed up. If she wore the bonnet it would seem more as if she had been somewhere else and had merely dropped in on the way. The bonnet would be best, she thought.

Then the space about the corners of her lips drew tight. She would wear the hat. Her eyes were hard and waves of strength passed along her spine. She would go on purpose to look at Sallie Lou, to look at her close and find out her way and find out where she was pretty. She would look at her. She would stare her in the face and the look would ask, ‘Let’s see your beauty, then, where is it?’

But no, she thought, the bonnet would be better. It would be that she had just happened to come on her way from the store; then she could look at Sallie Lou without her knowing. She would throw off the bonnet carelessly and say, ‘Kelly is a-given only fourteen cents for eggs. Did you ever hear tell of such! I taken a dozen and eight over for Mammy.’

She went to the barns and asked Ben for a horse to ride and he fitted a side-saddle onto one of the unused work horses. Down at the gate her mother waited with the eggs in a basket.

‘Trade for anything you think we need,’ Nellie said, ‘or get yourself a ribbon or a pretty. Anything you please.’

She found it difficult to make her journey seem casual, for the Seay house was three miles from Wakefield’s place. It was not easy to make it seem casual even to herself as she rode across the farms and came to the small yellow house in the midst of fields. Sallie Lou came out of the house to make her welcome, and then Mrs Seay came, Sally Lou’s aunt. Ellen had once met the aunt at Dorine’s.