Paul and Pauline had become the fine ones of the family. And even though Jake was the senior son and the nominal head of the family, it was at Paul’s large country home that family occasions other than the picnic were held. He lived just outside of Cato in a 1830 Classical Revival house that he had enlarged with elegance and taste, making use, at last, of the architectural studies of his youth. His home pleased him because it had the tradition and class of an American epoch preceding immigration. Still visible in his home were the hand-hewn matched flushboard sidings and thirty-foot columns, made from single tulip trees, that upheld the graceful two-story portico surrounding the original structure. Inside were hand-carved woodwork and seven fireplaces. This edifice was called the Soames House and was on grounds that had once been part of the thousand acres of a patent granted to General Thaddeus Kosciusko, officer in the American Revolutionary Army, and then passed by means of inheritance and marriage connections to the Soames family of Cato. Paul, of course, belonged to the Kosciusko Club, as did the best society of Cato—the English, Scotch, and Welsh society of Cato’s mill owners.

Yet Umbertina was not impressed, even though she had a great deal of wary respect for Pauline, recognizing in her the same determination and unflinching family partisanship that she herself had. As she scanned the group at the picnic, Umbertina thought that none of her own sons and grandsons looked as purposeful as her son-in-law Sam Scalzo—he was the self-made one; he was his own boss, not an inheritor like her sons. And her daughters, she reflected, had married men who were stronger than they, and they had simply accepted secondary roles as wives and mothers. Look at Sara with that arrogant little napoletano who slapped her around! None of them worked alongside their husbands as Umbertina had done; none of them had the drive and ambition to succeed that Umbertina had felt. How, she wondered, had it been that her daughters had not absorbed any of her strength? Margherita was more like her than any of the others and she had been taken. Carla, yes, had once said she wanted to go away to college but it was only a romantic notion, not connected to any work she saw for herself in the future, since in the future she wanted only to be courted, to dress well, and to marry. Sara had a certain spunkiness but all it led to was quarrelsomeness and disrespect to her husband.