It was all the same, and all different. Drowsily, she recalled that Thanksgiving of six or seven years ago when she had first come to the Cape as Timothy’s guest. She remembered the scene after dinner. They were sitting around the fireplace in the living room, where cabinets stood filled with Sandwich glass and the China Import plate of a century and a half ago, and the walls were hung with paintings of prosperous Jowers sea-captains and their patient wives.

A cousin called Emily had riveted Tina’s attention by saying, “Every time it’s Thanksgiving and I think back to those brave pilgrims, I give thanks for my heritage. I wouldn’t have wanted to be born anything but of Anglo-Saxon stock.”

Tina had been astonished, not only at the narrowness of the remark, but at its spuriousness.

“Well, I suppose I agree with Emily,” Grandmother Jowers had said. “I suppose I would rather be of English descent than anything else.”

“Mother, what nonsense!” hooted Professor Jowers. His field was not the Reformation, which had produced the Puritans, but the Renaissance, which had spawned humanists, and he had spent long periods in Europe on his studies. “We have here as Tim’s guest a girl whose father is an Italian poet, in a country of great artists. And Tim and Jason themselves have lived in Italy. Are they supposed to think that all they have seen there is not as good as any common person whose surname happens to be Anglo-Saxon? What nonsense!”

The conversation had stopped there, more from courtesy than from conviction. Emily, Tina thought, had hit a note of self-congratulation that, whether the professor wanted to admit it or not, the Jowers family all shared. Tina would have liked to say that as far as she was concerned, glory was in being Italian. But it all sounded so pretentious and silly that she was embarrassed. They were worse than her grandparents.

Tina thought again of that evening. Was there more merit in being self-contained, reserved, unemotional, reticent in the Anglo-Saxon way of the Jowers’, and of Jason? Or in her Latin excessiveness of emotion, her flights of fancy, her intensity of feeling?

It was a silly argument, she thought. Comparisons are odious. And futile. And so she slept in her New England canopy bed, dreaming of the swallows sweeping down over a terrace in the stupendous twilight of a May night in Rome.

“What are you doing?” Jason asked, as he came out the back way into the yard and found her planting something in a sunny area against the house where it indented into a small courtyard and was protected.

“It’s something I always promised myself, Jason; I’m planting rosemary. There’s a chance it can survive the winters here if it’s well protected, and when it grows to a regular bush. I thought I’d better get it in before we come back at Thanksgiving.”

“Why rosemary? For remembrance?”