The train followed the river bank all the way down to New London. Jean loved to watch the scenery as it flashed around the bends, past the great water lily ponds below Jewett City, past the tumbling falls above the mills, over a bridge so narrow that it seemed made of pontoons, through beautiful old Norwich, sitting like Rome of old on her seven hills, the very “Rose of New England.” Then down again to catch the broad sweep of the Thames River, ever widening until at last it spread out below the Navy Yard and slipped away to join the blue waters of the Sound. It was all familiar and common enough through custom and long knowledge to the people born and bred there. Jean thought an outsider caught the perspective better. And how many of the old English names had been given in loving remembrance of the Mother country, New London and Norwich, Hanover, Scotland, Canterbury, Windham, and oddly enough, wedged in among the little French Canadian settlements around Nantic was Versailles. How on earth, Jean wondered, among those staid Non-Conformist villages and towns, had Marie Antoinette’s toy palace ever slipped in for remembrance. At New London she had to change from the local train to the Boston express. It was eleven before she reached the Grand Central at New York and found Bab waiting for her. Jean saw her as she came up the Concourse, a slim figure in gray, her fluffy blonde hair curling from under her gray velvet Tam, just as Kit had coaxed Jean’s to do. Beside her was Mrs. Crane, a little motherly woman, plump and cheerful, who always reminded Jean of a hen that had just hatched a duck’s egg and was trying to make the best of it. “What a wonderful color you have, child,” she said, kissing Jean’s rosy cheeks. “She looks a hundred per cent better, doesn’t she, Bab, since she left Shady Cove.” “Fine,” Babbie declared. “Give the porter your suitcases, Kit. We’ve got a taxi waiting over here.” It was very nearly a year since Jean had left the New York atmosphere. Now the rush and hurly burly of people and vehicles almost bewildered her. After months of the silent nights in the country, the noise and flashing lights rattled her, as Kit would have expressed it. She kept close to Mrs. Crane, and settled back finally in the taxi with relief, as they started uptown for the studio. “Yet you can hardly call it a studio now, since Mother came and took possession,” Bab said. “We girls had it all nice and messy, and she keeps it in order, I tell you. But you’ll like it, and it’s close to the Park so we can get out for some good hikes.” “Somebody was needed to keep it in order,” Mrs. Crane put in. “You know, Jean, I had to stay over in Paris until things were a little bit settled. We had a lease on the apartment there, and of course, they held me to it, so I let Bab come back with the Setons as she had to be in time for her fall term at the Academy.”