“And that is what I was always saying when I was there, and my father told me of this country. I wanted to see it so. He would tell me of the great gray hills that climb to the north, and the craggy broken shoreline up through Maine, and the little handful of amethyst isles that lie all along it. He was born in New Hampshire, at Portsmouth. We are going up to see the house some day, but I know just what it looks like. It stands close down by the water’s edge in the old part of the town, and there is a big rambling garden with flagged walks. His grandfather was a ship builder and sent them out, oh, like argosies I think, all over the world, until the steamboats came, and his trade was gone. And he had just one daughter, Petunia. Isn’t that a beautiful name, Petunia Pomeroy. It is all one romance, I think, but I coax him to tell it to me over and over. There was an artist who came up from the south in one of his ships, and he was taken very ill. So they took him in as a guest, and Petunia cared for him. And when he was well, what do you think?” She clasped her hands around her knees and rocked back and forth, sitting on the floor before her untouched suitcases. “They married.” “But more than that,” warmly. “He carved the most wonderful figureheads for my great grandfather’s ships. All over the world they were famous. His son was my father.” It was indescribable, the tone in which she said the last. It told more than anything else how dearly she loved this sculptor father of hers. That night Jean wrote to Kit. The letter on her arrival had been to the Motherbird, but this was a chat with the circle she knew would read it over around the sitting room lamp. Dear Kit: I know you’ll all be hungry for news. We motored out from Boston, and child, when I saw the quaint old New England homestead we had imagined, I had to blink my eyes. It looks as if it belonged right out on the North Shore at the Cove. It is a little like Longfellow’s home, only glorified—not by fame as yet, though that will come—by Greek wings. I don’t mean Nike wings. There are sweeping porticos on each side where the drive winds around. And inside it is summertime even now. They have flowers everywhere, and raise roses. Kit, if you could get one whiff of their conservatory, you would become a Persian rose worshipper. When I come back, we’re going to start a sunken rose garden, not with a few old worn out bushes, but new slips and cuttings.