The second room was a private sitting-room, all willow furniture, and dainty chintz coverings, with Dutch tile window boxes filled with blooming hyacinths, and feminine knick-knacks scattered about helterskelter. Here were framed photographs of loved ones and friends, a portrait of Elliott over the desk, his class colors on the wall, and intimate little kodak snapshots he had sent her. This was the mother’s and wife’s room. And the last was her bedroom. Here Jean found her dressing. All in deep smoke gray velvet, with a bunch of single petaled violets on her coat. She turned and looked at Jean critically. “I only had this new serge suit,” said Jean. “I thought with a sort of fluffy waist it would be right to wear.” The waist was a soft crinkly crepe silk in dull old gold, with a low collar of rose point, and just a touch of Byzantine embroidery down the front. Above it, Jean’s eager face framed in her brown hair, her brown eyes, small imperative chin with its deep cleft, and look of interest that Kit called “questioning curiosity,” all seemed accentuated. “It’s just right, dear,” said Cousin Beth. “Go get a yellow jonquil to wear. Carlota will have violets, I think. She loves them best.” There was a scent of coming spring in the air as they motored along the country roads, just a delicate reddening of the maple twigs, and a mist above the lush marshes down in the lower meadows. Once Carlota called out joyously. A pair of nesting bluebirds teetered on a fence rail, talking to each other of spring housekeeping. “Ah, there they are,” she cried. “And in Italy now there will be spring everywhere. My father told me of the bluebirds here. He said they were bits of heaven’s own blue with wings on.” “How queer it is,” Jean said, “I mean the way one remembers and loves all the little things about one’s own country.” “Not so much all the country. Just the spot of earth you spring from. He loves this New England.” “And I love Long Island. I was born there, not at the Cove, but farther down the coast near Montauk Point, and the smell of salt water and the marshes always stirs me. I love the long green rolling stretches, and the little low hills in the background like you see in paintings of the Channel Islands and some of the ones along the Scotch coast. Just a few straggly scrub pines, you know, and the willows and wild cherry trees and beach plums.” “Somewhere I’ve read about that, girls; the old earth’s hold upon her children. I’m afraid I only respond to gray rocks and all of this sort of thing. I’ve been so homesick abroad just to look at a crooked apple tree in bloom that I didn’t know what to do. Each man to his ‘ain acre.’ Where were you born, Carlota?”