chin like that.” “She’s as sweet as a picture. I just love to sit here and watch her.” * * * * * Charlotte Bell died one cold season when the town was numb and bewildered with the unaccustomed freezing. Few could realize her loss. When the mild days reappeared she was somehow gone from the gallery. Old Anthony Bell walked the garden path in the early morning in a soiled smoking-jacket, stiff-legged, his eyes dim. Theodosia went to school at the Seminary, or she practised at the fiddle half the day, exploring music without guidance. She studied harmony at the school and assembled a small group there to play quartets, her quick skill dominating. She grew tall in a year. Her rounded breasts were up-tilted—two small graceful cups—as if they would offer drink to some spirit of the air. She ran swiftly from one thing to the next, the books in her grandfather’s cases, the fiddle, the games with the other girls. “This,” her grandfather said to her, “is the family tree of the Montfords and the Trotters. There’s a collection of family traditions written into the blank book on the second shelf. My mother was a Montford, and don’t you forget that, Miss.” She read the notes in the book of records swiftly one hour while she waited for a dance at the tobacco warehouse. She had learned to kiss with her first lover, but she had learned to kiss more deeply with her second, one of the boys at the Seminary, Charles Montgomery. In the kitchen at the back of the house she would bake a cake or make a pudding to augment Aunt Bet’s plain dinner, the cook book propped up on the music rack she had set in the middle of the floor. Her slender legs leaped quickly from the pantry to the table, and she made emphases unconsciously with fiddle gestures, a long wooden spoon in her right hand. “The whites of five eggs, it says. Have we got five, Aunt Bet? Here’s one says four whole eggs. All right, Aunt Bet. You fire up. Gentle at first, then big later on. Here we go.” The movements in the streets and along the roads were becoming more swift, and there were fewer horses in the pastures. “The horse business, it’s ruined, plumb ruined, or soon will be,” Anthony Bell said. Theodosia quarreled with Charles after slapping his face one night in early spring. “You don’t know what you want,” he said. “Maybe so,” she said. She could feel her anger rising and spreading within, a subtle fuel in her body mounting to a swift burning in her face. “Maybe so, but I know what I don’t want.”