A young woman named Jane Moore played accompaniments for Theodosia. They played in the parlor of the Bell house, the piano standing against the east wall and running back into the bay of the windows. Jane Moore laughed a great deal as she played, and she played many notes wrong, but she offered Theodosia a steady tinkle-tinkle of piano rhythms against which to set her fiddle. Over the chimney hung a steel engraving of Henry Clay in some congressional pose, and the insignia of the Trotters and the Montfords, done in color by some artist and neatly framed, hung near together on the north wall. Through the freshly curtained windows the scent of locust blossoms would come, and outside, from garden to garden, up the street, the locust trees had their flower. Sometimes the piano outdid itself, as when Jane Moore was caught on some rapture which swept her beyond her nervous inattention. Then she would go steadily on, without a giggle or a blunder, one with Theodosia, the piano married to the fiddle, rhythm after rhythm, measure after measure, and Theodosia’s fervid “Repeat!” as she struck the music with her bow and marched the melodies forward and marshalled them forth, would hold the good spell to the end of the piece. “Oh, Jane Moore, Jane Moore!” Theodosia would say. “Why in the name of the Lord, why can’t you play like that every day?” They would laugh until their eyes ran tears, laughter induced by Jane Moore’s concentrated interval. She had soft white skin and a round soft body, an inattentive mind. It was, as the flowering locust trees attested, the spring of the year. There were garden parties in the evenings, all the boys and all the girls gathering to laugh and joke and play with light caresses among the shrubs that were lit with paper lanterns. The girls would come walking with the young men, and their little shining shoes would tap on the village pavements. Catherine Lovell had curling yellow hair that stood in a soft roll on the top of her head, and in her bright organdie dress she was fair in the way of a pink in a garden. She was lovely to know, always coming to Theodosia with her smiles and her pretty little jokes, always wanting Theodosia to play her fiddle again. She would come running to Theodosia’s room on a morning after a party to talk over all the happenings of the occasion, and she would sit on the foot of the bed while Theodosia had her breakfast from the tray Aunt Bet had brought upstairs. Then they would tell over the names of all who had been present and repeat the bright sayings of the young men, Conway and Albert, whose names they called often, and they would praise the girls for their loveliness in the fullness of their own self-admiration and self-love. “Wasn’t May Wilmore a dear in her flowered sash?” “Like a sweet pea,” Theodosia would say. “Like a whole bouquet of little flowers.” “And Ruth was sweet in her green dress, dark bands across her hair.”