Margot stared at her cousin with an aggrieved, brief pout and then wound herself into Mark’s lap. The large doll was named Aunt Sadie for Mrs. Bernamer. Margot said, “Miss Converse fixed Aunt Sadie’s drawers, papa,” and her brown face rippled as she displayed three stitches. Then she righted the doll and gazed at Mark devotedly, solemnly, preening her starched skirt of pink linen. Pink went with her black hair and her tawny skin. Mark touched a roaming mesh of her hair and her face rippled once more. Her skin had this amber haze like the water of a pool in the pine forest behind the farm. In that pool he had bathed with her father through endless afternoons, idling on until other boys lagged off and the shadows were ink on the crumbled ocher clay of the margin where pink boneset grew. And now Joe was dead and his blackhaired wife was dead ... an unskilled cook before marriage, half Irish, half Italian, a good, sleepy woman who ate with her knife and wore a chaplet blessed for her Roman mother by some Pope. Margot would never know them. He kissed her hair. She was this warm bubble enclosed in his arms. “Love me any, sister?” “’Course,” said Margot. Gurdy snorted and stalked away. Mark talked to the stiff governess and patted Margot. Miss Converse sewed and chatted about Conrad’s novels, then getting fashionable. She assented, “Very interesting. Romantic, of course. I dare say the colour attracts you.” “Of course,” said Mark, “and what if they are romantic?” She had some vague objection. If she bored him, Mark was still grateful that she hadn’t tried to marry him. She was necessary to the training of the children but her buff, bulky face wasn’t alluring and her gowns hurt him by a prevalence of mole embroidery and rumpled lace. She was a gentlewoman, wonderfully learned and obliging about his pet airs on the piano. Mark talked and wished that he could escape, like Gurdy who went to practice handsprings in the white hall and slid downstairs at the note of the doorbell.