I am elaborately dressed like a bee for these outings and the other young women also replicate fanciful works of nature: a lily, a pomegranate, a noodle. I sit and suck melon flavored ices and swing my gloves over the edge of a white wicker chair. The scene is laid, the table, in the dining room. Father finishes the paper, a new one from France, printed on a special sort of material meant to be eaten after being read. He speaks: “There are useful cures these days for everything from a scalded head to getting tossed by a routine palpitation of the heart.”

The following afternoon I meet a man in the piazza who is about my size, with small black eyes, a strong back, strong in the eyes and nerves. He is equal to the day, but Mother says, “I hope you did not try to stop him by the bridle.” I request whether or not I should have rather thrown myself beneath his legs, but this she excuses with a nervous sort of laugh or really rather something of a brittle cough-cough. She’s a splash of a social seeker and cooks elaborate meals out of pigeons to be later consumed by her patrician entourage with pocket-sized forks. There are hardly any great things to be said of her. But when I XXX she did not stop short. She grew to a colossus. The roles were reversed then and I was obliged to confess I could recall only little: “I dimly remember him doing it with his eye fixed upon a mirror.” If only I had some new work to distract her: a broken engagement, a querulous sister.

Of course Father says scanty intellectual exercises are bad for my brains, indeed calamitous for the motoring power of my body and brains. “Dearest Doctor,” I tell him, “If I am to learn how best not to abuse myself it seems certain I should close my stomach and my waxy neck to at least half-a-dozen of your books. There is no need to laugh beside my ear; we have all had in our life more books than we know what to do with.” What a pity he considers me. I shall further inform you: about this time I acquired a passion for butterflies. With a homemade net of broomsticks, coat hangers, and cheesecloth I captured Red Admirals and Great Spangled Fritillaries and the elusive Morning Cloak I sought near the shaded walk.

My other favorite pastime is considered an unhandsome fixation. The word succulent comes up again and again, though I expect I prefer it to dry-husk. How feeble the parental instinct! Here at the antediluvian verge of womanhood they once again insist upon primal innocence. “Is the door to the broom closet a secret door,” my famously erudite cousin asks me. “If you think I do not see you you are very wrong,” I tell him. I sit on top of him in a paroxysm of mental and physical anguish. I say, “Ha traitor! If you loved me you wouldn’t take the back door. My only escape from this Victorian mausoleum is your horse.”

Unquestionably the overheated stimulations of this environment do little for me. Fed on prudence and undergrowth who could ever expect much of me? I so admire people who say damn. I so like the act of bidding good night. An ordinary mail coach - even that brings relief. Lately I emerge from my silence only to brandish enthusiastically gesticulating hands at the Family Moderator who tells me, “They won’t stab each other.” And so we eat our dinners, smiling. After all, one should have patience. Of course, this gets one nowhere, which is to say, this gets one novelists for brothers.