Litchfield

Ridgefield in April was full of wet daffodils and people with money, and Corinne's house was the smallest on the cheapest street, a saltbox with a kitchen that smelled of Preston Pell's coffee. He was out at the foundation from eight to six. Corinne was alone in it nine hours a day with a dog she had acquired in February and she said she had never been so content.

"It is the door," she said. "It shuts."

Hollis stayed a fortnight. She walked the dog. She read the whole of Preston Pell's bookshelf, which was theology and annuities. She wrote to Sylvie twice a day. And she went twice to Wray House, which stood on four hundred acres above the Housatonic with a gate lodge, a conservatory, and a gravel drive a quarter of a mile long that Preston Pell described, whenever he described it, as "the approach."

Constance Wray was sixty-eight and had the voice of a woman who had never once in her life been corrected. She received them in a room with eighteen windows, seated, and did not rise for either of them. She asked Hollis four questions in the first two minutes: whether her sisters were out, whether they were educated, whether their mother had family, and whether any of them played.

"One of us plays," said Hollis.

"Plays what."

"The keyboard. At the church. Badly."

"Then she has not been taught. It is a great misfortune in a family to have no one who has been taught. My daughter was taught. Odette, come here and let Mrs. Pell see that you have been taught." Odette Wray, who was twenty-four and pale and who had been sitting in a chair by the fire wrapped in a shawl in April, said, "Mamma," in the tone of a person who has said it ten thousand times. "Odette's constitution," said Constance Wray, to everyone, "has never been strong. It is the Wray constitution, and the Wray constitution does not bear contradiction, and she has been contradicted by doctors from Boston to Baltimore."

They ate at seven. The table sat twelve and they were five. Constance Wray told Hollis what she ate, how she ate it, and what it cost to eat it; she told Corinne how to run a house; she told Preston Pell how to address his letters; and she told all three of them, at length, that her nephew Roman was to marry her daughter and had been intended for her daughter since Odette was born, and that the arrangement was the dearest wish of her sister, who had died of it.

"I have no doubt of it," said Hollis, when it became clear that an answer was required.

"Young women in the country are very confident about things they have no doubt of," said Constance Wray. "You are very lively. Are all your sisters lively?"

"They are all something."

The men came on the Thursday.

They came in the late afternoon, two of them, out of a car that had been driven up from the city: Roman Ashcroft, and a man of forty with a lawyer's shoulders and a face that had been outdoors a good deal, introduced as Marcus Ellery, his cousin, who was Constance Wray's nephew too and who had the easy manner of a man who had spent his life in rooms like this one and was not impressed by any of them.

Roman Ashcroft had not known she was in the house. He came in behind Marcus and stopped in the doorway, and for one fraction of a second his face did something, and then it did nothing, and he crossed the room and said, "Miss Arden," and she said, "Mr. Ashcroft," and Constance Wray said, "You know each other."

"We have met."

"At Ashford," said Camille Reyes, who had arrived the day before and who said it from a settee with the bright, interested malice of a person holding a live wire. "Miss Arden walked three miles in the rain to sit with her sister, and we were all extremely struck by it."

"Extremely," said Marcus Ellery, looking at his cousin.

They stayed a week. Roman Ashcroft rode out in the mornings and was silent at dinner and did not contradict his aunt, which Hollis found, unreasonably, to be the most irritating thing about him. He watched her. He watched her in the way a person watches a thing they do not understand — not rudely, not with interest exactly, but steadily, as though there were an answer in her face and he were determined to find it by force of attention.

On the Tuesday Constance Wray made him do it in public. There were twelve at the table. She waited until the fish was cleared and then said, in the voice she used for announcements: "We shall be drinking to an engagement before the year is out. Odette, hold up your glass, my love. It is not formal yet, but everyone here is family, and I see no reason to be formal about a thing that was settled when she was born." Odette did not hold up her glass. Roman Ashcroft looked at his plate and said, "My aunt is describing her own arrangements," and did not say anything else, and Camille Reyes said, "How very modern of you," into the silence that followed, and Hollis, four chairs away, put her water glass down very carefully in the wrong place and did not look at Odette once for the rest of the meal. She played the keyboard one evening because Constance Wray required it and because refusal would have been worse; she played badly, and her hands shook, and when she finished, Roman Ashcroft, who had been standing by the windows, said, "That was not as bad as you were told it would be," which she chose to take as an insult and which she spent the evening repeating to Corinne in the kitchen.

"You are repeating it a great deal," said Corinne.

"I am repeating it because it was an insult."

"You are repeating it because it was not."

On the last evening Odette Wray played for them, beautifully, for twenty minutes, and Constance Wray said, "There," to no one, and Roman Ashcroft sat with his eyes on his hands and said nothing at all.