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school year, which she quietly preserved all her life, suggests otherwise.
    That fall, when Ruthie finally confronted Harlow with her suspicions, things came to a violent head between them, as reflected in their nine-year-old daughter's mounting absence record: eight and a half days for the report period ending November 9; thirteen and a half days for the next, ending February 15. Whereas nothing in the small, neat, precise hand with which Harlow signed Betty's report card for both periods betrays him as a man whose wife has just given him an ultimatum, the scribbly parental signature for the two periods that follow indicates his response. The signature is Ruthie's. Her husband has left her.
    In the third report period, between February 15 and April 18, Betty's teacher, Miss Elizabeth Hopkins, recorded her as having been absent for twenty-one days, more than four full weeks of school. During this time, Ruthie took the girls to St. Petersburg, Florida, to give Haiiow an opportunity to move out of the house.
    Only when they returned to Winchester, in time for Betty's tenth birthday that April, did Ruthie tell her daughters that Harlow wouldn't be living with them on Cambridge Street anymore. Bobby, who was repeating the second grade that year, was made miserable by the news, while Betty astonished her mother by blithely declaring, "Well, anyway, now we can go on picnics and have a baby

    sister!" In the fourth report period, ending June 29, Betty's absences would dramatically diminish to two and a half days. Betty had spent a good deal of die 1917-18 school year literally worrying herself sick, but now that Harlow was gone for good, the child made a great point of mimicking his Yankee mask of indifference. Betty had come to associate her father's indifference with strength, in contrast to Ruthie's long-established weakness.
    The shabby bungalow court where Harlow had arranged for his family to stay in Florida in the winter of 1918 presaged the reduced circumstances in which the grass widow and her girls would thenceforth be expected to live on their unvarying $200 monthly stipend (while Harlow continued as before, with a new Mrs. Davis). At the end of the school term, assisted by Kathleen Campbell, the devoted young Irish nursemaid who had accompanied them to St. Petersburg, Ruthie moved their possessions to a smaller, more modest house, on Hancock Street in Winchester, where she had resigned herself to remaining, the scandal of her divorce and her mother's terror of that scandal notwithstanding.
    Hardly did they settle in, however, when all three of them— Ruthie, Bobby, and Betty—were stricken with the then-rampant black flu, a virulent strain that claimed as many as five hundred thousand lives in the United States and almost twenty million worldwide. By the time they began to regain their health, many weeks later, Ruthie had acceded to Eugenia's persistent urgings that for their own good, the girls be sent away to boarding school.
    Significantly, the school chosen, health-minded Crestalban, situated among white marble caves and prehistoric boulders in the Berkshire Hills village of Lanesboro, Massachusetts, was what Sadie Porter would have called a "breathing resort." Here students spent some eighteen hours a day out-of-doors, in accordance with Elizabeth Barrett Browning's dictum: "He lives most life whoever breathes most air.'' Ruthie had just emerged from her sickbed (and, on a deeper level, from the years of poor health associated with her marriage), and thus she was thrilled to learn that even in the bleakest New England winters all thirteen of Crestalban's hearty students regularly studied and slept on a healthful open-air porch. The students often enjoyed nude snowbaths in the morning and partook of that species of physical culture popularized by Dr. Lennox Browne as "lung gymnastics," In the winter of 1918, Ruthie made a preliminary visit to the rustic white farmhouse, large red barns, and brown-shingled