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holdings, it was dotted with farms, with red barns and hayricks, corn-cribs and silos. A patchwork quilting of cornfields and truck-garden plots spread either side of the road, and there were wide pastures where cows and horses grazed. Even in the backyards on our street, barns and chicken houses were not uncommon, and though to us city people it seemed strange at first, for the old-timers it was no surprise at all to find a cow housed in a shed beside the car in the garage, as next door at Mrs. Flagler's. Nonnie immediately put herself to saving household money so we could have our own cow, but she was never able to save enough, and our milk came to the back door, pasteurized and in Smith's Dairy bottles ("A Quarter of a Century of Dependable Service").
    With Ma working five full days and half a Saturday at the Sunbeam, it fell to our eldest sister, Nonnie, sixteen, to look after us and the house. Nonnie was a thoughtful, serious girl who took her motherly duties to heart. Old beyond her years, she tried to see to it that our arctics were buckled when it snowed, that our mittens were threaded on strings through the sleeves of our windbreakers, that we didn't hide our uneaten salad lettuce in the china tureen, that our rooms were straightened, that we didn't fight. Hopeless tasks, all.
    My two older brothers, Lew and Harry, were twelve and ten when I was eight, and I didn't see them much, except at mealtimes. They had a gang of their own, and while they were allowed off on one of the islands in the river, where they could pitch a tent and stay out all night, I, too young, was left alone in the sleeping porch where we had bunk beds, and there I would lie, wondering when I would be old enough to sneak Lucky Strikes and swear and sleep on the island.
    There was Aggie, of course, but though I loved her I didn't want to be with her all that often. Ag came between Harry and me in age and was "a walking romance" as Ma called her, because she spent so much time holed up in her room, getting gingersnap crumbs in her sheets as she read mushy stories in the
Woman's Home Companion
or the
Delineator
. True, Ag
was
romantic, soft, and sweet, with big surprised eyes that teared up for almost no reason, and long unmanageable legs whose bony knees she tried in vain to hide under her skirt. No doubt of it, she was shy, she blushed all the time, and was almost self-effacing, as if she were afraid someone might discover that she was living on this planet. But Ag had ideals and principles; she believed in things, passionately, profoundly, energetically.
    Kerney was only three, and everyone fussed over him. It made me mad that just being the youngest could produce such attention, and I wanted to holler with frustration as they all stepped over me to see what Kerney wanted, or to assure him that he was "the
best
little boy in the world."
    I would go to my bunk and hang my chin on the railing, looking over to the Harleigh place, hating our house and wondering what it must be like to live in
that
house, so grave and still and solitary at night, and secretly scheming how I might one day storm the castle across the Green.
    As we came to know her better, the two sides of our new neighbor's personality were made clearer to all of us. She was gay and bewitching, both interesting and interested; she charmed where she went, reproached no one, offered no argument, never connived or gossiped -- nor would tolerate it in others -- helped where she might, lived her life generously and nicely, and was, we all felt, lonely.
    Lonely, and -- strange. We talked about it among ourselves, and wondered, and worried, too. When at last we were made at home in her house, it was often difficult to ignore the furtive looks, the murmurs aloud, the absently contracted fists which she, becoming suddenly aware, would turn into a feigned examination of her manicure, the tension in the throat cords as though to swallow were difficult, the abstracted lapses succeeded by a sudden