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rarely spoke of them. One of the aunts had been living with them when Miss Fuller was writing from England and France, and the aunt had been an enthusiast, reading passages aloud. There was relief when she left.) Such a writer and talker should be at home, where they needed her, with the Abolitionist cause. Women’s rights, on which Miss Fuller had spoken and written so famously, were another distraction, not to be countenanced in the face of the great wrong of slavery that history had placed before the men and women of the United States. In the last weeks before her death, Helen had sat up in her bed-clothes for long enough to preach a gasping sort of sermon about it. Helen had been far angrier with the likes of Miss Fuller than with the plantation owners and their “stooges” in Congress — who, as she and Mother agreed, had not been bred to know better.
    Anne had talked privately with Miss Fuller only once, and that was during one of those summers — a year or so after the Conversation Anne attended — when Miss Fuller had been living in Concord, at the Emerson home. In large groups, such as the lemonade parties Mrs. E hosted, MissFuller was expansive, full of opinions, and only fell silent when Mr. E spoke. She made sheep’s eyes at Mr. E — everyone saw it, including Mrs. E, though she would never say so. Anne guessed that was one reason Mrs. E was so gracious. Helen commented on Miss Fuller’s diminished figure, and Henry reported that she was attempting a “vegetary” regimen, some combination of something called the Graham System and one pressed upon her by friends from London who followed Oriental dietary laws. Mrs. E had been making a great effort to satisfy her guest’s appetite, but everyone could see she was looking thin and wan, and Mrs. E felt blamed.
    One afternoon Henry took his sister along with Miss Fuller for a river jaunt in his skiff. This time Miss Fuller seemed a school-girl gawky. When she snagged her pink sateen dress in an oarlock, Henry’s face registered for his sister’s benefit a comedy of exaggerated eye-rolling dismay unnoticed by their guest, who never stopped talking for a moment about a lecture she had attended the night before, not even when a length of sateen ripped into a kind of fringe that trailed into the water. At last catching her breath and looking about, she finally noticed the draggling finery and laughed easily, which made Anne like her after all. Then she quoted something in German and simpered and squinted, so she had liked her less. Naturally the laughing and the German, like everything else about her, were too loud for Henry.
    As Henry headed down river on his own, Anne walked Miss Fuller back to the Emersons’.
    “Please, do call me Margaret, as your brother does. And we have in common as well that we are both editors for Henry.”
    “No, I could not say I am his editor. I am a copyist, at times. We make the joke that I am his private secretary. We are all most grateful — I’m sure Henry is — that you have taken his pieces for The Dial .”
    “He has the soul of a poet, and I applaud his verses. But his essays, although rich and clear, are not, somehow, always coherent . I’ve only taken the one, you know. Sometimes his poet’s soul wanders .”
    “Do you really think so.”
    They arrived at the garden gate. Anne flinched as the woman seemed about to embrace her; they settled for shaking hands.
    Now she thought of her new Canary-bird, instantly thought to name her The Marchesa, then as quickly repenting of the joke, decided to call her plain Birdy instead. She would put the cage in the shade near the fields for the day, and find a tin cup for the bird’s water. Two of the farmers, young brothers, would be scything and pitching hay today, and their sweat would plaster their shirts to the hard planes of their muscles. She tried to decide which was handsomer, Thomas or Robert. It would take further study.
    The day grew lighter again. She urged the