We talk about cousins like these for a while, but we go on finally to people we knew more intimately, people whose characters have left us, even after all these years, something to wonder about. We speculate on how and when Robert Allard began taking morphine, and what induced Maggie McLean to turn Jim Crenfew down for a nincompoop1 like Edward Brewer. Somebody has seen the notice of Maggie’s death in a New Orleans paper. We think of it, but we cannot take it in. We see her as she was when she first came to Merry Point to visit, a frail, high-spirited girl, who made us all indignant with her outrageous treatment of Jim Crenfew. We talk on like that until we have called to mind almost all the people who ever came here in the old days. We hold them in our minds until they seem to live again. I look up through the branches of the sugar tree to where a light burns dimly in one of the upstairs rooms. Girls might be dressing there for a party. At any moment, I may hear the rumbling, explos