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By Root 761 0

and appears to reevaluate his daughter at every turn. He no longer regards her as the girl he loved and cherished in June, but rather looks at her as at a foreign creature, one who is perpetually distracted. Suddenly she has become a poor scholar who has difficulty attending to his informal lectures. She tries his patience and confuses him and makes him sad, she knows, more often than she makes him happy. As for her mother, Olympia is quite sure she thinks her daughter has a beau. Several times she has asked Olympia questions designed to cajole her into sharing a confidence, to elicit a boy’s name. Occasionally, when her mother is looking at her, Olympia can see her running through the names of sons of families who are summering in the area.

Despite these awkward moments, Olympia knows she is fortunate in that both of her parents are, by nature, often preoccupied with other matters: her father with his intellectual life, her mother with a world that requires nearly all of her wits to absent herself from. For certain, there are challenging interruptions in this routine, such as when Haskell’s schedule changes and suddenly permits them to be together, and he is able to get word to her; but these hiatuses Olympia disguises as best she can. Altogether, their affair is a reckless endeavor, although they have agreed never to be together when Catherine and the children come for the weekends. Nor has Haskell visited Olympia’s house again.

They have been several times now to the site of the new cottage, the construction sheltering them more each day. They go in the early mornings or in the evenings when the workmen have not arrived at the site or have left already. As the frame is filled in, it becomes easier to be together behind and under the thick wooden beams and cedar shingles. They make love in the room that will be a sun parlor, under an eave that might one day grace a servant’s bedroom, on the hard floor of the room at the back that will be a kitchen. On this occasion, Haskell brings rashers of bacon that he filched from the hotel kitchen and that they cook over the hearth along with slices of bread, and later Olympia will not be able to remember eating anything as delicious as those bacon sandwiches. Curiously, being together makes her ravenous, and so there is often food, and sometimes a good deal of it, and even occasionally champagne. As a result, she is filling out some and developing, in her bosom and thighs and stomach, the body of a woman — as though her outer form sought to catch up to the experiences of her inner life.

With interest, Olympia has watched as the windows of the cottage have taken shape and been glazed, as the entrance to the cottage has been fashioned and then enclosed with massive wooden double doors, as the floors have been sanded and polished and covered with painted floorcloths, as the bedrooms have been adorned with moldings and the roof overhead enclosed against the stars. It is, as the days progress, as though Haskell and she are being further separated from the universe — set off, set apart — and are allowed ever more daringly to explore each other.

It is a beautiful cottage, she thinks, with many gables and wide porches and a delicately carved tracery under and along the eaves. The upper panes of the windows have diamond panels of lavender glass, and a rich cherry wainscoting has been installed in all the public rooms. Situated as it is directly on the beach, it has an unencumbered and unparalleled view of sand and sea. It is a house in which memories will be made, a house that will be handed down from father to daughter to son, a house in which Haskell will live with his wife.

• • •

They lie on the floor, entangled in rugs and cloths stained with peach juice that has dribbled off their chins and onto the bunched material they hold to their chests as napkins. Olympia is wearing the locket and nothing else. A plate with cheese and mango chutney and the crusts of brown bread is listing precariously on her thigh, leaving a smear of amber-colored chutney on the makeshift sheet.

“Ollie is