“We have revised Emerson,” she wrote one July morning.  “It is fully as true to say, ’If one can make a better garden, show a bigger circus or put up a more cheerful front to Fate than his neighbours, though he build his house in Lone-Rock, the world will make a beaten track to his door.’  The path it has made to ours is a wide one.  The boys swarm here all hours of the day, to Norman’s delight, the summer campers make our garden the Mecca of their morning pilgrimages, and the cheerful front we put up to Fate seems to be the magnet that draws them back again in the afternoons.

“Really, our shady front porch reminds me sometimes of a popular Summer Resort piazza, it is so gay and chatty.  The ladies of the camp come over nearly every day and bring their sewing and fancy work, and Huldah and I serve tea.  It would do you good to see how mamma enjoys Mrs. Levering and Mrs. Seldon.  They’re like the friends she used to have back in Plainsville, and this is the first really good social time she has had since we left there.

“Professor Levering and Professor Seldon seem to find Jack so congenial.  They talk to him by the hour on the scientific subjects he loves.  It is a Godsend to him to have such a diversion.  Mrs. Levering said to me this morning that he is a daily wonder to them all, and a rebuke as well.  ‘We think we have troubles,’ she said, ’until we come over here.  Then you make them seem so insignificant that we are ashamed to label them troubles.  Oh, you Wares; I never saw such a family!  You fairly radiate cheerfulness.  I wish you’d tell me how you do it.’

“I told her I supposed it was because we were all such copy-cats.  First we imitated the old Vicar of Wakefield so many years that it gave us a cheerful bent of mind, and lately we’d taken the story of Aldebaran to heart and were imitating him and the other Jester.  She said, ’Commend me to copy-cats.  I’m glad I discovered the species.’

“I am telling you all this in order that you may see that we have managed to keep inflexible to the extent of impressing our neighbours, at least, and there is no need for you to worry about us any more.  I hope you will accept Eugenia’s invitation and spend that two weeks at the sea-shore in the idlest, most care-free way you can think of, and not give one anxious thought to us.  True, our day of great things is over.  We no longer lay large plans, and sweep the heavens with a telescope, looking for pleasure on a large scale, among the stars.  But it is wonderful how many little things we find now that we used to let slip unheeded, since we’ve gone to looking for them with a microscope.”

Two days later another letter was sent post-haste to Joyce, written in a hurried scrawl with a pencil, clearly showing Mary’s agitation.