the piano. She liked to raise the stakes and to bluff, and she smiled and laughed in frank enjoyment of the whole thing. After the ladies departed, she confided to Margaret in a comfortable way that she was up for the winter, thank goodness. She had been afraid, around the first of the year, to tell Robert about her gambling debts, but her luck had changed, and she had put some of her stake by. And, she said, it was not as though Robert didn’t like to play—what do you think he did on those quiet days at the newspaper? If he weren’t to play, and to play well, the businessmen around town would laugh at him.
Margaret sat in on a few hands, though she had no source of funds—she borrowed from Beatrice. She was lucky and cautious, and after a few parties—say, by the end of April—she was up by almost ten dollars, which she left in a jar at the farm.
It was about this time that Mrs. Jared Early began to join them. Here was a woman who was older than Lavinia, possibly sixty at that time, but she was active and healthy. Margaret watched her, thinking of that strange encounter she had had with Andrew Early—Captain? Dr.?—but Mrs. Early didn’t notice Margaret. She seemed to like Beatrice, and she had a friend who came with her to games, Mrs. Hitchens, another widow, about fifty, who always wore beautiful hats. She had moved to town from Minneapolis—“for the fine weather,” she said.
Margaret knew by now what Captain Andrew Jackson Jefferson Early had done to change the nature of the universe—he had gone with an expedition to Mexico and looked at the stars, and he had charted stars in the southern sky called doubles—two stars whirling in tandem. That spring, the spring of 1902, Captain Early was more famous than ever—everyone in town agreed that he was a wonderful example of what a town like theirs, full of enterprise and independent minds, could produce. Her memory of the man she had encountered on the bicycle, though, gave Margaret a chill; she thought he was nothing like anyone else she’d known.
Mrs. Early was a tall, generously built woman, sociable and good-humored. Margaret noticed that she often smiled quickly to herself, as if she was enjoying some thought that she dared not share with the other ladies. She had long, thick hair, still mostly dark, piled luxuriantly on her head. The ladies knew plenty about her—she had no daughters, but quite a few sons, of whom Andrew was the eldest (now thirty-five). They had come along all in a row—Andrew, Henry, Thomas, Daniel, and John, all named after famous men that Mr. Early was said to have known. Patrick had died as a boy of the cholera. Mrs. Early did not live in a mansion or have a big farm, but she had a nice two-story house on Maple Street, painted bright white and surrounded by a picket fence, with lots of flowers in the garden and a nice orchard in the back. There had been a large farm, but that was lost after the war. Only John lived in Darlington. He was twenty-eight, worked in the bank, and had married a girl from Arkansas. He also had a big house, but even though Mr. Jared Early had been dead some eight or ten years by now (and quite solitary for years before that), Mrs. Early did not live with her son and daughter-in-law. Beatrice said that there was family money, though she wasn’t quite clear about its source, but all the boys were enterprising. It was said that Mrs. Early and Mrs. Hitchens traveled together, and that they had not only visited Andrew in Germany but had gone to a famous spa there, and then to Paris. All the Earlys had gone to college for at least a year—Andrew, the brilliant one, had gone to college in Berlin, Germany (after he completed his studies up in Columbia, it was said, there was no college in the United States that could teach him anything he didn’t already know). He was now teaching at the University of Chicago, which had been founded by the Rockefellers because the big universities in the East were too slow to enter modern times. It was very grand to be teaching at the University of Chicago and, as far as Margaret understood it, to be on the payroll of the Rockefellers, but, to her credit, Mrs. Early