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of the eligible men are taking commissions and enlisting, and the other half are eager to settle down as soon as they possibly can. You’re going to dillydally too long and lose out. Do you want to end up an old maid like your aunt Eunice? She was too picky, you know, and the boat sailed without her.”
    The thought of spending her life alone disturbed Julia, but so did the idea of spending it in a loveless marriage with a man who bored her to tears. She’d been terrified at Bull Run when she’d come face-to-face with death, but she had also felt truly alive for the first time in her life. She wanted that kind of passion in her life and in her would-be suitors. She wanted adventure, excitement, fireworks in her relationships. Nathaniel had the kind of passion she longed for—if not for her, at least for his causes and in his sermons. That’s why she had fallen in love with him. And it was why no other man could compare with him.
    “If you don’t snap out of this pretty soon,” Mother continued, “we will simply have to arrange a suitable marriage for you. … Julia! Are you even listening to me?”
    “Yes, Mother,” she said dully. “I heard every word you said.”
    They were the last ones to arrive at the Blairs’ for tea. As they entered the parlor, the conversation stopped so abruptly that Julia was certain the women had been discussing her. Strangely, she found she didn’t care. All her life she had flattered and flirted, craving the admiration of her social circle. Now, after seeing herself and her peers through Nathaniel’s eyes, their opinion no longer mattered to her. She felt so detached from the other women as she listened to them talking that she may as well have been standing outside, looking in through the window.
    “Harriet was wearing one of those new Garibaldi blouses.”
    “Yes, I saw those in Godey’s Lady’s Book .”
    “I hear they are all the rage.”
    “I’m having my seamstress make one.”
    Julia used to prattle on and on about such silly things, too. Now she simply sipped her tea, feeling numb. Eventually the conversation shifted from fashion to courtship. Everyone, it seemed, was racing to pair off with an eligible gentleman. The girls her age discussed the scramble as if it were another California Gold Rush—hurry up and stake your claim or you’ll lose out.
    “Wouldn’t you just die if you were left with the second helpings?” Olivia Blair asked her.
    “No, Olivia,” Julia replied coolly. “If I loved a man, I wouldn’t care if he was rich or poor, handsome or ugly. I wouldn’t even care if …if he was a penniless immigrant.”
    The room fell silent for a long, awkward moment.
    When the discussion resumed, Olivia and the others carefully ignored Julia—which suited her just fine. She barely uttered another word all afternoon until one of the women said, “Have you heard about the Fitzhughs’ son? He went to London to study medicine last year and returned with a wife. It seems he’s fallen for a woman who was a Nightingale.”
    “Excuse me,” Julia said, remembering what Nathaniel had said. “Do you know anything about the Nightingales?”
    “I read an article about them in the Illustrated News, ” Mrs. Blair replied. “They’re nurses, named after Florence Nightingale. She went to the Crimea during the war and organized the hospitals over there. They were dreadful places, it seems, filled with injured, dying soldiers. After she and her little band of nurses cleaned them up and began caring for the men, fewer of them died. She has become quite famous and is widely admired for her work.”
    “I saw wounded soldiers at Bull Run,” Julia said. “One of them had both of his legs blown off.”
    Silence dropped again, like a stage curtain.
    “Julia, dear,” her mother said in a tight voice, “kindly change the subject.”
    “No, Mother, don’t you see? If I knew how to be a Nightingale, I could have helped those soldiers.”
    The very scandal of Julia’s