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need had she of a man?
    “An old maid, that’s what I’m to be. A literary spinster, with a pen for a spouse, a family of stories for children, and twenty years hence a morsel of fame, perhaps.” That’s what Jo March had said, and Alice had always regarded this as an admirable ambition. She had been born in 1868, the year in which the first part of
Little Women
had been published, and that was what Papa had called her for a time, for a short time: “My Little Woman.” She had, briefly, modeled herself on Jo — rather halfheartedly saying “Christopher Columbus!” once or twice — though she had never been able to bring herself to address Mama as “Marmee.” Even Jo had ended up as a wife and mother, a Laura, Lady Glyde, and not a Marian. If it had not been quite like Dorothea Brooke marrying Mr. Casaubon in
Middlemarch
, Jo March accepting Mr. Bhaer was very much like Lucy Snowe accepting Monsieur Emmanuel in
Villette
, an equal betrayal. (No Rochesters, they.)
    There was no Mr. Bhaer in prospect for Alice — a considerable relief: his accent made him sound worryingly like Mrs. Webster, loyal helpmeet of Dr. Wolcott Ascharm Webster — so perhaps she might concentrate on the possibilities of becoming (she would be more single-minded than Jo March had ever been) “a literary spinster”. To be a poet, to be a writer, she needed two things: an appropriate name, and a beard, so that — whatever the qualities of the poetry — her name would at least
sound
right, and her face
look
right. Alice Pinkerton possessed neither the name — the syllables fell sadly short — nor the beard for success. She thought of the names of some of the poets in the poetry book —
An American Anthology —
that Miss Ericsson had given her for her thirty-third birthday in 1901: St. John Honeywood, Fitz-Greene Halleck, Francis Orrery Ticknor, Mirabeau Bonaparte Lamar …
    (Miss Ericsson stood diffidently in front of her, with
An American Anthology
— the size, weight, and color of two bricks side by side — pressed against her bosom. It was one of the things that women were supposed to do with poetry books. The sunlight caught the gold laurel wreath embossed on its front cover, and Alice expected to see a small, quivering reflection floating on the ceiling, like light from water, or the curved glass face of a pocket-watch. She was holding it out toward Alice, smiling rather shyly.)
    She could not recollect a single line that any of these poets had written, but their names (curious how minor talents — she excluded Mrs. Browning from the observation — insisted on having three names) had a music, a — well,
poetry
, she supposed — that in itself inspired confidence. She had no doubt that all four would sport magnificent beards, clinching proof of their poetic credentials. “Francis Orrery Ticknor!” she had chanted, as she spun herself around the pillars in the schoolroom, as if enraptured by the magical harmoniousness of the name. “Francis Orrery Ticknor!” Thirty-three years old, and cavorting, chanting! (For some reason, that
thirty-three
had sounded like a knell of doom.) They may have been wrong about the attic, but perhaps they had a point about the madness. Once she started on Mirabeau Bonaparte Lamar, there’d be no holding her.
    There was an awe-inspiring display of beards (all male, only a male could become one of The Bearded Ones: no bewhiskered female had smuggled herself in front of the camera) in the photograph opposite the title page. Many of the poems in the book — too many of them, those written on subjects such as America, Freedom, or Slaves — made her think of some of the groups of statuary silhouetted across the roofs of buildings in the business districts of the city, awkwardly posed, symbolically gesturing. Surprisingly — she had searched assiduously through the volume — there were no poems in praise of beards, though Helen Keller and Shakespeare (with one beard between them) had inspired