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took a long walk in the woods that began at the dead end of Marlborough Road not far from the house, then came back and tried unsuccessfully to take a nap.
    Clara had bathed Jeff and was brushing him out in the sun on the upstairs terrace. Walter went into his study across the hall from the bedroom. It was a room on the north side of the house, darkened restfully in summer by the trees just beyond the window. It had two walls of books, a flat-topped desk, and it was carpeted with a worn oriental rug that had been in his room at his parents’ house in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. Clara wanted to get rid of the rug because it had a hole in it. It was one of the few things Walter took a stand about: the study was his room, and he was going to keep the rug.
    Walter sat at his desk and reread a letter that had arrived last week from his brother Cliff in Bethlehem. It was a letter on several pages of a small cheap writing tablet, and it told of the everyday events around the farm that Cliff supervised for their father: the rise in the price of eggs, and the champion hen’s latest record. It would have been a dull letter, except for Cliff’s dry humor that came out in nearly every line. Cliff had enclosed a clipping from a Bethlehem newspaper that Walter had not yet read, with the notation: “Try this on Clara. See if it gets a laugh.” It was a column called Dear Mrs. Plainfield.
    Dear Mrs. Plainfield:
    My wife has a way of getting under my skin like no one else I’ve known. She doesn’t do anything but she becomes so darned expert that you can’t live with her. If she follows football, well, she knows the scores all over the country, and the records of the teams better than anyone else, so it’s no fun talking football with her.
    Right now it is the indoor planter fad. She has spent weeks, to say nothing of dollars, amassing her collection of philodendron dubia, philodendron monstera, and even a poor little philodendron hastatum—elephant ear to you and me.
    There’s a perfectly nice Fiddle Leaf plant in her collection, but let me call it Fiddle Leaf and she goes up in smoke and snarls “Ficus pandurata!” at me. It’s the same with the rubber plant. It’s not rubber plant to her, it’s “Ficus elastica.”
    I’m not against plants or those who plant them, but I am against people who turn up their noses at a sweet potato vine because it isn’t a deacaena Warneckii—and that’s the way my wife is.
    Mr. Aspidistra
    Walter smiled. He doubted if it would get a laugh from Clara. He knew what had prompted Cliff to send it: the time he and Clara had visited his father, and Cliff had shown them around the barns, pointing out a tractor he called “Chad,” which was an abbreviation of its make-name. Clara had asked Cliff very seriously what he meant by “Chad,” and then had peered at the front of the tractor and announced that it was “Chadwick.” After that, without cracking a smile, Cliff had called every piece of machinery he pointed to by some unintelligible, abbreviated name. Clara had not apparently got the point. She had only looked bewildered. Clara thought Cliff was half cracked, and often tried to convince Walter that he was, and that he ought to do something about him. He was grateful to Cliff for staying on the farm, and for looking after their father. Walter’s father had wanted him to be an Episcopalian preacher, like himself, and Walter had disappointed him by holding out for law. Cliff was two years younger than Walter, and not as serious, and their father had never even tried to persuade Cliff into the church. Everyone had expected Cliff to go off after he quit college, but he had chosen to come back and work on the farm.
    Walter tossed the letter to one side of his desk, and opened the big scrapbook that he used for his essay notes. The scrapbook was divided into eleven sections, each dealing with a pair or group