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and somehow safe, he had looked down at her with his wonderful smile and told her she had grown up to be “a beauty.” A beauty! Tom thought that! Suddenly she, who had always thought of herself as nothing special, began to think of herself as more, as a young woman with promise.
    But he didn’t come to call on her. She watched him occasionally walking with other, older girls, and felt an actual pang of pain. What did he see in those girls that she didn’t have? Could she ever have it?
    She missed Maude, who was living away from the family in her own home, a busy married woman starting on a life of her own. Rose went over there more often than Maude came to see her. Maude seemed so adult, so finished now, knowing the mysteries of sex (although Rose was too shy to ask her about anything so personal), owning her own household things—sheets, dishes, silverware, pots—and with a husband to please and share things with. Rose wondered if she would ever have a home of her own. What if she couldn’t fall in love with anyone? She knew she would never marry without love. She was adamant about that. She would be a spinster if she couldn’t have Tom, so it looked as if she were doomed to be alone, living with her father and Celia forever, a pathetic figure.
    When Rose told this to Maude, her sister just laughed. “You’re too stubborn,” Maude said. “You need to open your eyes and look around you. There is never only one man.”
    “For you, maybe,” Rose said. “You couldn’t make up your mind for ages. I’m not like you. You liked them all.”
    “No I did
not
like them all,” Maude said. “I picked the man who had the qualities I
wanted
to live with for the rest of my life. The others, some of them, had qualities I would have been
able
to live with. If Walter hadn’t come along I could have fallen in love with someone else eventually, but I’m glad he did come along. I know Celia never understood why it was Walter. She was always partial to looks and money.”
    “Aren’t most people?” Rose said.
    “Apparently not you. Tom has looks but he’ll never be rich.”
    “I don’t care.”
    “Well, I don’t care either. Walter will make a good living in the years to come, but what’s more important is that he’s my friend, he’s kind and honorable, and we have so much fun together. No matter what our future brings, I like him just the way he is.”
    “How lucky you are,” Rose said, feeling a little sad. “And I’m lucky to have such a smart sister.” She knew that in the past six years Maude had been as much a mother to her as her own mother had been, and sometimes she wondered how she could possibly have grown up without her help. She liked Celia, who was fun-loving and modern and often generous, but there was a core of coldness in Celia, even when she was being kind, that made Rose wary. She didn’t know why she felt that way about her stepmother, but she did.
    “If Tom doesn’t notice you then you need to get over him,” Maude said. “It’s just not fated to be. What does he have, anyway, that no one else has?”
    How could she define it? She had heard people say, as a compliment about certain young men, that they represented the best part of America, and she had always felt it applied to Tom in particular. He seemed both solid and glamorous. He had a certain glow about him: that handsome, open face, his optimistic look, his health and strength and cheerfulness, his muscles from working in the shipyard. If they were to put someone on a patriotic poster symbolizing the brightness of their country, it would be Tom Sainsbury. People always referred to America as “the New World,” while Europe, where the war raged, was the old one. Half their town consisted of people who had come from other countries, from that old world, with different faces and different customs, all looking for a better life, and finding it, Rose was sure. Anyone would be proud of Tom—as she was, as she would be if he let