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him feel consequential —there could be no other word—to be brought into another’s confidence as he had, to be allowed to be the witness of such vulnerability.
    So he was more unprepared than he ought to have been when, sitting in the parlor after Christmas lunch (duck, its skin crisp and pimpled from the oven, and surrounded by pearl-like crimson currant berries), John announced, a trace of triumph in his voice, “So, David, I hear you are being courted by a gentleman from Massachusetts.”
    “Not courted,” replied Grandfather, quickly.
    “An offer, then? Well, who is he?”
    He let Grandfather provide only the barest of sketches: shipper and trader, the Cape and Nantucket, widowed and childless. Eliza was the first to speak: “He sounds lovely,” she said, staunchly—dear, cheerful Eliza, in her gray wool trousers and length of paisley silk knotted around her plump neck!—while the rest of his family sat in silence.
    “Would you move to Nantucket, then?” asked Eden.
    “I don’t know,” he said. “I haven’t considered it.”
    “Then you haven’t accepted,” Peter said: a statement, rather than a question.
    “No.”
    “But you plan to?” (Peter, again.)
    “I don’t know,” he admitted again, feeling himself grow flustered.
    “But if—”
    “Enough,” said his grandfather. “It is Christmas, and besides, it is for David to choose, not the rest of us.”
    The party dissolved shortly after this, and his siblings went to gather their children and nannies from John’s room, which had been made into a playroom for his and Eden’s sons and daughter, and there were goodbyes and well-wishes, and then he and his grandfather were alone once more.
    “Come back up with me,” his grandfather said, and David did, resuming the same seat he always took in his grandfather’s drawing room: across from his grandfather, slightly to his left. “I have not wanted to pry, but I admit I am curious: You have had two meetings now. Do you have any sense of whether you might want to accept the gentleman?”
    “I know I ought, but I don’t—Eden and John made their decisions so quickly. I wish I knew, as they had.”
    “You must not think of what Eden and John did. You are not they, and these decisions are not to be made rashly. The only thing you are required to do is consider the man’s offer seriously, and, if the answer is no, inform him immediately, or have Frances do so—though really, after two meetings, it ought to be you. But you must take your time, and not feel bad for doing so. When your father was matched with your mother, it took her six months to accept.” He smiled, slightly. “Not that that ought to be your example.”
    He smiled, too. But then he asked the question he knew he must: “Grandfather,” he said, “what does he know of me?” And then, when his grandfather did not answer, only stared into his glass of whiskey, he ventured further. “Does he know of my confinements?”
    “No,” his grandfather said, fiercely, his head snapping back up. “He does not. And he does not need to know—it is not his business.”
    “But,” he began, “is it not a kind of duplicity not to tell him?”
    “Of course not. Duplicity suggests we would be intentionally withholding something meaningful from him, and this is not meaningful—it is not information that should affect his decision.”
    “Maybe it shouldn’t—but wouldn’t it?”
    “If it did, then he would not be a man worth marrying to begin with.”
    His grandfather’s logic, usually sterling, was here so faulty that, even were David in the habit of contradicting him, he would not, for fear that the entire edifice of his grandfather’s story would come tumbling down. If his confinements were not meaningful, then why should they not be divulged? And was not the way to judge Charles Griffith’s true character by telling him, fully and honestly, the truth of himself? Furthermore, if his illnesses were not in fact a source of