NE SUMMER Sophia had a guest of her own—her first friend to come visit. It was a fairly new friend, a little girl whose hair she admired. Her name was Herdice Evelyn, but everyone called her Pipsan.

Sophia explained to her grandmother that Pipsan was scared of being asked her real name, and that actually she was scared of everything, so you had to be very careful with her, and they decided not to frighten Pipsan, at least in the beginning, with things she had never seen before. When Pipsan arrived, she was dressed wrong and had shoes with leather soles. She was too well bred and terribly quiet, and her hair was so beautiful it took your breath away.

“Isn’t it lovely?” Sophia whispered. “Naturally curly.”

“Very lovely,” Grandmother said.

They looked at each other and nodded slowly, and Sophia sighed.

“I’ve decided to be her protector,” she said. “Couldn’t we have a secret society to be her protectors? The only sad thing is that ‘Pipsan’ doesn’t sound aristocratic.”

Grandmother proposed that they call the child Berenice, but only within the society of course. Berenice was a queen, renowned for her hair, and also a constellation.

Surrounded by this secret imagery, and the subject of much serious conversation, Pipsan wandered about the island, an unusually small and timid child who could not be left alone. As a result, Sophia was always in a hurry. She didn’t dare leave her guest to herself for more than a few minutes at a time.

Grandmother lay in the guest room at the back of the house and heard her coming. She puffed up the stairs, burst into the room, and sat down on the bed.

“She’s driving me crazy,” she whispered. “She won’t learn to row because she’s scared to go out in the boat. She says the water’s too cold. What are we going to do with Berenice?”

They held a short meeting on the subject, without deciding anything for the time being, and Sophia rushed out again.The guest room had been a later addition to the house and therefore had a character of its own. It clung tightly to the back of the original building, and its inner wall was tarred. On this wall hung the nets, along with ringbolts and rope and other items that might come in handy and had always hung there. The roof, which was a continuation of the regular roof, was very steep, and the room rested on posts, because the rock on which the house stood dropped straight down into what had once been a bog between the building and the woodyard. There was a pine tree outside, which restricted the guest room to an area not much longer than a bed. It was, in effect, nothing but a short corridor, painted blue, with the door and the nail kegs at one end and a window that was much too large at the other. The window was large because it was left over, and it slanted on one side because of the roof. The bed was white, with ornamentation in blue and gold. Underneath the guest room, they stored lumber, empty cartons, picks and shovels, cans of coal tar, gasoline, and wood preservative, plus some ageing bait boxes and other odds and ends still too good to be thrown away. In other words, the guest room was a very pleasant place, quite distinct from the rest of the house. The details don’t really matter.

Grandmother went back to her book and more or less forgot about Berenice. From the southwest came a steady summer wind that whispered sleepily around the house and on across the island. She could hear the weather report on the radio inside the house. A corner of sunshine edged across the windowsill.

Sophia banged open the door and came in.

“She’s crying,” she said. “She’s afraid of ants, and she thinks they’re all over the place. She just keeps lifting her feet, like this, and stamping, and crying. She’s scared to stand still. What are we going to do with her?”

They decided to take Berenice out in the boat, where there weren’t any ants, and thus coax her away from a greater fear into a lesser one, and Grandmother went back to her book.

By the foot of her bed there was a nice painting of a hermit. It was a color reproduction on shiny paper and had been cut out of a book. It showed a desert in deep twilight, nothing but sky and dry earth. In the middle was the hermit, lying in his bed reading. He was in a kind of open tent, and beside him was a bedside table with an oil lamp. The whole space occupied by the tent, the bed, the table, and the circle of light was hardly larger than the man himself. Farther off in the dusk were the vague outlines of a lion at rest. Sophia found the lion threatening, but Grandmother felt it was there to protect the hermit.

When the southwest wind was blowing, the days seemed to follow one another without any kind of change or occurrence; day and night, there was the same even, peaceful rush of wind. Papa worked at his desk. The nets were set out and taken in. They all moved about the island doing their own chores, which were so natural and obvious that no one mentioned them, neither for praise nor sympathy. It was just the same long summer, always, and everything lived and grew at its own pace. The arrival on the island of the child Berenice—we shall call her by her secret name—involved complications that no one had foreseen. They had never realized that their casual island household was in fact an indivisible unit. Their absentminded manner of living in time with the leisurely course of the summer had never had a guest to reckon with, and they could not see that the child Berenice was more afraid of them than she was of the sea and the ants and the wind in the trees at night.

On the third day, Sophia came into the guest room and said, “Well, that does it. She’s impossible. I got her to dive, but it didn’t help.”

“Did she really dive?” Grandmother asked.

“Yes, really. I gave her a shove and she dived.”

“Oh,” Grandmother said. “And then what?”

“Her hair can’t take salt water,” explained Sophia sadly. “It looks awful. And it was her hair I liked.”

Grandmother threw off the blanket and stood up and took her walking stick. “Where is she?” she asked.

“In the potato patch,” Sophia said.

Grandmother walked across the island to the potato patch. It lay a short way from the water, in a lee among some rocks, and had the sun all day. They always set out an early variety of seed potatoes on a bed of sand and then covered them with a layer of seaweed. They watered them with salt water, and the plants produced small, clean, oval potatoes with a pinkish luster. The child was sitting behind a large rock, half hidden beneath the branches of a pine. Grandmother sat down nearby and started digging with her trowel. The potatoes were still too small, but she dug up a dozen or so all the same.

“Here’s what you do,” she said to Berenice. “You plant a big one and it turns into a lot of little ones. And if you wait, they all get big.”

Berenice looked at her from under a tangle of hair, quickly, and then looked away again. She didn’t care about potatoes, or people, or anything at all.

If only she were a little bigger, Grandmother thought. Preferably a good deal bigger, so I could tell her that I understand how awful it is. Here you come, headlong, into a tight little group of people who have always lived together, who have the habit of moving around each other on land they know and own and understand, and every threat to what they’re used to only makes them still more compact and self-assured. An island can be dreadful for someone from outside. Everything is complete, and everyone has his obstinate, sure, and self-sufficient place. Within their shores, everything functions according to rituals that are as hard as rock from repetition, and at the same time they amble through their days as whimsically and casually as if the world ended at the horizon. Grandmother thought about all these things so intensely that she forgot about the potatoes and Berenice. She gazed out over the lee shore to the waves that swept around the island on both sides and then rejoined and moved on toward the mainland—a long blue landscape of vanishing waves that left only a small wedge of quiet water behind them. A fishing boat with a big white moustache was sailing across the bay.

“Oh look!” Grandmother said. “There goes a boat.”

She looked around for Berenice, but by this time the child had concealed herself completely beneath the tree.

“Oh look!” said Grandmother once again. “Here come some bad men. We better hide.”

With some difficulty, she crawled in under the pine tree.

“See?” she whispered. “There they are. They’re coming. You better follow me to a safer place.”

She started crawling across the rock and Berenice followed along on all fours at a furious pace. They made their way around the little bilberry bog and came to a hollow full of willow bushes. The ground was wet, but that couldn’t be helped.

“That was close,” said Grandmother. “But we’re safe for the moment.”

She looked at the expression on Berenice’s face and added, “I mean we’re safe. They’ll never find us here.”

“Why are they bad?” whispered Berenice.

“Because they’re coming to bother us,” Grandmother said. “We live here on this island, and people who come to bother us should stay away.”

The fishing boat sailed on by. Sophia hunted for them. She looked for half an hour, and when she finally found them, quietly teasing some tadpoles, she was angry.

“Where have you been?” she screamed. “I’ve looked all over!”

“We hid,” Grandmother explained.

“We hid,” Berenice repeated. “We won’t let anyone come bother us.” She walked over very close to Grandmother and stared hard at Sophia.

Sophia didn’t answer but turned abruptly and ran away.

The island shrank and grew crowded. Wherever she went, she was aware of where they were. She had to stay away from them, but the minute they disappeared she was forced to search them out so she could ignore them again.

After a while, Grandmother got tired and started up the guest room stairs.

“I’m going to read for a while,” she said. “You go play with Sophia.”

“No,” said Berenice.

“Well, then, play by yourself.”

“No,” said Berenice. She was scared again.

Grandmother went after a pad of paper and a charcoal pencil and put them down on the steps.

“Draw a picture,” she said.

“I don’t know anything to draw,” the child said.

“Draw something awful,” Grandmother said, for she was really tired now. “Draw the awfullest thing you can think of, and take as much time as you possibly can.”

Then she closed and latched the door and lay down on the bed and pulled the covers up over her head. The southwest wind whispered peacefully, distantly in from the sea and enveloped the island’s inner core—the guest room and the woodyard.

Sophia pulled the bait box up to the window and climbed up and gave three long and three short knocks on the windowpane. When Grandmother emerged from her blankets and opened the window a crack, Sophia informed her that she had withdrawn from the society.

“That Pipsan!” she said. “I’m not interested in Pipsan. What’s she doing?”

“She’s drawing. She’s drawing the awfullest thing she can think of.”

“She can’t draw,” whispered Sophia passionately. “Did you give her my pad? What does she have to draw for?”

The window slammed shut, and Grandmother lay down again. Sophia came back three times, each time with a dreadful picture, which she pasted up on the window facing in toward the guest room. The first picture showed a child with ugly hair who stood screaming as large ants crawled over her body. The second showed the same child being hit on the head with a stone. The third was a more general view of a shipwreck, from which Grandmother concluded that Sophia had worked off her anger. When she had opened her book and found her place at last, a paper came sliding through the crack under the door. Berenice’s drawing was good. It had been done in a kind of painstaking fury, and depicted a creature with a black hole for a face. This creature was moving forward with its shoulders hunched. Its arms were long scalloped wings, like those on a bat. They began near its neck and dragged on the ground on either side, a prop or perhaps a hindrance for the vague, boneless body. It was such an awful and such an expressive picture that Grandmother was filled with admiration. She opened the door and called, “It’s good! It’s a really good drawing!” She didn’t look at the child, only at the drawing, and the tone of her voice was neither friendly nor encouraging.

Berenice remained seated on the steps and did not turn around. She picked up a little stone and threw it straight up in the air, whereupon she stood up and walked slowly and dramatically down toward the water. Sophia stood on the woodpile and waited.

“What’s she doing now?” Grandmother asked.

“She’s throwing stones in the water,” Sophia said. “She’s going out on the point.”

“That’s good,” Grandmother said. “Come here and look at what she did. What do you think?”

“Well, yes...” Sophia said.

Grandmother put the picture up on the wall with a couple of thumbtacks.

“It’s very original,” she said. “Now let’s leave her in peace.”

“Can she draw?” asked Sophia gloomily.

“No,” Grandmother said. “Probably not. She’s probably one of those people who do one good thing and then that’s the end of it.”