of her print gown had become
inextricably entangled in the maze amid which she moved, and fearing
Willie's wrath if she should sunder her fetters she had been forced to
stand captive and helplessly witness a newly made sponge cake burn to a
crisp in the oven. She had hoped the ignominious episode would not
reach the outside world; but as Wilton was possessed of a miraculous
power for finding out things the story filtered through the community,
affording the village a laugh and the opportunity to affirm with
ominous shakings of the head that it was only because the Lord looked
out for fools and little children that a worse evil had not long ago
befallen the Spence household.

Willie accepted the banter in good part. Born with a forgiving,
noncombative disposition he seldom took offence and although Janoah
Eldridge, who knew him better perhaps than anyone else on earth did,
acclaimed that this tranquil exterior concealed, as did Tim
Linkinwater's, unsuspected depths of ferocity, Wilton had yet to
encounter its lionlike fury. Instead the mild little inventor, with
his spools and his pulleys, his bits of wire and his measureless
reaches of string, pursued his peaceful though tortuous way, and if his
abode became transformed into a magnified cobweb only himself and
Celestina were inconvenienced thereby.

To Celestina inconvenience was second nature since from the moment of
her birth it had been her lot in life. Arriving in the world
prematurely she had found nothing prepared for her coming and had been
forced to put up with such makeshifts for comfort as could be hurriedly
scrambled together. From that day until the present instant the same
fate had shadowed her path; perhaps it was in her stars. Her parents
had been of dilatory habits and by the time a crib with the necessary
pillows and bedding had been secured, and she had drawn a few peaceful
breaths therein a new baby had arrived and she had been ousted from her
resting place and compelled to surrender it to the more recent comer.
Ever since she had been shunted from pillar to post, sleeping on cots,
on couches, in folding beds and in hammocks, and keeping her meager
possessions in paste-board boxes tucked away beneath tables and
bureaus. Poised on the ragged edge of domesticity she continued
throughout her girlhood to look forward with hope to an eventual state
of permanence. When she was eighteen, however, her mother died and in
the task of bringing up six