Part 2, Chapter 8 Summary

Miss Rhoda Bellamy is eighty-two years old. Miss Bellamy lay beneath a quilt that was removed from her hope chest. Rhoda Bellamy had never married. Laying quietly, she spies a Christmas wreath hanging on the wall across from her bed. In a moment, her maid Belle will arrive. Miss Bellamy is outraged that, sometime in the night, Belle had placed the wreath there. The old woman realizes that she is a contrary person and it is her nature that has caused her to remain a spinster. Miss Bellamy begins to remember her childhood and she remembers, the night before that it was she, and not Belle, that had hung the wreath.

Miss Bellamy's debut, the formal introduction of a young girl to polite society, had been a debacle. It shamed her parents to the point the family had to move from...