Summary

After writing her letters, Miss Strangeworth cooks and eats lunch, admiring the windows of her own dining room and the rose garden outside, content with herself and her life. She washes her plate and silverware from lunch, returns them to their proper places, and goes upstairs to her bedroom. There, the narrator notes that the room had also been her grandmother’s and mother’s, and that they, too, had kept bowls of roses on the dresser and tables inside. Miss Strangeworth draws the curtains, changes her clothes, and lies down for her nap, confident that nobody would call on her at this hour because everyone knows she is taking her afternoon nap.

After her nap, she works briefly in her garden, eats her dinner, and cleans up. Afterward, she puts on one of her hats – well-known by others in town as having...