[From the diary of Ottilie Thorpe, 1919. Morocco-bound, clasp not locked. Selected entries. Ink black, hand firm.]
Saturday, 14 September 1919.
The house has been full of people since Friday evening and I have not been alone with any thought for thirty-six hours. I would not write these lines except that if I do not now I shall forget what my hands are doing.
Augusta is with me. She has not left the parlor. She has not wept. She and I sat across from one another for two hours this afternoon without speaking. I am grateful for her.
Julian has been in his father's study most of the day. I have not troubled him. I have instead gone to his rooms with linens Mrs. Pomfret had finished. I placed them in the press myself. I did not intend to open the bureau drawer. The drawer was not closed. It is the top drawer, where he keeps his pocket-things.
I will not write here what I saw.
I washed my hands three times in the basin in the back hallway, three separate times, before I came down to the guests.
Tuesday, 17 September.
The Rev. Tanner came and sat with me and spoke of his last conversations with C. Tanner is old now and repeats. I was glad of the repetition. He said C. had told him, at a Christmas call two years ago, that of his three children the one he understood least was the one he admired most, and I said yes, and Tanner thought I meant Augusta.
Sunday, 22 September.
Evangeline Hume came yesterday with violets and sat with me an hour. She did not say anything particular. We looked at the violets. She is so much thinner than she was in 1914. She knows something that I know. She has the way of her kind of suffering. I have, it turns out, the way of mine.
Thursday, 25 September.
I have asked Mr. Reddick to call upon me tomorrow morning at eleven. I intend to ask him to draft certain revisions to the trust. I do not know that I have the right to do this. I do not know that I do not. C. spoke to me only once about the trust, in May of 1915. He told me he would always want me to do what was best for Blackwell. He said this on the porch at Aldenhaven. He was not sober. He was not always sober. He was, in that conversation, telling the truth.
Monday, 29 September.
The new girl Anna — pretty Polish girl, nineteen, from Little Warsaw — has a face like a mirror. I do not like a face that gives back too much. I must speak to Mrs. Pomfret about which rooms she is permitted to attend.
Friday, 3 October.
Augusta goes tomorrow to the Orpheus Society for what she calls a sitting. I do not disapprove. Madame Laforge is a silly woman, but silly women in times like these are sometimes the harbor one finds. Augusta has lost a husband and a brother, and now — though she does not know how to name it — a father in some way she will never quite have again. If some nonsense in the Heights gives her a room where she may be five years old and talk to those she has lost, I will not be the one to keep her from it.
I will go myself next Thursday. I have said I will.
[Entries continue. No later reference to what was in the bureau drawer. The bureau was not opened by Ottilie again.]