"Really?" Anne looked up with hopeful glitter in her eyes. The idea that Lottie would embrace whatever life she chose for herself and that even her dear mother would look down on her with pleasure, opened temporarily a wide world of possibility. "How did your great aunt live?"

There were women who didn't marry in her community, but few, and only because they couldn't find a husband, or because they had taken care of elderly parents or younger siblings for so long, that they were 'too old' to attract a spouse. This was the life Anne had quietly accepted for herself. Such women found ways to continue to be useful to their extended families, who in return provided. But she had never heard of a woman making her own way.