The narrative flashes back to the youth of Thomas, James’s grandfather. Thomas is married to Constance Bradford, the Bradfords being another Mayflower clan. The couple have three daughters in succession, at a gap of two years each. Constance insists on giving the girls the “virtue names” of Faith, Hope, and Prudence. Thomas and Constance recruit wards of states as nannies for the children, treating the young women as a part of their family. The nannies are given “allowances” instead of salaries, encouraged to refer to their employers as Tommy and Connie, and expected to do well in school and college. This progressive arrangement annoys the townspeople, since it indicates the Winslows are above usual social concerns, such as where the nannies, all orphans, come from.

The townspeople feel patronized by Thomas, the beloved English teacher who often tells his students that their antecedents do not matter, only the present and future do. They try to cut Thomas down to size by sneakily referring to his petite build, but to their annoyance Thomas does not feel bothered about his short stature. Many of the townsfolk hope for a scandal around the nannies, but the nannies only have good things to say about Thomas and Constance.

The Winslows have long shifted out of the school grounds into a large five-bedroom house when Constance becomes pregnant again. By this time, Prudence, the youngest girl, is already 11 years old. The fourth daughter is named Honor, which is not exactly a virtue name, according to Constance, since honor is an expectation rather than a quality. The townspeople wonder if the Winslows will get another ward of state for their youngest child. Hiring an orphan for the fourth time will be like pushing luck, the townspeople believe, even though they know little about orphans or orphanages.

Constance realizes that they will have to look out of state for their new nanny, because of a paucity of suitable wards-of-state. She hears of St. Cloud’s, an orphanage in Maine run by a doctor (Dr. Larch, a character from Irving’s Cider House Rules), where inmates are encouraged to read. Connie finds the doctor’s love for reading encouraging, though she has also heard people say he is “prone to tirades” (16). Thomas does not want to consider Maine as he believes the state puritanical: Maine was the first state to pass anti-abortion laws. Thomas and Connie were pro-choice advocates before the phrase “pro-choice” existed.

The matter of the Maine orphanage briefly parked, Constance, a librarian at the Pennacook Public Library, turns her attention to an initiative called Town Talks. Hosted at the school’s lecture halls on weekday nights, the Talks aim to draw people into reading books.

Thomas discusses Charles Dickens’s Little Dorrit and Great Expectations for his first couple of lectures, and then turns to the works of the Brontë sisters. He notes that his audience is mainly comprised of women, though men turn up for the discussion on George Eliot’s Middlemarch, believing Eliot to be a male author.

During the talk on Jane Eyre, Thomas focuses on Charlotte Brontë’s Preface to the second edition, in which she makes a case for distinguishing conventionality from morality. Constance realizes Thomas is speaking to the town’s ladies through Brontë’s words, asking them not to confuse small-mindedness for ethics and piety.

Constance knows orphanages run by nuns are not an option for “her Tommy” (25), as she thinks of Thomas, since he is skeptical of the proselytizing bent of such institutes. Earlier, the Winslows had recruited two of their au pairs, Lucie and Denise, from the Androscoggin Children’s Shelter in Berlin, New Hampshire, but the shelter has since shut down. The Winslows believe that the shelter’s director, Dr. Ronald Remillard, may have been arrested for performing abortions for women-in-need. Now that abortion is deemed illegal, women with unwanted pregnancies often find themselves in a bind.

Given the paucity of good shelters, Thomas finally writes to Dr. Larch. Dr. Larch writes back, asking Thomas in a direct manner about the Winslows’ source of income. Dr. Larch wonders how the Winslows—a schoolmaster and a librarian with four children—have managed to support the college education of three au pairs.

Dr. Larch is not the only person wondering about the Winslow finances—the topic of their income has been a perennial source of talk in Pennacook. Thomas writes to Dr. Larch that he and Constance come from old money. The two studied at prep-schools in Massachusetts, and first met in Marblehead, Massachusetts where both families had summer homes. Impressed by Thomas and Constance’s love of books and their family history of philanthropy, Dr. Larch agrees to send a young woman from St. Cloud’s to them.

Meanwhile, Thomas gives a controversial Town Talk on the history of abortion in America. Unlike most of Thomas’s other lectures, the talk is scarcely attended, except for some faculty members from the English department, a few doctors, and a bunch of older churchwomen. As Thomas says that abortion was a woman’s choice when the Pilgrims landed in Plymouth two centuries ago, Constance can see the churchwomen purse their lips in displeasure.

When Thomas explains that abortion became a contentious topic after male doctors gained control of childbirth in the 1840s, the doctors in the audience grow annoyed. The churchwomen walk out; Mrs. Sweeney, the last to exit, tells Thomas and Connie that they don’t care about the “soul” of the fetus being aborted. The Winslows counter that they do not believe anyone has a soul. No one asks Daniel Rosenthal, the English faculty member who stands on stage with Thomas, any questions, confirming the Winslows’ suspicion that most people in Pennacook are biased against Jewish people. The town talk fizzles out.