Little Women

Jo and Professor Bhaer have been conducting a mutual pretense for weeks: taking the same route, arriving at the same times, calling it coincidence rather than intention. Everyone at Plumfield can see the situation clearly except the two people inside it. When Bhaer disappears for three unexplained days, Jo discovers how thoroughly she has structured her daily life around his presence. She goes into town on invented errands, moving through his usual haunts with determined casualness that convinces no one, including herself. She finds him—and the rain finds her, hard and sudden, without an umbrella. He materializes beside her with his old one, large enough for two. They do their errands together in the downpour: buying little gifts for his students, navigating puddles, carrying packages, being thoroughly ordinary together. Jo's mood swings wildly between hope and the careful management of hope. When he mentions a teaching offer out West, she can't keep the loss off her face fast enough. He sees it. That involuntary flicker of disappointment is the thing he came to find—some evidence that his feeling isn't only his. He had read her poem about loneliness and recognized himself in it, but he needed to know before he said anything that there was something to say. Standing in a muddy street, bedraggled and laden with packages, they say the true things. It is the opposite of a romantic scene in every external detail, and it is completely right. Jo realizes she has found her place: walking beside this kind, serious man who has always seen exactly who she is. The best love, Alcott suggests, tends to arrive like this—on an ordinary afternoon, in the middle of an errand.