The narrative point of view shifts to Camila and moves backward in her timeline as she recalls a trip to Vermont in 1950. This year is the centennial of her mother’s birth, and Camila is scheduled to make a number of speeches commemorating the occasion. Her first speech will take place at the college where her friend Marion teaches. Camila feels that she’s received a multitude of speaking requests only because she comes from a famous family: “She is, after all, the anonymous one, the one who has done nothing remarkable. But—and this annoys her—she is in demand for sentimental reasons, the daughter who lost her mother” (69).

On the way to the talk, Marion announces that she is going to move in with a man named Lesley. Camila is surprised because she and Marion were lovers in their younger years, although Camila never wanted to become Marion’s life partner because of her controlling behavior. Marion says her relationship with Lesley will be an alliance, not a love affair. The narrator expresses Camila’s state of mind when she thinks, “We’re both too old for all this, Camila is feeling. Too old to still be knocking around the hemisphere, motherless, daughterless, fatherless souls” (74).