Secondly, when Elnora is in her final year of high school, Wesley and Margaret insist that Katharine accompany them to the high school play. Katharine has no interest in seeing "what idiotic thing a pack of school children were doing." But Katharine is curious about the high school; she enters it to deride it, then finds she admires it; when she hears a violin playing, she enters the school play and discovers Elnora playing "as only a peculiar chain of circumstances puts it in the power of a very few to play." Upon seeing Elnora playing her dead husband's violin to an enthusiastic audience, and realizing that her world has changed irrevocably - "The swamp had sent back the soul of her loved dead and put it into the body of the daughter she resented, and it was almost more than she could endure and live" - Katharine faints.