Edward Drone

Edward Drone is the son of Dean Drone and a clergyman in his own right, a young man whose sensitivity to the world's accidents—mining disasters, aeroplanes, gasoline—has left him more nervous than his father's generation. He moves through the town's gatherings with a literary bent and a quiet unease, his thoughts often drifting to the larger questions that Mariposa's cheerful surface never quite addresses. His presence in the early chapters adds a note of youthful introspection to the town's comic chorus, reminding readers that not everyone in Mariposa takes its rhythms for granted.