Twentieth-Century Willie

Lora Delane Porter is a formidable authoress and amateur philosopher whose driving is as aggressive as her opinions on heredity and child-rearing. When she accidentally runs down George Pennicut, the collision sets off a chain of events that draws her into the Winfield household and gives her an alarming degree of influence over young William's education. Her confident theories and utter lack of self-doubt make her both comic and quietly menacing, and her presence in the family's life becomes one of the story's central irritants.