"verbs, all of them tiring"

This short chapter about Ada and Ruby settles into the simple joy of concrete description and story-telling. Without many generalizations to ponder, it's a chapter of practical action and life in the mountains during the Civil War, and Ruby is the main catalyst. Here's how Ada sums it up:

All Ruby's talk was of exertion. The work it would take to build a momentum of survival to carry them through winter. To Ada, Ruby's monologues seemed composed mainly of verbs, all of them tiring. Plow, plant, hoe, cut, can, feed, kill.

When, at Ruby's suggestion, Ada barters away her piano to a farmer, the list of what they get is long: "a pied brood sow and a shoat and a hundred pounds of corn grits . . . a few of the little mountain sheep, . . .  a wagonload of cabbages. And a ham and ten pounds of bacon from the first hog he killed in November."

As Ada watches the piano being carried away, we get a flashback to "a party Monroe had given four days before the Christmas in the last winter before the war." Ada gets a little "tipsy" on champagne and has a brief romantic encounter with Inman in the kitchen. She is "at once faint and giddy," and "by some mechanism she was unable to reconstruct later, she found herself in his lap."  It's only a moment between them, and for the rest of the party they shyly avoid each other, but Inman had made an impression for the brief time Ada rested in his lap:

"Ada remembers thinking that she never wished to leave this place but was not aware that she had said it aloud. What she did remember was that he had seemed as content as she was and had not pressed for more but only moved his hands out of the points of her shoulders and held her there."

A moment of security, rest, and contentment: perhaps its not too much to say that those things form Ada's initial "idea" of love.  Like all ideas, they will be altered perhaps by encounters with reality.

The chapter ends with a summary of Ruby's life growing up with an indifferent and unreliable father and a mother who vanished after Ruby's birth and isn't even remembered clearly by her father. Ruby's "brightest childhood memory" is of being stranded outside at night, "caught on a trailside blackthorn briar."  Ruby had always been taught to fear Nature after dark, but her experience of it is different.  She hears "a voice in the dark."

"Its talk seemed to arise from the rush and splatter of the river noise, but it was no cannibal demon. It seemed some tender force of landscape or sky, an animal spirit, a guardian that took her under its wing and concerned itself with her well-being from that moment on. . . . every word spoken directly to her deep core by the calm voice that took her in and comforted and protected her all through the night."

Two women: two different experiences of comfort and security.