malediction
- Back in May, as Mattie approaches Miss Wilcox's house to organize the library one Saturday, she hears voices arguing.
- A man's voice asks Emily to come home, and Miss Wilcox wonders how the man found her; the man says that if she comes home, she can't write any more. Miss Wilcox refuses.
- The man says that a powerful man called Mr. Comstock has called Emily's works obscene, and then the man claims Emily is harming the names of Wilcox and Baxter, before threatening Miss Wilcox with committing her to a doctor's care.
- Frightened, Mattie runs into the house just as the man leaves and finds her teacher smoking. Miss Wilcox explains that the man is her husband, Theodore Baxter.
- And Mattie realizes that Miss Wilcox is actually the poet Emily Baxter.
- (Curtain falls to much applause.)