Warning: This post contains spoilers.
The story still generates fascination, if not quite beguilement. It begins when a little girl from the boarding school discovers a Union soldier with a wounded leg while picking mushrooms in the woods. She brings him back to the school, where the teachers and students decide to help him recover rather than turn him over to the Confederate army. As he heals, the soldier inspires the curiosity of all the school’s inhabitants. For the younger girls, he’s simply a mysterious stranger; for the older girls and women, he becomes a source of erotic possibility. The teachers grow to desire him, but he rejects their interest in favor of an older student.
