The morning Julian Ashworth arrived at East Hampton, the fog was so thick he could not see the water. He was twenty-eight and carried only what fit in a canvas bag. The market had taken everything from him.

But the market had not taken his mind. And Julian Ashworth had a mind for building things.

The cottage he rented belonged to a woman named Eleanor Vance. She was thirty-one, and she appeared on his first afternoon standing in his garden, which was to say standing in a field of nettles.

"You're the new tenant?" she asked.

"I suppose I am."

"I'm Eleanor. I grow things that people eat. You look like a man who doesn't."

Julian smiled. "I used to. Before I stopped believing that money was anything but organized greed."

Eleanor nodded. "Well, organized greed won't help you with these nettles. Come on. I'll show you how to grow tomatoes."

The Ashworth Cooperative began as a conversation between two people in a garden. Julian proposed it over dinner: a cooperative enterprise where the townspeople could pool their resources and own their businesses together.

The first member after Eleanor was Rosa Martinez, who ran the only grocery store. Then came Professor David Chen, who had been fired from Harvard. And "Red" Sullivan, a former dockworker.

The cooperative expanded quickly. By the end of the first year, they operated a grocery, a bakery, a small manufacturing workshop, and a credit union. It worked with a stubborn vitality that Julian had never experienced.

The crisis came in 1927, when a syndicate of Wall Street investors decided the cooperative was a threat. They began buying the debts of the cooperative's suppliers. The syndicate's offer was straightforward: sell the cooperative for a sum that would make Julian rich enough to disappear forever.

"No," he said. And he meant it.

But Julian was a trader, and traders understand one thing above all: you cannot win every hand. He spent six months maneuvering. He won some battles. He lost the war.

The cooperative was dissolved in the spring of 1928. Julian stood in the empty grocery store on the last day, watching the shelves being stripped.

Eleanor came at sunset. "We failed," she said. "We did." "Do you regret it?"

Julian looked at her. "I don't regret planting the seed. I regret that I thought I could be the only one to harvest it."

Eleanor took his hand. They stood like that for a while, in the empty store, as the summer ended and the long night began to close in.

Outside, the first maple leaves were turning. But for one moment, two people held each other's hands and felt, imperfectly and temporarily, that the night was not quite as long as they had feared.