All this was before the dressmaker, who listened with no particular interest.  Affairs which did not directly concern her did not awaken her to much sharpness of regard.  She had been forced by circumstances into a very narrow groove of life, a little foot-path as it were, fenced in from destruction by three dollars a day.  She could not, view it as keenly as she might, see that Jim Tenny’s elopement had anything whatever to do with her three dollars per day.  She, therefore, ate her supper.  At first Andrew had looked warningly at Fanny when she began to discuss the subject before the dressmaker, but Fanny had replied, “Oh, land, Andrew, she knows all about it now.  It’s all over town.”

“Yes, I heard it this morning before I came,” said the dressmaker.  “I think a puff on the sleeves of the silk waist will be very pretty, don’t you, Mrs. Brewster?”

Ellen looked at the dressmaker with wonder; it seemed to her that the woman was going on a little especial side track of her own outside the interests of her kind.  She looked at her pretty new things and tried them on, and felt guilty that she had them.  What business had she having new clothes and going to Vassar College in the face of that misery?  What was an education?  What was anything compared with the sympathy which love demanded of love in the midst of sorrow?  Should she not turn her back upon any purely personal advantage as she would upon a moral plague?

When Ellen’s father said that to her at the supper-table she looked at him with unchildlike eyes.  “I think it is something for me to worry about, father,” she said.  “How can I help worrying if I love Aunt Eva and Amabel?”

“It’s a dreadful thing for Eva,” said Fanny.  “I don’t see what she is going to do.  Andrew, pass the biscuits to Miss Higgins.”

“It seems to me that the one that is the farthest behind anything that happens on this earth is the one to blame,” said Ellen, reverting to her line of argument.

“I don’t know but you’ve got to go back to God, then,” said Andrew, soberly, passing the biscuits.  Miss Higgins took one.

“No, you haven’t,” said Ellen—­“you haven’t, because men are free.  You’ve got to stop before you get to God.  When a man goes wrong, you have got to look and see if he is to blame, if he started himself, or other men have been pushing him into it.  It seems to me that other men have been pushing Uncle Jim into it.  I don’t think factory-owners have any right to discharge a man without a good reason, any more than he has a right to run the shop.”

“I don’t think so, either,” said Fanny.  “I think Ellen is right.”

“I don’t know.  It is all a puzzle,” said Andrew.  “Something’s wrong somewhere.  I don’t know whether it’s because we are pushed or because we pull.  There’s no use in your worrying about it, Ellen.  You’ve got to study your books.”  Andrew said this with a look of pride at Ellen and sidelong triumph at the dressmaker to see if she rightly understood the magnitude of it all, of the whole situation of making dresses for this wonderful young creature who was going to Vassar College.