Why should she break her heart over a child whom she had never seen before, and have no love and pity for the man who had laid his best at her feet so long?

He saw at a flash the sweet yet monstrous imperfection of her, and he loved her better for it.

Chapter IX

After Ellen’s experience in running away, she dreamed her dreams with a difference.  The breath of human passion had stained the pure crystal of her childish imagination; she peopled all her air-castles, and sounds of wailing farewells floated from the White North of her fancy after the procession of the evergreen trees in the west yard, and the cherry-trees on the east had found out that they were not in the Garden of Eden.  In those days Ellen grew taller and thinner, and the cherubic roundness of her face lengthened into a sweet wistfulness of wonder and pleading, as of one who would look farther, since she heard sounds and saw signs in her sky which indicated more beyond.  Andrew and Fanny watched her more anxiously than ever, and decided not to send her to school before spring, though all the neighbors exclaimed at their tardiness in so doing.  “She’ll be two years back of my Hattie gettin’ into the high-school,” said one woman, bluntly, to Fanny, who retorted, angrily,

“I don’t care if she’s ten years behind, if she don’t lose her health.”

“You wait and see if she’s two years behind!” exclaimed Eva, who had just returned from the shop, and had entered the room bringing a fresh breath of December air, her cheeks glowing, her black eyes shining.

Eva was so handsome in those days that she fairly forced admiration, even from those of her own sex whose delicacy of taste she offended.  She had a parcel in her hand, which she had bought at a store on her way home, for she was getting ready to be married to Jim Tenny.  “I tell you there don’t nobody know what that young one can do,” continued Eva, with a radiant nod of triumph.  “There ain’t many grown-up folks round here that can read like her, and she’s studied geography, and she knows her multiplication-table, and she can spell better than some that’s been through the high-school.  You jest wait till Ellen gets started on her schoolin’—­she won’t stay in the grammar-school long, I can tell you that.  She’ll go ahead of some that’s got a start now and think they’re ’most there.”  Eva pulled off her hat, and the coarse black curls on her forehead sprang up like released wire.  She nodded emphatically with a good-humored combativeness at the visiting woman and at her sister.

“I hope your cheeks are red enough,” said Fanny, looking at her with grateful admiration.

The visiting woman sniffed covertly, and a retort which seemed to her exceedingly witty was loud in her own consciousness.  “Them that likes beets and pinies is welcome to them,” she thought, but she did not speak.  “Well,” said she, “folks must do as they think best about their own children.  I have always thought a good deal of an education myself.  I was brought up that way.”  She looked with eyes that were fairly cruel at Eva Loud and Fanny, who had been a Loud, who had both stopped going to school at a very early age.