However, the two women had almost a hand-to-hand encounter over little Ellen’s cradle, the elder Mrs. Brewster judging that it was for her good to be rocked to sleep, the younger not.  Little Ellen herself, however, turned the balance that time in favor of her grandmother, since she cried every time the gentle, swaying motion was hushed, and absolutely refused to go to sleep, and her mother from the first held every course which seemed to contribute to her pleasure and comfort as a sacred duty.  At last it came to pass that the two women met only upon that small neutral ground of love, and upon all other territory were sworn foes.  Especially was Mrs. Zelotes wroth when Eva Loud, after the death of her father, one of the most worthless and shiftless of the Louds of Loudville, came to live with her married sister.  She spoke openly to Fanny concerning her opinion of another woman’s coming to live on poor Andrew, and paid no heed to the assertions that Eva would work and pay her way.

Mrs. Zelotes, although she acknowledged it no social degradation for a man to work in a shoe-factory, regarded a woman who worked therein as having hopelessly forfeited her caste.  Eva Loud had worked in a shop ever since she was fourteen, and had tagged the grimy and leathery procession of Louds, who worked in shoe-factories when they worked at all, in a short skirt with her hair in a strong black pigtail.  There was a kind of bold grace and showy beauty about this Eva Loud which added to Mrs. Zelotes’s scorn and dislike.

“She walks off to work in the shop as proud as if she was going to a party,” she said, and she fairly trembled with anger when she saw the girl set out with her son in the morning.  She would have considered it much more according to the eternal fitness of things had her son Andrew been attending a queen whom he would have dropped at her palace on the way.  She writhed inwardly whenever little Ellen spoke of her aunt Eva, and would have forbidden her to do so had she dared.

“To think of that child associating with a shop-girl!” she said to Mrs. Pointdexter.  Mrs. Pointdexter was her particular friend, whom she regarded with loving tolerance of superiority, though she had been the daughter of a former clergyman of the town, and had wedded another, and might presumably have been accounted herself of a somewhat higher estate.  The gentle and dependent clergyman’s widow, when she came back to her native city after the death of her husband, found herself all at once in a pleasant little valley of humiliation at the feet of her old friend, and was contented to abide there.  “Perhaps your son’s sister-in-law will marry and go away,” she said, consolingly, to Mrs. Zelotes, who indeed lived in that hope.  But Eva remained at her sister’s, and, though she had admirers in plenty, did not marry, and the dissension grew.